Magnificent May

You can tell when the weather gets nice. I have trouble sitting down at the Mac to write when all I want is a hot shower and early to bed. My last post (1/2 a month ago) mentioned two centuries, but this post only has one. A week ago, I set off to “paint some roads”. Yeah.

In the RideWithGPS website and app (premium account?), you can display a heat map of roads you’ve recorded rides on. I only started really using RWGPS to log my miles since late 2020, so most of what I’ve covered over the years hasn’t been captured. But it appears that 2021 was pretty busy and I managed to cover much of northwest Wayne county, but there are still roads to be savored!
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Blue lines are where I’ve been. Red line is the day’s ride.

​And a nice day it was! A cool start, but it warmed up nicely by the time I stopped for a snack in Sodus Point. Bonus points for discovering a rail-trail between Sodus Point and Route 104. Scored 108 miles on that one.

Another super riding day came when I was leading the “Wayne & Brian’s Ride”. It’s another bike club “Adventure” ride, and yes, there was a buddy, many moons ago, who once called me up and said “Let’s take a f@#*-off day and go ride the hills!” And did he ever find some hills! That was Wayne and we HAD to save that as a bike club ride. And this year … 28 YEARS later … who shows up for the ride but none other than Wayne himself!

And he even rode the same bike!

May started a bit slowly, weather wise, and toward the middle of the month, I was beginning to wonder if I’d end up with fewer miles in May than April. But the last two weeks shaped up nicely, I’ve been getting out on longer rides most days, and I ended up beating my goal of 4000 miles by the end of May, by 220 miles. Terrific!

And the ride that really put me over the top was yet another old, old, old bike club route: Todd’s Turns. With Todd leading of course, we did that ride on Memorial Day in the heat. Most everyone who showed up at the start had announced that they would take a cut to avoid the afternoon heat, except for that one guy.

I had no time commitments and brought two bottles and a hydration pack, so I was OK to give it a shot. The full route of Todd’s Turns is 76 miles and the best part of it is Fowlerville Road, with it’s long gentle downhill to the east. Combined with the day’s steady tailwinds, I was in Avon in no time! LOVE that road.

And I felt good having done a “Good Deed” that day, with the help of another rider, Jay.
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Mean, nasty, typical snapper.

​We came upon a giant snapping turtle on the road and I HATE seeing critters getting mooshed by cars. Jay expressed a certain “dislike” for snappers, thinking maybe he’s right where he oughta be. But I insisted on saving the big guy, so Jay and I grabbed a couple big sticks and eventually convinced the big green guy (well … we kinda dragged his ass off the road … a good 30-40 lbs worth) to return to the bushes.

And that was the big excitement for the day. Shortly after, I peeled off from the group to ride on with the full route. It was hot, and the wind started shifting by the time I got back. I knocked off the 76 miles in just under 6 hours with only two stops for fluids and was pretty excited to fire up the air conditioning in the car for the drive home!

So May turned out just fine. Stats below.
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