Cold and windy

The sky was beautiful and if viewed from indoors today looked quite nice. But it was only about 49 when I headed out, on its way to 54. The wind was 18 from NNW with gusts in excess of 25. This qualifies as cold and windy. It was a beautiful day for early March, not quite as nice for early May.

But still, it was acceptable riding weather, a perfectly acceptable day. And it was gorgeous.

The Vadnais gate was standing wide open so I rode on down. At this point the wind was from behind me. Downhill and tailwind, I didn't have to pedal much as I made my way to the picnic area usual stopping spot. There were not any fisherpersons present today so I could ride out to the end of the point for a photo op.I was torn between tilting the camera up to photograph the beautiful blue sky or tilting it down to photograph the beautiful blue lake.

I have two pretty good cold and windy at Vadnais stories. In the first, as I was putting the camera away and reconfiguring my costume (zippers and gloves mostly) a large American car pulled into the parking lot with a grey haired couple of Americans on board. They chose kind of an odd place to park, directly in front of the Porta-potties, which led me to believe that they were not regulars. They had chosen to take advantage of the beautiful looking conditions to get in a walk at an undeniably scenic spot. They piled out of the car and turned towards the wind to start the walk. They didn't even make it out of the parking lot. The wife got about 3 car lengths away from the car but I don't believe the husband ever even cleared the rear fender. Boom, back in the car, fired it up and drove away. It was cold and windy.

The second story is that as I continued on my way I had to ride across the south end of the lake. The wind was howling down the length of the lake. The wind was blowing so hard that I had to lean into it to keep from being blown over. Let me repeat, I had to lean my bicycle over to 4 or 5 degrees off upright to keep from being blown over. It was windy.