Down a pint

With warming weather, I am starting to bump up my mileage. On April 28 I managed 52 miles on Big Nellie. I chose the hilly route to Falls Church to buy some Halt pepper spray at a bike shop. It was closed. Derp.

I continued west to Vienna to see if Bikes at Vienna sold any. Nope. I did get to chat with the ever- loquacious Beth. She was dying to get her hands on Bike Nellie for service work, but that will have to wait until I wear out the chain later this year. She mention that she had a recent chat with Lawyer Mike, a loyal customer who is a regular at Friday Coffee Club. Mike bought an electric assist Hase Pino tandem. The front is a recumbent, the real conventional. Mike’s son is developly disabled so the bike allows them to go on weekend excursions. The son is the stoker, which means he sits up front on the recumbent half of the bike. Mike is the captain in back. It’s an amazing design and works great for them.

I had intended on continuing west of the W&OD trail to check out a new bridge over Wiehle Avenue in Reston but Beth told me it isn’t installed yet. So I headed back east. Not a half mile later Mike and his son passed me going west. (They stopped at Bikes at Vienna on their way to a milkshake place in Reston.) I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen someone I know on a bike in the last year.

Temperatures were unseasonably warm but I made it home in decent shape, making sure to take a swig of pickle juice to ward off leg cramps.

I did an easier 30-mile ride the next day, again on Big Nellie. I finished the month on Tuesday with a day off the bike and a blood donation at the Bloodmobile parked at the hospital down the street. Back at home, I set up my tent to make sure I remembered how to do it. I slept in it overnight. It rained. I stayed dry. I slept very deeply in three roughly two-hour stages. I guess the blood donation factored into that.

The weather on May 1 was perfect so I got on The Mule and headed out for what turned out to be a 52-mile ride from my house to Bethesda, Maryland and back. After emerging from the new tunnel under the Humpback Bridge on the Mount Vernon Trail, I noticed a couple of people standing around checking out some Canada geese. Among the adult geese were a handful of yellow-green goslings busily snarfing up grass. The first goslings of the year are always a welcome sight.

I continued onward up the Capital Crescent Trail, stopping in Bethesda to snack on a few cookies I brought then I headed back, down Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park. The temperature was in the 80s but the shade in Rock Creek Park took the edge off the heat. Seeing all the green made me all but forget that stick season is barely over.

On my return, I crossed the Potomac River on the 14th Street Bridge. The ramp connects to the Mount Vernon Trail pretty much exactly were I saw the goslings. This time there were 20 of the fuzzy little critters being tended to by a pair of adult geese. As I stopped to enjoy the goings on, Miles, another Friday Coffee Clubber, came by on his electric-assist Brompton. What’s with these encounters? Miles was on his way home from work and he sped off south on the trail.

After some gosling zen, I headed south as well. About four miles later I came upon a horrific scene on the adjacent George Washington Memorial Parkway. A crash had just occurred. (Miles passed the site before the crash and I arrived just after it.) A BMW was speeding north on the Parkway. The driver passed two cars in the right lane. The driver of the van had entered the Parkway from a perpendicular side street. Eye witnesses said the BMW was going “about 100 miles and hour”. It hit the van and sent the van airborne for what witnesses said seemed like three seconds before it landed on its roof on the Parkway. The BMW ended up upright in the wide median between the north and southbound lanes.

The force of the impact destroyed the front end of the van, sending parts, including the entire engine, off into the grass on my side of the roadway.

The elderly driver of the van had been removed from the vehicle by passersby and was being attended to. He was in rough shape, but was conscious. A school-aged boy who had crawled out of the van was sitting on the grass about 20 yards away, surrounded by some super nice folks. He didn’t have a mark on him and seemed remarkably calm. (He complained to the ambulance crew that his back was sore but there were no surface injuries visible.)

It is amazing to me that no one was killed. (As far as I know, that is; the elderly driver, the boy’s grandfather, is in critical condition.)

The rest of the ride home was blessedly without incident.

Thursday I rode The Mule to a big box hardware store for some home repair supplies. I wanted to take it easy but the store was on top of a big hill so climbing was involved. After shopping, I went for an exploratory ride through Kingstowne and the Fort Belvoir areas The Kingstowne part of the trip was intended to avoid a brutal hill on the direct route to Fort Belvoir. The roundabout route I took cut the one big hill into three manageable ones.

It was hot and muggy during the ride. I drank all my fluids. At home I hit the floor to do my physical therapy exercises. When I went to stand up, the back of my left leg seized up with a humungous, very painful cramp. After it calmed down, I went straight to the kitchen for a shot of PJ.

Today I rode to and from Friday Coffee Club on only four hours of sleep. The weather was fantastic: 70 degrees and breezy. The pollen, however, was not. I had three coughing fits brought on by pollen coating the back of my throat. I used albuterol to calm my lungs and managed to ride home without incident. PJ was imbibed.

I was going to attend to a home repair project but the weather was perfect for napping on the deck and so I did.

Tomorrow I plan on riding 50 miles in the cold rain.