I did my first outdoor bike ride in four weeks last Saturday. The ride itself wasn't bad...got in 37 miles and kept the pace sane. However, with all the crappy weather we've been having...spotty rain, high humidity, weird temperature changes...the roads were wet and well-traveled by trucks hauling dirt and water tanks from the local oil & gas wells, tracking lots of mud on the asphalt. In other words, we got DIRTY!! When I was done, I had a nice coating of this green-brown mud/dirt all over my Bradley and some of it on me, too. Yep, got to use the garden hose on the bike when I got home. Back to the ride: the first 4-5 miles felt a tad uncomfortable since I realized I had too much air in the tires for the wet roads, so the bike felt a little skittish plus I had forgotten how sensitive the Bradley's steering was. But after that I had my handling skills back and I was cruising like the old pro that I am. It was just that thing of dodging all the "rooster tails" that were coming off the bikes in front of me.
Jonnene and I put in an easy one hour ride on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. It gave us a break from all the things we were doing to prepare for Christmas Day and having all the immediate relatives come over for our first Christmas in the new house.
Anyway, back to the Aussie trip before I forget everything...
OZ Factoid (for those who've never been to Oz): When you get into a "lift" (elevator) in a multi-story building in Australia...from street level...you will be on the "ground" floor, not the "first" floor, as you would be here in the States. The buttons start with a G instead of a 1. The first floor is above you...where the second floor usually appears in the States.
Our flights from Los Angeles to Alexandria were pretty much uneventful. Since we arrived at LAX a couple of hours later than we were supposed to, that meant we only had to hang around the airport for less than three hours before our flight to Houston. I'm all about spending less time in airports by this point in our travels! Weather was still moody...cloudy, rain in places, just dreary overall...heck of a thing to return to after all of the mostly pleasant weather in Perth. Our flight from Houston to Alexandria was QUICK! We had only 9 or 10 people on our little Embraer jet and the pilot announced that we would be there in 30 minutes! Sure enough, we could feel the tiny jet gaining altitude for the first 15 minutes, then you could feel the plane pitch over and we headed downhill the rest of the way. My brother and one of the nieces met us and drove us to their house where we spent the night before driving home. It was fantastice to lay down in a horizontal position to go to sleep! We hadn't done that the previous 36 hours and I would have to recommend this to everybody...if you haven't slept lying down before, try it, you'll like it.
After we got home on Sunday morning, we unpacked everything and began delivering souvenirs. We tried to get back to normal as soon as we could but we were dragging for the first couple of days. Jonnene had to go to work on Monday and I had plenty of errands to run and things to catch up on. It felt like I was going non-stop on Monday and Tuesday. Tuesday morning I went down to see the senior project presentation of the high school student I had been mentoring the last three months and, outside of some obvious nervousness, he did a great job and I think he got good marks for his efforts. I was proud of him...maybe the experience will be a positive mark on his life and give him some needed confidence. It'll be interesting to see how the next few years of his life goes.
No comments:
Post a Comment