Today's spotty tracking via APRS and Ham Radio
We awoke this morning with a bright red sunrise, which we normally think portends a stormy day, as per the old saying "Red Sky at Morning, Sailor Take Warning; Red Sky at Night, Sailor's Delight". It was a tad cold also just as the sun was arising: 7 degrees F.... Talk about shivering a sailor's timbers.
Then the breeze began swaying the treetops so we figured it was going to be another cold & windy & blustery & miserable day.
Believe it or not, it didn't turn out to be a bad day at all. I had determined I was going to ride at least a few miles no matter HOW nasty the weather was (discounting blizzards, gale force winds, and heavy rains).
I had a good excuse to ride: I had a ham radio I'd repaired along with several radio magazines I wanted to deliver to a teenage ham friend about 10 miles away, so why not use that delivery for a compelling reason to ride the bike?
I'd hoped, as usual, to get going around 10:00 AM so it would be warmed up a bit and I could get back in time to do something besides flop on the couch after riding the bike. Trouble is, I had a priority need that had to be addressed first: We were out of homemade cookies. Jacque is busily trying to put the Chinese out of business with her new supercomplicated knitting machine, and I like making cookies, and make most of them most of the time anyway, so I whomped up a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies. Then I had to bag them into ZipLock sandwich baggies, 3 in each bag. The reason for 3 to a bag? It's simple. However many I put in a bag or other container I will eat, usually within a few minutes. Put 'em all in a cookie jar and I will eat all of them in short order or until my tummy explodes. Put the cookies in some kind of container and I can easily pick one container and eat whatever is inside. If there's 6 in a bag I will eat 6. I cannot stop at 2 or 3. Same thing if there's 20 in the "container". I used to put 4 in each baggie but they last another day or 2 if I only put 3 in each bag. Go ahead, call me weird. It's been done before....
Now, with the psychological disorder discussion out of the way, back to the bike ride. I got the cookies properly assembled and containerized right after noon, so by the time I got the bike loaded up with water, cargo, radios, and specialized emergency bike food rations (Chocolate Chip Cookies, What ELSE?) it was 1:30 PM-ish.
Bouncing down our goat-path private road to the pavement of Frost Road, I was happy to note it wasn't terribly windy or extra cold.
However, when I huffed and puffed up on the pavement, I discovered and unusual west-bound breeze blowing me in the face (since, obviously, being a cyclist, I was headed east thus forcing the wind to blow to the west). I stopped within a few hundred feet and dug out my windbreaker layer and also my polar fleece skull-cap Jacque made for me several years ago. I also switched from fingered gloves to my shooter's mittens, which are warmer since my fingers can associate with each other, but have fold-back flaps so I can work the radio buttons (or a firearm mechanism if I was a shooter instead of a cyclist).
With this combination it took me a while to get overheated, and that wasn't until I was halfway up the second long hill on this direction.
I have recently re-realized that "cotton kills" when exercising in cold weather. Cotton tee shirts get sweaty and then they get COLD. I have a few fairly expensive turtleneck "wick-action" polyfiber undershirts that I have begun wearing again for riding in cold weather and they really are worth the money: They still get sweaty but they do a decent job of wicking the sweat away from my torso and not getting too hot or too cold.
I dropped off my precious cargo and turned around for home. I had sorta wanted to do a larger and longer loop ride around these East Mountains but the cold breeze was motivating me to buzz it back home and not dilly-dally. Even then, it was almost 5:00 when I arrived back home, and that's not far from being DARK.... and here in this kind of weather it gets COLDER when the sun don't shine.
Within the last 4 miles of home, I saw a school bus coming up in my rear view mirror. Thankfully I was on the newer stretch of Frost Road where there is a nice wide shoulder so I was able to give the bus plenty of room to get around. Not all bus drivers around here are too careful of such low forms of life as cyclists, but this one did not crowd me at all. Thus I was shocked to hear a scream of epithets from the bus as it passed. Silly me, it was a teenage student with his window pulled down venting his newly discovered hormonal displacements at me. I hope he thought it was worth it: He surely suffered some discomfort from opening his window to the bitter outside air.
I could easily have taken real offense at such behavior except for the fact that, even at my advanced age, I still remember being teenaged, bullet-proof, and stupid. Now, of course, I'm just stupid. Grew out of the rest....
Trip Started: 1:36 PM Trip Ended: 4:37 PM
Beginning Battery Voltage: 13.0 Ending Voltage: 13.0
Lowest Temp 37 F Highest Temp: 42 F
Stats from the GPS: Total Miles: 19.56
Overall average speed Moving Avg Max Speed
6.6 MPH 8.6 MPH 25.3 MPH
Total Trip time Moving Time Stopped Time
2 hours 59 mins 2 hours 16 mins 42 mins 49 secs
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