A little bit of a weekend update for you, it was a good one.
Saturday consisted of a pretty busy morning taking care of things around the house and getting the lawn mowed. I'm not real big on mowing the yard, too many other things that I would rather be doing. One of my neighbors on the other hand has one of those "golf course" lawns where every single blade of grass is just right so I have to make sure to mow my yard or he will.
Saturday afternoon and evening were set aside due to some plans that Amy had made. She called it an early Father's Day present that I had no idea about until we arrived at the destination however, it does seem that everyone around me was fully aware of all of it. You will all pay dearly later on. We went to Boone, IA to pay a visit to the
Iowa Railroad Historical Museum and take a ride on the dinner train. I have this thing for trains, they're cool. I had no idea what was going on the whole trip to Boone and when we arrived there I figured that we were just making a quick stop to see the museum but, Amy showed me the registration for the dinner train for my parents, Amy, and me and told me that the dinner train trip was the surprise. Very cool. The train ride is about two hours long and covers some really cool terrain plus a couple of bridges. One of the dinning cars has a platform on the end of it so that you can go outside while it is moving too. Pretty neat experience to go over a bridge while out on the platform. It was a good trip and had some good food so I recommend it to anyone who is looking for something a little different for dinner sometime.
Sunday I had a planned ride to Shell Rock on the SystemSix in the morning which I set out for and actually had second thoughts as I was heading North on Union Rd. The wind was out of the NNW at around 25+ mph and it was a chore to keep the pace up. I opted not to turn West to New Hartford and just continued North to Finchford although as soon as I got there I decided to go ahead and continue the trip to Shell Rock anyway. It was actually a really good workout all the way there trying to keep the speeds up. Pedaling downhill at around 18 mph was interesting but, no where near as entertaining as the 11 mph uphill while heading into the wind. It took 1 hour and 45 minutes to get in the first 25 miles and then I had to turn back to get home in time. The trip home went much quicker with speeds ranging from 24-30+ mph the entire way back. So the trip North was a resistance workout and the return trip to the South was pretty much tempo work. Took a hair over an hour to get back home by the way. After that it was lunch at Toad's and then home to watch the weekly Giro d'Italia coverage on TV.
It has been a brutal week of racing in Italy this past week with numerous riders being taken away by ambulance in the various crashes that have been the story of the first few stages. Liquigas has been pretty good at avoiding any major problems so far although they have had a crash or two.
Today's stage 9 was a pretty good one too. A two-man breakaway at km zero set the stage for a lat pursuit with the pair getting reeled in towards the end of the stage and the peloton getting the opportunity for a sprint finish. Time for the sprinters to show everyone how it is done. There are quite a few good names out there and many of them with some serious speed. McEwen, Zabel, Forster, Cavendish, Dean, and Backstedt to name a few. Today's finish was one of the better ones though. It was a very close group with a lot of speed and a straight road to the line. It even came all the way down to that finish line and then the photo of the finish was still needed to make the winner official although, those of us that support Team Green knew that Daniele Bennati had just won his second stage of the 2008 Giro over Paolo Bettini. It was a close one though, edge of your seat type racing going on this year. Those of you that are not following it are truly missing out on a great race.
Read the complete post at http://carlosdajackal.blogspot.com/2008/05/time-for-dinner.html