The best & worst ride ever!

As part of our training for Reach the Beach (just two weeks away!), our biggest, longest, hardest training ride was this last weekend. It actually wasn't that rough of a route. 70ish miles of pretty minimal hills, gorgeous farmlands, good roads, no traffic. The standard route is actually just shy of 50 miles (we added bits and doubled back to get the miles we needed) and I'm really looking forward to doing the ride again later this spring/summer. There were even fluffy little llamalings (baby llamas) and such.

That would be the "best" part of the ride.

The "worst" bit would be: "A short but severe thunderstorm Saturday afternoon killed a 59-year-old Southwest Portland man, cut power to about 30,000 people, capsized two sailboats, clogged traffic and knocked over trees across the Portland area."

Over half an inch of rain in ten minutes at one point, gusts of wind 40-50 mph and me and my Christopher out riding about in it. It was absolutely horrible. Definitively the worst weather I've ever ridden in, or even been outside in in any way. Not fun at all to be riding my little bicycle with that sort of wind tossing me around the street (thank you cars for not crushing the life from my body!) Oh, there was lightning too. With everything else going on, however, that was a bit of a side-note.

End of the story though, we made it back to the car (of course this happened around mile 62 of our 68 mile ride) just about the time it stoped and though we were muddy, frozen and a bit wiped out (more from the storm than from the 70-mile ride) we arrived hale and hearty, safe and sound. Which is sort of astonishing when I think about it.

After that Reach the Beach should be a piece of cake. mmmm.... cake....