I remembered how to ride a bicycle

I have just gotten back on my bicycle after not having turned a single pedal stroke for four days. I checked the log, and except for one six day stretch in late March, four is the most consecutive days off the bicycle since the first ride of the year in early March. And that March six day deal, for one of the days the log contains the terse note: "Snow", so arguably that was pre-season riding anyway.

I was confident that I was going to get in a ride today, so confident that I was a bit lax in keeping track of the weather radar. I WAS monitoring the temperature, waiting patiently for something over 50. Just before noon I looked a the radar and discovered, horrors, that the entire western half of the state seemed to be experiencing rain. I rushed to check the living room thermometer and decided that anything that rounds to 50 was close enough. I hurried through lunch and began preparations to ride.

Layering gets easier as you go along. Today I had the proper gloves and I also added my summer weight helmet liner underneath the heavier ear flap helmet liner. The gloves were my good ones which keep my fingers warm and the two layers on my head gave me on that major location for heat loss as many layers as I had on nearly everywhere else. Bingo, warm enough.

I got out to ride barely in time. As I sit at the computer now it is raining and has been raining for a couple of hours. I rode with gradually gathering clouds but finished before it was much more than beginning to be threatening. Now it is wet again.

Much like my sibling in Michigan, I assumed based on the large number of miles ridden in September that a record or near record year was in the making. For the past couple of months I have tried to keep my average miles ridden per day for total days of the month (as opposed to days with a ride during the month) over 20. With 30 days in a month that makes a 600 mile month.

With today's ride I raised my average for this month all the way up to 5.2 miles ridden for each day of October.

*sigh*

We have in our yard one of the many species that are referred to as "Burning Bush" due to the fact that the leaves turn red in the fall. Ours is just starting to the change.I rode around the neighborhood a bit making sure that I was properly layered and then started out towards the north. I passed the corn field and found nearly all of the corn gone replaced by dozens of geese. Here is the view from pretty much the same spot from which living plants have been photographed for the past approximately four and a half months.It is always a bit of a shock.

There is still a tiny bit of corn standing down at the other end of the field and these guys are up to something.They don't look like students, they must be faculty and staff. They are gathering complete corn plants. If you check the harvest photo from last week you can see that the main harvest was a silage chop. I don't know what these guys are up to but I suspect a teaching moment of some kind.

This evening in France, Tours 1-1 Nantes. FC Nantes remains firmly in second place in the Ligue 2 table.