Half a Century

I biked 53 miles on Saturday.  That’s a long way.

The trip was broken up into four major parts.  First, I rode the 10 miles of trails from my parents’ house to my sister house.  These were the same trails that were snow-covered last time I was home and caused me to fall.  Fortunately, there was a major heat wave on Saturday (it got all the way up to 49 degrees), so the snow had melted and left in its place large puddles of icy cold water.  I felt like I was playing Oregon Trail (that was such a great computer game) and I had to decide if I was going to look for an alternate route, ford the river with my oxen team and covered wagon, or pay to ride the ferry across the river.  I opted to ford the first few puddles that I encountered, but just like the game the last puddle was HUGE.  Since there was no ferry to ride across, and I didn’t have any money to pay even if there was, I decided to look for an alternate route.  The other route was easy to find.  I just jumped on the road for a while and got back on the trail on the other side of the lake…oh, I meant puddle.

The second 10 miles were fun because I had the company of Dave and my nephew Eli.  Dave was towing Eli in the trailer and it made me very glad that we will have a support van this summer because it looked like a lot of work towing that extra weight.  Eli was excited to go on the ‘icycle’ ride and I think his favorite part was the tunnel.

The third part of the trip was another 10 mile leg out to Colmen.  This part of the trip was not super fun because there was a head wind and my toes were starting to get really cold.  Dave, Christel, Eli, and Luke were meeting me for lunch at A&W in Colmen so at least I had something good to look forward too.  They were able to beat me there in their fancy gasoline-powered automobile.  They offered me some chilly-cheese fries, but somehow those just didn’t sound good knowing I still had a lot of riding ahead of me.

The last part of the trip was 20 miles back to the spot where my Dad was going to pick me up.  There was a nice tail wind and I was able to average 17 miles per hour in the last 20 miles.  By the end I was getting pretty tired, but I was able to make it all the way.  The timing worked out great because my Dad and I got to the meeting location within 10 seconds of each other. 

I spent the rest of the day doing a whole lot of non-physical activities like grading papers, playing board games, and eating cookies.