MUT musings

The GRider and I headed out shortly past noonish to try to get in a ride.  The GRider's preferred weather website predicted 0 percent chance of precipitation on each and every hour of the afternoon.

I use two sites mainly, one showed an iffy radar profile and the other proclaimed 41 percent chance of precipitation on each and every hour of the afternoon.

Today my websites had better accuracy than GRider's.

We got to Acorn Park on the reverse Vadnais route.  The route through the park is on a multiple use trail and we ride that trail with full awareness that there might be other users.  For instance the very first time I rode through there I was confronted with frisbee golfers flinging their discs in my general direction.

Even so we were not prepared for this other user.

There were some workmen doing what appeared to me to be additional disc golf course prep down in the wetland to the right.  They certainly were authorized to drive into the park on the MUT but there does seem to be parking available to them, like immediately to their right, that would have allowed for multiple uses of that particular piece of tarmac.

The GRider confronted one of the workers and I must say her approach was less bombastic than some might have used.  She just suggested to him that if they moved over even a foot that the rest of us could continue to use the trail.  Myself?  I just rode out onto the grass there and kept on going.

Less than a mile later the GRider reported raindrops.  Within a dozen or so pedalstrokes of hearing her report I felt them as well.  By that time we had already adopted the absolute must protocol for feeling rain drops when more than 7 miles from home.  We had turned and were on our way back to being closer to home, rather than farther, if actual heavy rain occurred.

When we rode through the park, only 10 or so minutes after GRider had rebuked the construction crew, we discovered that the truck had been moved to a 20 or so yard more distant from their work site parking available position.

Sometimes honey does work better than whatever that other alternative is.

On the way home we got pretty close to home, it wasn't actually raining, I tried to divert the route towards Lake Como.  We got about half a mile along the diversion and sprinkles returned, this time bigger drops.  Once again we turned toward home.

By now we were JRA but we got enough miles to satisfy each of our exercise goals.

As I have noted numerous times, rain is a powerful motivator.  We spent most of the ride trying to ride fast instead of just riding.  We done good, we got our collective highest average speed for any of her rides yet this season.