This is mostly just a place to document some of the options. But I would like to also state that people who don’t ride 20,000 miles on a bicycle every year don’t have a good perspective on the hierarchy of dangers in cycling. For example, riding a two-lane county road with a speed limit of […]
TLDR Adventure 1 – Thanksgiving – I attempted a 550 mile out/back-ish (tight loop) from Birmingham to Panama City Beach and back to record my own GPS data for Washington and Bay counties in Florida. The ride was going to be split into 265 miles there and 285 miles back for back-to-back Eddington 256 rides. […]
TLDR – It was tough I had imagined this as being a slightly faster, slightly longer version of my normal multi-day adventures around the South. What I hadn’t counted on was how exhilarating it would actually be to do the ride and how I would overextend myself early in all the excitement. They had great […]
I had intended to document my training and everything leading up to my Paris Brest Paris (PBP) adventure a bit more, but life has gotten so busy. I’m going to use this post as a “reverse order” summary of the journey leading up to PBP. TLDR Paris Brest Paris is only held once every four […]
Another year, another skyway. This is the life. This was my 11th year racing the skyway. It would be one of the few races I’ve ever had the opportunity to do every single edition … except for getting hit by a car and spending the week of the race in the hospital in 2014. This […]
We just survived what was being called “snowmageddon” here in Alabama. Unfortunately, the bulk of the snow was just north of Birmingham with some places getting over 6-8 inches of snow. The snowfall dropped sharply below a line about 10 miles north of us with only about an inch of snow and another inch of sleet/freezing rain falling here in our part of Hoover. But it was enough to cancel school for two days (Monday and Tuesday)! The pictures below document the story – hover over each one to see a caption.
It’s been such a good day. Typing on my iPhone, but I just had to capture the sweet simple memories.
I worked Friday/Saturday, leaving Brian and the kids Thursday evening. I came home to happy kiddos and husband, lots of hugs and Josiah saying several times, “I was missing you, Mom!”
The kids joined us in bed this morning, full of sweet snuggles, spontaneous hugs for each other and kisses all around. Ahhhh… loved it. They were both full of love today, playing well together, wrapping their little arms around me with hugs at random
times. They joined me snuggling on the couch as I watched the Packers game (Yay Packers!!!), as we settled in for winter storm. And as the sleet and flakes fell tonight, we curled up in our PJs to fall asleep on the couch watching A Bug’s Life. Perfect.
Today, we had some really interesting weather – 21 degrees and raining! Yes, the freezing rain that started right around dinner time was treacherous. Within 15 minutes, you could barely walk to the car and drive a couple blocks down the street to the sledding hill. So imagine how fast the sledding hill was. On the first run, I started Analise halfway down the little hill and she still went straight into the woods. So I started Josiah a lot lower, and he still went into the trees, too! Fortunately, there was some deeper snow and smaller brush to slow them down before plowing into any of the big trees! We went over to the big hill and only managed one crazy run each starting from near the bottom of the hill. Analise still flew at least two feet into the air on her first run and landed hard enough to knock both of her boots right off her feet. Fortunately the landing also scrubbed most of her momentum. After watching this, I took Josiah down the hill practically to the bottom, let him go, and he still went nearly all the way down to the football field. We decided it was way too dangerous to continue. You could probably hit 30-40mph with the right sled starting from the top if you could steer it down the path to the football field!
Video of Analise and Josiah sledding into the woods (watch on our blog if you are reading this in Facebook):