Overreach

Yesterday it was 75 and I DID ride my bicycle.  Generally if I ride, I post.  No post yesterday.  The problem was that I had a theme in mind and I spent pretty much the whole ride thinking about paragraphs and topic sentences.  The photograph was going to come near the end of the ride.  When I arrived at the photo spot the guy had moved his trailer.

No photo, no post.

I did also want to report that I found two different websites that were streaming the English language feed for Eurosport of Paris-Roubaix so I got to watch the last hour and a half or so of the race.  Some German guy won in a bunch sprint inside the velodrome at Roubaix, the first bunch finish they have had in many years.

What I got out of the race coverage though was some spicy gossip about one of the leaders being under suspicion for his relationship with a "certain race doctor".

So the bicyclists are still not riding clean (looking at you Froome and Contador).  But on the other hand neither is major league baseball clean.  Baseball just announced the second 80 game suspension so far this year for pitchers testing positive for steroids.  I also note that I recently read a newspaper article about a pitcher for the local club who had very poor results last year but who has returned to the team looking "noticeably bigger and stronger" after as the pitcher reports it "participating in the team's off season weight lifting program".

Baseball still quacks like a duck.

But back to local cycling, yesterday I stretched the ride a bit, that's what one is supposed to do early in the season.  I reached the largest number of miles possible finishing with an even number of miles but being less than what has in recent years become the "standard" ride.  It was HARD, but not that hard.

And I too wanted to achieve a destination ride.  I figured today was the day, a little bit more stretch and I could do it.  It was 75 yesterday, only about 55 today but the still extremely punitive wind had switched around from pretty much cardinal South to pretty much cardinal West.  I convinced myself that I could ride the 10 lakes tour.  That ride is mostly north, leads absolutely to a DESTINATION, but does feature some time riding cardinal West on the very end of the return leg.

So I made it today to Lake Vadnais.

I was hoping for wildlife but saw only a single loon.

A bit earlier in the ride I passed by the former beaver dam site.  The water looks very suspiciously high.

There doesn't seem to be any current at this spot, the culvert inflow.  I rode along and took a good look at the creek on the other side of the culvert and it seems about the same height and about the same lack of flow.  So if there is a dam it is somewhere else, somewhere farther downstream.

This was a surprise though.  The east side of Owasso vermin herd has expanded from three to five.

And they are absolutely bold.  That photo is taken without any zoom whatsoever.  I am sitting on my bicycle, stopped within about 30 feet of those animals and they fear not even the slightest amount.  Mostly they didn't even raise their heads to take a look a me.

So I did it, I got the "standard" ride, a destination.  And it was a pretty big mistake.  I started doing the caluculations fairly soon after leaving Vadnais and I quickly figured out that I had nearly 4 miles of West with a bit over 2 miles of due West very near to the end of the ride.  Before I started the ride I expected that I would be fine with that but it turned out that I was not.

Really hard.

Really, really hard.

Home now.  Not a single thing gets any easier.