too much, and not enough

It's been over 60°F both days this weekend. I'd been planning on that, and when I saw Laura OLPH was planning a 40-something for yesterday, I did not want to miss that...especially when I saw she was adding some extra miles from her home, bringing the total to almost 60.

I shouldn't have done the extra miles. I'll tell you now, I hit the wall at just about 50 miles; I had no power going up any kind of a hill, I was falling off the back, and I could feel the tremor. I didn't intend to be the Ride Canary for the day, but that's how it worked out. I'm grateful for Snakehead and Chris C, who had stayed back, and saw I got enough water and junk food to make it the rest of the way.

Perhaps I'll be more careful in the future when I'm getting back on a bike after several months, with an injury and a weeks-long illness-and-recovery in the interim.

But probably not.

It was a great ride anyway, and just the thing I needed after my enforced idleness. Eight of us went, many of whom I've ridden with for years, whom I consider friends, and others whom I wish I knew better. Peter and I met Laura at her house, and we rode into Pennington, where we met Ricky G, Snakehead, Chris C, and Andrew. Just as we were leaving, Celeste rode in.

We did this route. I found it hillier than advertised (Laura's route page showed the elevation as 2272, lower than the 3042 I wound up with), and there was moderately hairy direction (we went about twenty feet on 206 in the direction against traffic), but it was a great day, a great ride, and I'm delighted I had a chance to hang out with some bike-y people and ride again.

The nominal reason for the ride was another stop at thee Factory Fuel coffee shop in Flemington.

It's a wonderfully alt-left place; the baristas are decorated with tattoos, ear gauges, and good cheer; there was a young lady out front of the farm market next door collecting signatures against Trump, and the inside of the farm market held (in addition to the farm stands) an aging band and stands with various homemade wares for sale (there was a driving cap that caught my eye; I may be back). Most of us ate and drank coffee in the sun.

The coffee-drinkers tell me the coffee is good (I went with an orange Pellegrino instead), and I can tell from personal report that the junk food there is certainly worth the working-off of the empty calories.

In lieu of the obligatory bikes pic, here's another look at that rack they've installed out front. They need to move it away from the wall a bit.

It is, of course, similarly warm and sunny today, but I didn't have another long ride in me. Instead, I went for one of my usual 20-milers at a sensible pace. Then I came home and fell asleep on the recliner... it wasn't even noon yet.

Later this week: a post about bringing the Ultra Geeky Linux Computer back from the dead when the hard drive died, and how, even if you can salvage files from the hard drive (I did), it doesn't help if one of the programs on which you've come to depend has upgraded to the point that the old format is no longer recognized. Grrr...