Of things last week....

Hey, what's happenin'? Haven't posted in a while, but that's because we've been pretty busy this past week. First of all, we had a special visitor from Chicago. Hugo got to hang out with his Babcia! They walked around the neighborhood, visited the park, met other parents & babies, sang songs and chatted with each other. Thanks for all your help this past week Grandma.

With Babcia watching the baby, I was off to ride in my very first century. Actually, the North Fork Century--so named because it took place on the northern peninsula of the easternmost tip of Long Island. A century, for those who don't know, and I didn't before I started biking to work on a regular basis, is 100 miles of riding in a day. Now, my ride to work is 7 miles, 14 round-trip. I figured 100 miles would be a little more than 7 commutes in one day--monotonous to think about, but it sounds doable. Here's the group of us, in the pouring rain at the start, contemplating the doable:

From left to right: Dave, Me (in all my gray splendor), Ben (who decided to make a shiny torso-length bib of that emergency tinfoil/blanket and rode with it for over 20 miles..it was that chilly), and Todd. Colin, whom you will see below, took the picture. Just to place things, we're standing behind Greenport High School with roughly 1700 other riders who took part (well not all of them were there...some of those yahoos actually took off in the earlier downpour).

Jen, too, had a nice day with the ladies (here pictured with Barbara Lynn and Kim). Aside from dealing with the oddly rude locals, they had lunch together, visited a beach, toured around the North Fork, and then dropped off the two "bored" boys they had been tortuously dragging around all day, so that they could ride the last 23 miles with us. (Note: these boys belong to Todd and Ben/Kim, they are not some random boys they picked up on The Fork).

And here's us, on the side of the road, somewhere on the North Fork, on Mile 77. We are still contemplating the doable.

At the end of the ride, we all met up back at Greenport High for a barbecue, showers (for the cyclists), and eventually, pie! Really really good pie! For some reason pie is tradition on these rides. I don't know why yet. Here's a group of us enjoying blackberry pie--don't bother slicing it--we'll just dig right in. Or in Colin's case, below, just stuff our face right in it.

What comes after this photo is that he is cleaning raspberry pie out of his nose.
Jennifer and I send out our thanks to all; we had a wonderful day.
Special thanks to Colin for driving us and our bikes out there and back.