Rain, rain, rain.
It’s been pouring here in the santa cruz mountains… we got 10 inches in the last 5 days. Lots of rock and mud slides on our road. The county road crew has been busy. The other day Laura was on her way to town and a mile from home found the road flooded a foot deep. She had to turn around.
You can imagine that I haven’t gotten a lot of cycling done. I got a lot of time on the spin bike. Well, as much as I can stand, which is about an hour a day. I hate riding indoors. By friday I was desperate for a real ride outside, and the rain didn’t look too bad. By the time I got into town to start my ride (I wasn’t up for riding through the crap that’s on our roads, and I’m not keen on riding roads this steep when they’re soaking wet) it was raining. I went ahead anyhow and put in an hour and a half. After an hour my feet and hands were numb, because it was 36 degrees and even with fenders on my bike and a rain jacket on me, I was soaked. When I got to work I spread my bike clothes around my cubicle to dry. No one said anything but my co-workers already think I’m a freak. It was an absolutely miserable ride and I felt so much better afterwards. My gear still wasn’t dry when I got home from work, so I arranged it on top of the heater vents. George helped by sitting on my booties to hold them down on the register.
Today was supposed to be the “dry” day of this endless series of storms. Of course it was raining when I got up. It stopped after breakfast so I went into town and did a nice long ride (4:45, 73 miles). On the way back I noticed a dark cloud in the valley I was about to ride up. I hoped it would have moved to the east by the time I got there, but instead it started raining immediately. I was no longer feeling like a weenie for having the fenders on my bike and bringing a rain jacket. It poured for about 15 minutes… not Arizona thunderstorm kind of rain, but hard for California. There was a lot of water running in the road and my shoe covers and gloves got soaked. But a few more miles down the road it was dry, and I started drying out. Then another 10 miles up the valley it started raining again, but it stopped before I got back into town.