The Vineyard and Miccosucki

I like it when rides start lining up early in the week for the following weekend. I'm a little O. C. D. when it comes to planning and like to know what and where by Friday night so I can relax knowing I've got plenty of pedaling lined up.

With a few of the regular crew out of town the trail Yoda/ BW was kind enough to call me and see what we had planned for the weekend. I'm usually at the bottom of his invite list and feel honored just to be allowed to tag along. So imagine how surprised I was when he actually called me to see if we had plans for Saturday. He had a route in mind starting from Joe's and heading east. I was hoping we would go over to the Lines tract but like I said it's so rare I get a personal invitation I jumped at his offer.

I let PP and PJ know what our plans were and we agreed to meet at Joe's at 8:30. I question the sanity of going to what I consider downtown Tallahassee to begin a MTB ride but I had never been on this particular route so I was looking forward to it. A local rockstar decided to grace us with his presence not to mention his amazing wheelie skills. So we set off through the sleepy neighborhoods over to Fern, through Tom Brown, over to the vineyard off of Mahan, then onto the Miccosocee Greenway, back down Blairstone, onto Fern again, then back to Joe's.

The only sketchy parts were the four lane road crossings. PP decided to use the middle of Blairstone as a bull ring and cut me off, forcing me to unclip and almost dump it on the concrete median. I'm pretty sure she did it on purpose as I could hear her laughing as we crossed the Digestive Disease Center parking lot.

We ended up with 27 miles for the day and grabbed lunch at El Jalisco. Unfortunately for us and any patrons sitting close, PP and PJ wore their riding kits to lunch. But in a Mexican restaurant the smell just kind of blended in. PP, that's what you get for the take out maneuver.

Sunday we joined a large group for the Dirty Spaghetti (which takes place October 15th) pre ride starting from the school in Micosuckee and going to Thomasville Ga. and back using mostly clay roads. I got to ride with a lot of people I don't normally ride with. I don't remember much about the scenery since most of the time I was just looking at the wheel of the rider in front of me. 38 miles at 15.5 mph average may not seem like much but I was pretty whipped at the end.

Neither Blake nor I got all of our chores done around the house since both days we just came home and fell asleep on the couch. I'm lucky to have such an awesome, beautiful, and understanding wife who doesn't mind letting me feed my cycling addiction. When I got the first "how was your weekend?" question at the office Monday, all I could say was "awesome". To which she replied "wow, sounds like it was better than mine". I'm pretty sure it was.

P. S. no, I don't know how to spell Micosocee and I'm too lazy to go look it up.