Feb 25/26 - life's a beach

I've seen coffee mugs that say "life's a mountain, not a beach" -- of course those come from ski resorts. Here, life's a beach.

For the second day in a row, Abby and I just got back from the dog beach. If we go out tomorrow as well that will make it something that she expects. It's not a bad routine -- it's cooler in the morning, the sun is lower on the horizon so it's better for you and the boardwalk is open to dogs until 10 am. At the end of the walk there is a small concrete pad with two faucets and hoses which are perfect for rinsing the salt off her and then I go onto the boardwalk for a few minutes to let her drip dry a bit before getting back in the car.

Otherwise, yesterday, we didn't do much. We, in this case, being Abby and I. I took her for a walk later in the day to the beach close by, but of course we could not walk on the beach there. There were lots of people out -- nice sunny day albeit windy.

I had a heck-of-a-time setting up the Central Florida 400km ride with bikeroutetoaster.com for a variety of reasons. One was my stupidity -- I had a few tabs open in the browser and I closed the wrong tab, losing the 2/3 of the route that I'd already setup. Grrr. Bikeroutetoaster does not have an "are you sure" prompt before losing the work. I'm not blaming the software though, it was my fault.

The other problem that I was having is that the route doubles back on itself a few times and the software thinks that you are trying to undo what you've done before as you mouse-over the prior route. Eventually I gave up on that and setup the route in two sections, an "A" and a "B". The other reason for doing that is that the route follows a 20 mile section of the Orange Trail, or some such name, which is a rails-to-trails project similar to the trail that I used to ride in Philly. Of course that trail is not on the map so the best that I could do was let it find a shortest route between the start and end ... in practice that would be a mess trying to follow with the 705 because it would constantly say that I'm off course.

I'm not looking forward to this ride for one reason and one reason only -- it has 4 pages of turns in an excel spreadsheet. That a) slows you down, b) gives you more chance to get lost, c) is difficult to follow in the dark. With the ride starting at 5am and likely ending around midnight, for me, that will mean at least 7 hours of riding and navigating in the dark. The 705 will help, if the GPS readings are at all accurate, but if they're not I'll have a problem. I will have to look for a small LED flashlight that I can attach to my helmet. Hopefully KMart or WalMart might have something. I have not found anything at the biking websites other than expensive helmet-mounted headlight systems. I don't need headlights, per se, just reading lights.

I heard from Sandy late in the day yesterday and they had a good time at their lunch. She and Marda are now at a hotel looking out at the causeway to Sanibel Island and Marda forwarded pictures with her Blackberry. Sandy called again this morning to again ask for Marty Smith's phone number ... she wrote it down and lost the piece of paper. Per her message, I've now forwarded the info to Marda's Blackberry. I didn't speak to her live because Abby and I were at the beach.

They were about to have lunch with Mariadella -- whoops, make that breakfast -- I get confused because it's almost lunch time for me :).

My plan is to go for a bike ride today. As usual I'll be out for around 5 hours, leaving Abby to mind the store. It's sunny and warm -- short sleeve jersey weather. Everyone is out these days -- walkers, riders, dog-walkers -- it's like spring in the north where everyone and everything comes out of the woodwork. Of course up north that means people, leaves, bugs, birds ... the bugs and birds are here year-round; the leaves are almost all out on those trees that shed and the people come and go. It's also getting busier, with bike week officially starting Friday night. It then stays fairly busy here through a couple of weeks after Easter, gets quiet for most of May and part of June and then roars back again for the summer, which is the real high season here.

I had to chuckle when I read my friend George Cederholm's blog the other day. He hadn't posted for the better part of a month because nothing was going on. Well, nothing really happens here either ... but I write anyway. I write for the same reason that I ride ... just exercising different muscles -- one being between my ears. Speaking of muscles, I printed off a chart of lower back exercises a couple of days ago. Do you think that's a good start ? I haven't done anything since !

I did get up top and clean the evestroughs / gutters yesterday. They are full of dead leaves from our Live Oak trees. If the Live Oaks were dead I wouldn't have that chore ! If they only shed leaves once per year it would be better, but they shed all year long. I had toyed with the idea of going for a leg-stretch ride yesterday afternoon but after squatting for a while on the roof there was no way.

That's it for now.