Well maybe it was just a dismal afternoon. I had to work late and Melanie wanted to get going to Aberdeen to see her mom. I told her to go ahead and go, I would take the Buick Roadmaster. It is a very comfortable car, and a great cruiser. They don't call them Roadmasters for nothing. After a little over a hundred miles, I felt a vibration, so I pulled over to see what it was. The tire tread had started to separate, and it was going flat. No problem, just get out the spare. After changing that, it was only about half full. Bummer. I decided to go to the nearest gas station, and that was 35 miles away. I could only go about 20 mph to keep the tire from overheating, so it took a long time. But it was 50 miles the other way, and would have taken another hour at those speeds. I decided to just head home after that, and I would take my bike instead. It was only 335 miles, and that is an easy day for us. Well it is easy after putting in some miles, which had been hard to do with all the daily snows we had been getting.
When I got home, I had to shovel out a path to the street so I could get my bike on the road. When I checked the weather, I knew it was going to be cold on the way there, and wet on the way home. The ride home turned out to be better than I thought it would be, with a heck of a tail wind most of the way home. I didn't get nearly as wet as I thought I would and was happy about it!
Here is the snow that I had to shovel. Not a lot, but still, it is May 7th, 2010!
Here is Melanie and Marylou in their back yard, shortly after I got there.
Mike (VROC #29008) wanted to go for a ride, and we only had a short time, so he suggested Columbia, SD. I used to have a lot of relatives that lived their, and we had some mutual friends, but they weren't home. I told Mike I wanted some pictures of the high water. Yes there is flooding going on here too. This was after we tried to go north by the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge. I spent a lot of time there growing up, and love that area. We didn't make it, the roads were in really bad shape, so we turned around and took these pictures.
Here is a smiling (as always) Mike.
Here is a picture of our bikes, and the high water behind them. Normally there is a river and fields back there. The water is within a couple of feet of the road, and it has been going down for a while now.
On my ride home, here is a picture of the clouds on the back side of the frontal system that brought the rain that was supposed to soak me. The Missouri River is in the background, and the whitecaps were very big today.
Here is a closeup of the whitecaps. They always mean it is very windy. These were very big, even for whitecaps! The river is still nearly a half a mile away to give an idea how big the whitecaps are on the water. Click to view any of the pictures bigger.
