Crunched Bike, Fixed, Good Break-in Ride Today

Last week we spent Thursday through Sunday at the very pleasant Circle Cross RV Park  in Timberon, south of Cloudcroft in the Sacramento Mountains.
We rode the bikes around that area a bit.  We left Sunday about noon, and we decided to "take the long way home" and drive down Highway 82 through Mayhill and Artesia and then north on Highway 285 through Roswell and home.  On a whim we side-tracked over to Hagerman to look at the 3 generations of Devenport ancestors buried there.

Then I got the itch to drop in on my  cousin Darel Devenport and his wife Genia, who own a ranch just south of Roswell in the Dexter area.
Devenports get away with such behavior (Dropping in without advance warning) for some reason;  it's just the way we were raised.   Our wives, of course, are horrified at the thought of not planning such visits weeks in advance with appropriate advance letters, cards, calls, to make it official.
Anyway.  We found Darel at home by himself and the first thing I did upon arrival was to back over his newspaper receptacle on its post, bending it horizontally and partially cracking the plastic news-box.  Adding injury to myself as well as insult to Darel's property, we discovered the contact point for the pole-crunching exercise was my beloved recumbent bike, supposedly safely mounted on the hitch-platform on the rear of the RV.

As you may have noted from previous posts, I'm kinda hard on front forks.  This is the third one I've damaged. Thank goodness the wheel was removed already for the trip or it would have been crunched too.
I was able to man-handle Darel's newspaper-post back almost perfectly vertical again by heaving on it several times and then using stainless steel hose clamps to re-fasten the paper-box to the pole.  But straightening out this fork.... no amount of muscle would budge it and I was afraid I'd break it if I used pry bars or other heavy duty tools to try to bend it pack to the correct angles.
SO.  We stayed the night in Roswell and got home late Monday afternoon, and I spent most of the day Tuesday working on my bent 'bent.
After fruitlessly tearing up 2 other "parts bikes" to see if their front forks would work, which of course they didn't, I found a bike I'd paid $10 for at a yard sale had a fork that fit perfectly.  I was only able to test it for about 100 yards down the road and back, but decided to ride it today for a long ride anyway.
I had a doctor's appointment in Albuquerque at 9 AM today, Wednesday, so I decided to try riding the 30-some-odd miles on the bike.  Since it used to take me slightly over 2 1/2 hours for that trip to work, almost the same neighborhood, I awoke at 5:30 AM and scuttled about getting ready to leave.  I was able to depart about 6:15 and made it there at 8:30, so I was pretty full of myself over that.  My blood pressure came in very low and satisfactory, which surprised me since I was still overheated and puffing from the ride.  Then I rode back toward Los Altos park to meet Jacque, who had driven in to ride her trike around town with me.  By this time I was hungry, so we rode up to Eubank and a nearby Lota Burger where I pigged out on fries, cheeseburger, and onion rings.  Yum
I was shocked to find, after stuffing myself thusly, my blood sugar was now only 77, hardly a good level to take off on another round of biking.  So I went back into Lota Burger and got a small normally sugared Pepsi, not Diet as is usual.  Shouldn't have done it.  Although it souped me up for a little while, by the time we got back to the car my blood glucose had shot over 300+ and stayed there for a few hours while my insulin pump worked overtime.
It was certainly a great day for a ride in the country.... I'll have to try taking off at daybreak again sometime instead of my normal wait-tiill-it's-HOT afternoon takeoff time.
Stats from the GPS: Total Miles:     41.29
Overall average speed            Moving Avg               Max Speed
07.0 MPH                                10.1 MPH                   32.3 MPH
Total Trip time                       Moving Time             Stopped Time
5 hours 51 mins                     4 hours 5 mins            1 hour 45 mins