Jim & I have been training for some big bike rides this summer. The first one was yesterday, the 50-miles Watermelon Ride. It seems like a majority of our training rides had been in the wind- headwind, side wind, high wind everywhere! So we were strong & prepared for any wind the course might throw at us.
But our training hadn't prepared us for Sunday's weather: Rain, and lots of it. We'd been looking forward to this ride, tho, so we went for it. It was drizzly when we started riding, but eventually cleared up. We had a gorgeous ride, along with Jim's friend Shibley. The course took us through Independence and Jefferson and up some big hills, and we even got to ride a ferry! We had some, um, directional issues. We didn't exactly get off course, we just missed a vital turn or two. During the last stretch of the ride, the rain just started pounding. The raindrops hurt my legs as they slammed against the skin, and I couldn't see anything out of my sunglasses. I eventually took them off and just squinted into the rain. It was crazy & it never would have occurred to me to ride a bike in such a storm. But we did, and it was kind of awesome.
Oh, and during the ride we saw a cop car pulling over bikes & giving them tickets!! We never found out the real reason why, but someone said it could have been because they ran stop signs.
We had fun, and our next planned ride is the 85-mile Covered Bridge Ride in August, and then the 100-mile Peach of a Century in September. Yay for bikes!