The world, and how it should work, according to John C. Straffin

I had taken today off from work (tomorrow, too) to help out around the house as my wife’s best friend has flown in from AZ with her two daughters. There’s stuff they’d like to do, just the two of them, and I can stay home with the four kids while they do so. They didn’t have anything planned until this afternoon, however, so I had planned to take a ride. Sure… it was a bit windy and there was a chance of rain, but it’s only wind and only a chance of rain, right? Besides, next week on the CNC, if it’s windy or rainy or spewing lava and frogs from the heavens, I’ve got to ride on through it if I was to get to my dinner that night.

So I went on my ride anyway: another running of my 50-mile loop.

And it was windy. And rainy. And my BlackBerry’s battery died again 10 miles into the ride. :/ (Note to self: turn the BlackBerry’s radio off; don’t just turn off e-mail checking… radio off!)

Having no more audiobook to listen to (with only 5 minutes left in the entire book, grumble grumble grumble), my head found songs to fill the silence, using my cadence at the moment as a guide. Oddly, my head primarily and repeatedly came up with the following:

• Poison Arrow by ABC
• Never Tear Us Apart by INXS
• Sweet Emotion by Aerosmith (particularly the pre-chorus guitar riff at ~1:54)

Some mix, huh?

I also experienced a rather odd set of recollections: the first time I traveled this route, I was listening to Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics. This second time, as I traveled the same route, I was vividly recalling what was being discussed in the book at certain locations: at Guess & Berry roads, it was the corruption present in Sumo wrestling… on Satterfield Road, leaving Hurdle Mills, it was how Superman helped defeat (or at least seriously damage) the KKK in real life… crossing the bridge over Lake Michie, it was the similarities (and differences) between Architects and Prostitutes… passing Bahama Fire and Rescue, it was the economics of drug gangs. (Freakonomics truly is a very interesting read/listen and I highly recommend it.)

I got home–safe and sound and wet–about 4.5 hours after starting. The gusting headwinds cut my average speed down to 12.4mph (11.4mph for the first half of the ride), but I was pretty pleased with my performance overall. I’ll be taking tomorrow off from biking as I’ll be pretty busy packing, getting the bike ready… oh, and getting new tires on my car. :/ Very good friend and very good auto mechanic took a look at my tires earlier this week and strongly recommended against driving to Black Mountain on them (grumble grumble grumble).

(ba-DUM-pshhh!)

So… yesterday I rode my bike to Virgina. Virgilina, Virginia, to be precise. Took 501 from home, then 49 to Virgilina. To make things less boring than an out-and-back trip would be, I then took 98 to Oxford and Old 75 (NC 1004) back to Durham. Total distance = 90.9 miles according to Google Maps, 95.13 miles according to my cyclometer (which I’m fairly sure is mis-calibrated).
The trip started out well enough. It was a little chilly so I had on my windbreaker and some sweatpants, and a slight headwind that stayed with me all the way to beyond Roxboro made me happy that I had. It was then–just beyond Roxboro–that I had my first mishap. Three hours into my ride, my Blackberry’s battery had run out of juice. Apparently, the act of searching for a signal tower in the middle of nowhere is very electrically taxing. At this point, I was actually considering turning around, because I would have neither a way to contact my wife in case of an emergency nor (more importantly!) my audiobook to listen to for the remaining five hours of my ride. Luckily and thankfully, a nice woman at the Mayo Marina market let me use her car-charger for *her* phone to recharge mine. About 45 minutes, one Snapple Tangerine White Tea, a BIG box of Boston Baked Beans (yum!), and the Saturday Edition of the Roxboro Courier=Times (yes, that’s an equal sign… no, I don’t know why) later, I was back on the road, about 80% charged.

I twittered most of the trip, but soon ran into my second mishap. No signal anywhere in or around Virgilina. Took pictures in lieu of tweeting. (Okay, I would have taken pictures anyway. But with no tweets to back them up, the pictures became more important.) Here they are:

The final (and thankfully also non-painful) mishap of the trip was when I arrived in Oxford, I realized I had left my “cue sheet” (aka “map”) at home. I could see the shape of the map in my head, but unless I was to suddenly figure out how to look at Oxford from 1000 feet off the ground, that wasn’t very useful. So, I called on my standard Navigator-of-choice, and called my wife. She got me back on track (Thanks, Honey!) and I was on the final leg of my trip. Tweets and pictures again suffered neglect because I had noticed that the battery was getting low again and I really wanted to finish my audiob… I mean… I wanted to be able to reach my wife in case of an emergency. Yeah. That’s it…

I got home at around 4:20; 10 hours after I had left. The “official” stats from my cyclometer:

Now–24 hours after I finished the trip yesterday–my legs and knees are only a little sore, my back and shoulders are more so. The back and shoulder soreness are likely from a borrowed CamelBak Ventoux hydration pack I had tried using for the first time. I liked it very much for this “un-supported” long-distance trip, but, as there will be rest/refueling stops every hour or so on the CNC Fall Ride next week, I’ll probably just stick with bottles and a fanny pack.