I hit the sweet spot, which is to say the dry spot, on today’s ride.
The rain was pissing down at oh-dark-thirty when I sent Herself off to toil at Darth Perry’s Death Star, so I decided to eat a medium-heavy breakfast and wait it out.
Come 11 it was still gray and brisk outdoors, but the roads were mostly dry, so I kitted up, grabbed a fendered Soma Saga and a rain jacket, and logged an easy hour of spinning without incident. I even had the leisure to take a break and snap the pic up top.
Now that I’m home and full of lunch, it’s pissing down again. Winning! MASA!*
We’ve been enjoying a pleasant off-and-on rain, and by “we” I mean “not the Balloon Fiesta people.”
Welp, the Balloon Fiesta people have another year and a day to get their traffic problems sorted, because their final launch of 2018 got rained out this morning.
What does a balloon aficionado do when there is no ballooning to be had due to inclement weather? Beats me.
I know what a cycling scribe does. He stays inside and blogs.
Herself takes an exercise class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and sometimes she’ll slide by Il Vicino afterward to collect a couple sammiches so Your Humble Narrator doesn’t have to cook.
Last night was one of those sometimes. Until the deluge.
First came the thunder, which sounded like incoming artillery rounds fused for airburst. Skylights, which we have aplenty, gave me and the cats a pretty good look at the flash part of the flash-bang, too.
And then, the rain. Holy hell, the rain. A neighbor said we got an inch in an hour, and I have no reason to doubt her. The cul-de-sac basically turned into a giant storm drain.
In any case, the upshot is, I had to cook. It would have been an upstream swim to Il Vicino for Herself and we’d have wound up with soup sammiches after she swam back.
Is it a patio or a pool? This morning it’s a little bit of both.
Drop bars stayed off the menu this week.
After savoring a Jones SWB on the rocks both Tuesday and Wednesday, I broke out my own Jones on Thursday for purposes of comparison.
The SWB is a 27.5+ bike, with a 1×10 Deore/Zoom drivetrain and 3-inch Maxxis Chronicle rubber, while mine is a 29er that rolls with 10-speed, triple-ring XT and 2.4-inch Maxxis Ardents.
The Jones SWB and Your Humble Narrator enjoy a rare shady section of Trail 365.
I’d be happy with either of ’em given our trail conditions. The SWB serves up a bit more flotation in deep sand and over rough stuff with its 50mm rims and 3-inch squishies, but my 29er sort of expands my practice of riding rigid steel cyclocross bikes everywhere. On the Jones I can just gorilla my way over obstacles I have to finesse on a Steelman.
The triple drivetrain gives me a lower low end for the steep bits, too.
Yesterday, just ’cause I could, I pulled down the 1995 DBR Axis TT hardtail and took that out for a spin. This shout out to days gone by rolls on 26×2.0 Hutchinson Pythons, sports an 8-speed, triple-ring, twist-shifter XT/Sachs/GripShift drivetrain, and is the only rim-brake bike of the three (XT linear pulls).
The lads at Sandia Cycles resolved some irksome headset and braking issues for me a while back and the old beast proved surprisingly fun to ride. After a while I remembered that I had a suspension fork and quit trying to tiptoe around things, but the rear wheel wanted to hold onto rocks after the rest of the bike was done with them.
Today is looking like a day for running, or even staying indoors. The skies erupted sometime around stupid-thirty this morning — the full rooster, with thunder, lightning and rain — and at the moment they’re still blacker than six yards up Satan’s colon.
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