One Post, Two Rides

Quoting myself, "I might be a little slow getting this blog going but I've got ideas and lofty goals...and it looks like an early winter is setting in here in southern New England, so I might have some extra time too. Stay tuned"

Did I say I might have some extra time? What extra time??

My goal going into this past Friday was to get two rides in over the next three days. I knew it would be tough given the weekend weather forecast of snow on Sunday and our plan to once again find our "perfect" Christmas tree and get the lights on it. For us, buying a tree is not a quick errand...it's not even an activity that can be reliably scheduled in a 2-3 hour window, though we do try. In a good (lucky) year, it may take an hour...in a bad year it might start on a Saturday afternoon and wrap up the next morning! This was a fairly good year. We left the house around 2:30 pm Saturday afternoon and headed over to a previously unknown (to us) tree farm in Plainville. Traipsed around there for 30 minutes looking at all the half-way decent trees that were already tagged...okay, time to try another place (Sunlight Farms) we recently found in Foxboro. First Saturday in December and their pre-cut Frazer Furs are all picked over...time to move on, until I start talking to a worker about the tree farm we had just visited. He asks if we've been out back to look at their 3 dozen or so uncut trees (they're not really a tree farm, but apparently they planted some a few years back). The moment I saw these trees I had a feeling we would find ours. Bingo! 15 minutes later we're driving away with what I consider to be a great "tree farm" find. Total elapsed time of about 3 hours (after a few more Christmas decoration related errands). Not bad. Unfortunately, with the children's commitments in the morning and the tree adventure in the afternoon, there's no time left to ride the bike. That's the bad bike news.

The good bike news is I left work early on Friday and was able to get a 14 mile ride in and the snowstorm on Sunday was a nuisance event that was over by early afternoon...so another 14 mile ride shoe-horned into an otherwise busy weekend. It actually snowed for a while on the Sunday afternoon ride...so that was a first for me.

Ride Stats

Bike: Fixie
Distance: 2 x 14.2 miles
Time: about 60 minutes each day
Average Speed: not worthy of mention
Next scheduled ride: who knows with a week of forecast unsettled weather and no doubt another busy weekend
Temperature: ranged from 33 to 38 F for the 2 rides.

I had most of my new winter riding gear on during these two rides, but the verdict is still out on how much I like this stuff. Need a few more rides to finalize my opinion.