Saturday April 22, 2006 was a nice day for a bike ride early.  We have had a mixture of very nice days this spring with a fairly long string of rainy days in early May.  Overall the spring this year has been quite nice, actually a bit on the dry side until the week of long rains.  It is funny how the weather always seems to even out over time. 

The Tour de Cure ride is coming up in just a few weeks.  So far Pete and I have signed up to participate, we are inviting anyone and everyone else to join us for this fun event.  Contact me if you need additional information.  It is for a really good cause and it is a bike ride as well, what more could you ask for. 

On this Saturday Pete and I got together for a mid day ride.  It was warm and sunny, but a little windy which always makes the riding a bit more difficult.  Back on to the weather again for a moment.  One thing I have noticed as we transitioned out of winter into spring is a consistent pattern of windy days.  Now that I have been riding fairly regularly, on the weekends, for a few years it seems the days have been much windy this year.  Maybe there was just a period of rather calm days the first couple of years riding and the more recent windy days are actually the norm.  I guess I will have to log in a few more years of riding to see which way this trends.  Stay tuned and I will let you know as time goes on.  I’m sure there is some web site out there that would show me the average wind speed over the past few years, but that would be too easy.  I would rather continue this real world investigation on my own while riding my bike.   

Once Pete and I got together for this ride we headed south as we have for the past few months.  I keep saying we need to start heading north on our rides, but for some reason or another we end up going south again.  Anyhow, it was around lunch time and we decided to ride over to our favorite sub shop, Penn Station.  We rode around for a few miles before stopping for lunch.  As much as I praise Hamlin Pub I have the same feelings toward Penn Station.  When you are looking for a relatively quick lunch or dinner without any frills, then Penn Station is the place.  Their subs are by far the best around, and we have tried many other places, nothing else measures up.  Pete and I both enjoyed our lunch.  We took our time relaxing and talking while we ate. 

My son Jonathan refs kids local soccer games on the weekends.  Some weekends he has games on Saturday and Sunday and some weekends only one day.  Every once in a while he won’t be scheduled for any games.  There really isn’t any rhyme or reason to the scheduling process.   The guy who does the scheduling is a very unorganized person and it shows.  The scheduler is actually in way over his head with this job, but it is what it is and if you want to be a ref then you just have to put up with it.  It is a running joke with all the refs in the area what a joke this process has turned out to be.  Anyhow, Jonathan was scheduled to ref a few games this afternoon, so I needed to cut the ride a bit short to get back in time to take Jonathan to the soccer fields.  After lunch Pete and I basically rode straight home.  Clouds we starting to roll in, but there wasn’t any immediate threat of rain for the ride home.  I thought Jonathan might get wet later on out on the soccer field while wearing his yellow ref jersey.  Turns out in Jonathan’s last game he was the center ref and shortly into the second half it started lightning.  Jonathan  stopped the game and waited about 12 minutes when more lightening came and at that point he cancelled the game due to the danger of lightning.  This is when the bad thing about reffing reared its ugly head.  One of the parents of the visiting team decided to make an absolute jerk of himself and try and intimidate Jonathan into restating the game.  Reffing is actually a nice way for a kid to make a little spending money, but the actions of the coaches and the parents more often than not drive the young refs away.  

Following are the statistics from this ride, 13.1 miles total, 23.5 max mph, 1 hour and 8 min time on bikes and 11.5 average mph.  This was a nice paced ride again.  Any time we average over 11 mph around our area with all the hills we have done a decent ride.  If we lived in a flat area then the 11 mph average wouldn’t be very impressive, but in our area with all the hills it is actually a good number for our club. 
David Lindquist