Thurday: Riding on Bikes, Riding in Cars

It’s been a LONG day. It started out with the usual group tandem ride; this must have been one of their “fast days” because when the ride was about half-way through we lost contact with the group and never saw them again! There’s nothing more humiliating than to have a bunch of “old” people leave you in the dust like you were still using training wheels. I’ll either have to learn to get used to the humiliation, or really work on my conditioning to keep up with them. Hmmm. Humiliation and I will become good friends!

The ride’s distance was 29.5 miles. The temperature was around 75 degrees. And the wind, coming from the northeast, was rather brisk. This is apparently being influenced by a hurricane currently off of the Atlantic coast. Hopefully it will stay away from us – I’d hate to have our tandem rally turn into a soggy affair!



We went straight home, rather than stopping for the usual after-ride snack and iced tea because we needed to get cleaned up and hit the road to go visit Valerie’s grandmother. We rented a car for the day and headed northwest to Archer, Florida to pick up Grandma and then headed into Gainesville to do some shopping for her.

Dinner followed our little shopping expedition, and we took Grandma to the Bonefish Grill where she took on a plate full of King Crab legs… she left no trace that there was ever any meat inside the crab legs. Ever. Those things were picked clean!



We drove Grandma back home and bid her farewell, arriving back in the Villages just before 10:00 PM. I dropped Valerie off at the house, took the rental car back and deposited the keys in a night drop. A quick trip through a local grocery store and here I sit at 10:45 PM… unable to download the photos that will accompany this story, so I won’t post this until my server comes back on line.



Friday, 7:40 AM – The e-mail server is back up, so I could download the photos I had sent to myself. You’ll see three pictures; one is Valerie’s view as we rode with the group on Thursday, another is the view out of the car window on the way to Grandma’s place (not what people think of when they hear the word “Florida” and the third is Valerie and her grandmother just before the crab demolition began.