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Thank you, God, for yet another chance to improve myself. When we look back on the ride, this is the one we'll call The Windy Day. At least, I hope so, because I don't want to see worse. It started out well enough. Sue, a local who rode the Fast Ride last year, gave us an alternate route out of the city, to avoid some bad construction on Route 50. There's a bike path along the Colorado River, where I saw a couple of Great Blue Herons, a handful of quail, and enough rabbits to fill a bathtub. In other places, it ran through brownfields that were being reclaimed with native wildlife, but were currently, well, brown. Overall, it was beautiful, and well worth doing, but it turned out to have added an extra 5 miles. Just before 9:00, the wind started - out of the south/south-east at 25 mph, with gusts to 40 mph. It blew non-stop for about 2 hours, then gusty for the rest of the day. When you're pedalling as hard as you can to go 8 mph downhill, that's a headwind. It took forever to reach the sag stop - I knew the bike path had added some to the mileage, but didn't know how much, so I was looking and looking, and getting blown around. I couldn't afford the energy to curse the wind; I just tucked, and soldiered on. And on. Andy and I rode through all the way to Montrose without stopping for lunch. Rather than waiting two hours to have lasagna and iceberg lettuce at the Red Barn, we had Chinese across the street instead.
How this came about was a bit of a coincidence. They don't own a TV, but they've been watching a lot of motel TV, and happened to see a special on testicular cancer, with instructions on self-examination. Dan found a lump, and had it checked out at the local hospital. (He only went to the hospital at that point because there was already a hospital run for the people with strep.) Anyway, it's definitely Something, so they're going back to Philly to get it biopsied and possibly removed. They're currently back in Grand Junction, and they're going to take the Amtrak tomorrow, so John rented a car, and we (John, Andy, the other Dan, Tom, and I) drove back to have dinner with them before they leave. On the bright side, this gets rid of the surplus Dan. Now whenever I refer to Dan, I don't have to specify amputee-Dan. We lose the surplus John (Andy's and my roommate) in Pueblo, so the only John will be Dutch John. There's also a surplus Paul, but I think I can keep straight which one is him, and which one is me. |
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Philly-Dan and Marnie are going home to treat a suspected testicular
cancer.