A Week Away

Rainier

It never fails. Plan a little vacation, and for sure things are going to start falling apart around you. In this case, it started with the air-conditioner. Our flight out to Olympia was scheduled for Thursday morning. On Sunday (it's always on a weekend, isn't it) the air-conditioner stopped working. Naturally, it was also the warmest weather we've had all summer. On Monday we amazingly got someone to come look at it right away, and by early afternoon it was back in action. Or so we thought. 24 hours later it shut down again. So now it's Tuesday evening and the quick fix this time (it was 15 years old) involved a blower assembly that, as we discovered on Wednesday afternoon, was not available for an estimated four weeks. 

By then the temperature in the house was around 90 degrees, so we had dragged the big 20 year-old emergency window unit up from the basement and stuck it into the living room window. Doesn't everyone in New Orleans have an emergency window unit? Of course they do. So the best option at that point was to just replace the whole thing, which could be done on Friday. We had someone coming over to dog-sit while we were out, so I paid (a lot) for the a/c in advance since we wouldn't be there ourselves. I packed the old Orbea into my trusty Airport Ninja bag, and we headed to the airport around 4:30 am on Thursday. Way down at the very end of the long line of airline counters is the tiny little Alaska Airlines counter where a very nice and relaxed agent helped us get checked in. By then I was actually looking forward to the long 4 hour and 40 minute flight to Olympia during which I read a book about AI.

Olympia was quite a bit colder than I had expected for August. We went from New Orleans heat advisories and city-sponsored "cooling centers" to mornings in the low 50s and highs in the 60s. Fortunately, I was on vacation at The Daughter's house, and could lounge around watching the Vuelta and drinking coffee until it warmed up into the low 60s. I admit, I was still a little chilly anyway, even with a short-sleeve base layer, but considering the fact that it was August, I refused to pull on the arm-warmers.

Olympia has some nice Rails to Trails bike routes, and since I was always riding alone in somewhat unfamiliar territory, I did a lot of riding on them. I did do one ride out to Summit Lake that was mostly on public roads, though. That turned out to be a pretty good training ride with a decent amount of climbing, most of which was short but steep little segments. The only way to get there involved a few miles on the shoulder of a major highway, which was a little stressful I guess, but the shoulder was quite wide and I never felt particularly uncomfortable. The loop around the lake itself was a real roller coaster. I think I just kept it in the small ring the whole time. The climbs were really short, but also really steep.

I was almost back when I got a text to meet the family for lunch, which worked out pretty well. I had been following my own route on my Garmin, but of course had to use my phone to navigate to the restaurant, which is difficult. I had to stop a couple of times to figure out exactly where I was. At any rate, I made it there without too much of a problem, so that was good.

We had planned on doing some longish hikes while we were there, but the weather was a little sketchy so we only did one. Of course it started raining while we were there, so it ended being a pretty short one. Sometimes it's like that. 

On Wednesday, the day before we had to fly back to New Orleans, I had been hoping to meet up with a local Tuesday evening group ride. It rained most of Wednesday, and I ended up not going out at all, which of course I later regretted because it had eventually stopped raining. Oh well, best laid plans and all.

Thursday morning was the longish drive up to Seattle. The Seattle airport is always packed, and this was no exception, but compared to some previous visits we got through TSA and everything relatively quickly. The flight home was uneventful, although I was disappointed that it was cloudy and/or hazy the whole way. I always prefer a window seat, but there wasn't much to see as we made our way back to MSY. 

On the plus side, the house was nice and cool when we got back. All-in-all it was a very nice, but very expensive, week.