Upper-Left Corner

A week ago today we took a little trip over to the upper-left corner of the contiguous U.S. for a brief visit with Danielle and Shannon.

After some internal debate, I'd decided to take the old steel Cervelo with me, and after some more internal debate decided to just put it in a 40-year-old un-padded bike bag. Risky, of course, but easy to carry around. Considering that we'd have to get from the terminal to a shuttle to a rental car, and then drive down from Seattle to Olympia (actually Lacey but close enough), the prospect of lugging the big hard-sided case I had available seemed like more trouble than it would be worth. At best, I'd get in three rides. More likely just two. So I wrapped the bike up in pipe insulation, braced the dropout ends, and put in into the bag with some cardboard at the bottom and on the sides, and hoped for the best. The Cervelo was a great racing bike in its day, and I rode it nearly to death. All of the return springs in the shifters are broken and there's some serious rust in places, so if it met its demise at the hands of Southwest Airlines it wouldn't constitute a huge disaster. As it turned out, not only did it survive the trip with nothing more than a new scratch on the downtube (my fault for not being careful packing it for the return trip) and a slightly out of true rear wheel, but Southwest didn't charge me anything extra either way, which kind of made up for some of the cost of the SUV we rented but didn't use except to go to and from the airport.

No, it's not Disneyworld

Anyway, it was kind of a long travel day because we had a plane change in Denver, but we eventually made it to SEA and headed down to baggage claim. Since I had been under the illusion that an airport in the PNW would naturally be a model of urban efficiency, I was surprised when we had to wait about half an hour before the luggage started appearing on the carousel. Finally, with bags and bike in hand we followed the signs to the rental car shuttle where we shocked to find a line of Disneyworld at Christmas time proportions. WTF?  As we soon discovered, people in Seattle could take driving lessons from people in New Orleans and be no worse for the experience. On one of the access roads to the airport some kind of shuttle bus had been hit and knocked on its side, and the police had shut down some streets for the duration, exacerbating an already clogged transit system. In Google Maps parlance, everything was red.  Dark red.  Eventually we pushed our way onto a fully packed shuttle bus and made it to the Enterprise car rental desk where everything was thankfully running with military precision.

We were in the car and out of the garage in no time, only to plunge ourselves into two hours of Interstate 5 gridlock. Google Maps was showing something like 13 incidents between Seattle and Olympia, which extended what was normally be a one-hour drive into over two hours of stop-and-go. That evening I put the bike together. Then I put Danielle's bike together since it was still in its bike box since she had moved back there. In her defense, she had recently moved, unloaded two U-Haul moving pods, started her second or third week at her new job as an epidemiologist at the Office of Public Health, had ankle surgery and was clunking around in a big boot. On the plus side, the weather for the next few days was looking great.

The next morning, Friday, I headed out for a nice 40-mile ride that I'd mapped out after consultation with Strava. I was keeping it simple and using a lot of the bike trail system and not going where I really wanted to go, which would have been to the west rather than the south, but then this was vacation and not training camp.

The ride was nice and soon after I got back we drove back up to STL to pick Shannon up from the airport on her way back from a work trip to Japan. We were going to take a look at the Glass Museum and maybe meet up with Charlotte, who lives there now, pick up lunch before heading back, but when we looked at Google Maps after the visit to the museum it looked like a repeat of the prior day, so we decided to wander around a bit, have lunch, and hang out at the biggest REI store I've ever seen until the projected return drive time dropped below the two-hour mark. By the end of the day I could feel the start of a post-nasal drip and sore throat and knew I'd caught something in the airplane. The only question was how long I'd have before it went from a scratchy throat to the plague.

Saturday morning Ben and Charlotte came down from Seattle for a ride. We did the same 40-mile course - this time a bit faster since Ben was on the front most of the time. That evening we strapped a kayak to Danielle's car and put two paddleboards into Shannon's antique pickup and headed down to Lake St. Clair to float around for a while. The weather was pleasant, the leaking paddleboard didn't deflate too much, and the virus continued its slow trip down my throat. By Saturday night I knew I was in for a chest cold and so we raided Danielle's medicine cabinet. I settled on a box of NyQuil.

Ben and Charlotte

For Sunday, Danielle had arranged for a boat ride with some friends who have a big boat. Unfortunately, I was in no shape for that by morning and basically spent the next twenty hours or so in bed. That night I packed the bike back up and we headed back to STL in the morning, arriving back in New Orleans around 10:30 pm. By then I was actually feeling considerably better, although even now there's a lingering but only occasional cough. Could've been worse, I guess. Fortunately, I'd taken Monday off from work, so although there was still a little stuff to take of online I had an extra day to recover. I pretty much overslept every morning since then, but have still gotten in some miles each day, so I should be back to normal, whatever that is, but the weekend.