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As previous mentioned, I am out in Estonia this week (in the cold rain, as it were) for a work trip.  I am flying back to Memphis this Saturday…  So far, so good.  Just a normal trip (I have made over 30 of them in the last several years).

Go back a few days, Andrea gets a message from her team manager that he wants her to do Downers Grove / US Crit championship.  This is a huge deal, this is the race that Tina Pic has won 7 of the last 8 years or something like that.  Now Andrea doesn’t expect to win, but a top 20 placing (or even a field finish) would be a victory for her.

Now, I usually fly back from Estonia via Chicago (on Scandinavian Airlines) which would have been perfect, but this time I am flying back on Northwest right to Memphis.  I did some fare shopping and came up with a good price to fly up there to watch.  She is racing both Saturday and Sunday, but I can get up there Saturday night to see the race big event on Sunday.

Then, I get to thinking… she is driving up… and she could bring my bike.  And there is a cat 3 race at 10am on Sunday.  So in the end I made the maybe foolish choice to race the next morning after flying back from Europe.  The good news it that it is in the morning…  in the late afternoon will be the problem.

So to recap.
Saturday:

7am (eastern european time) to 4:50 pm (Memphis time) fly via Amsterdam to Memphis
drop off back at my car in the parking lot… or put it in left luggage if time is short.
6:35 pm (Memphis) to 8:20 pm (Chicago).

Sunday:

10am, race the Cat 3 crit championship in Downers Grove
noon, watch Andrea tough it out against the best crit women in the country
after that…watch the pro men?

oh, and drive back at some point… not sure on those details yet.  So this whole thing will cap off a pretty crazy week.

Did I mention that I have been off my bike since last Saturday (the morning before I left)….?  Although I have been running some…

We (Andrea and I) went out for a longer ride today out of Marquette. We choose a hybrid route looking at numerous roads on my mapmyride.com. The route wasn’t bad, but started out on small highways with too many double (and single) dump trucks.

After winding around to the open pit mining area south of Ispheming, we got on some smaller county roads. Unfortunately, they were pretty rough. Right away on one of the hills, I spotted “feed zone” and then we started to count down the kilometers from 5k to go… at the end, we sprinted for the finish line… well sort of……

I am 50% Finnish by blood, so I felt right at home leading attacking and winning that sprint. Andrea won her share out there including the all important final city limit sign… for the City of Marquette. The cool thing is that right after that city limit sign was one of those speed measuring signs… we ramped it up again and I saw 35 before we passed the sign. Not too fast, but we were just putting along on the ride, so it wasn’t too bad.

And finally, as Andrea has already blogged, we ran across a historical landmark. The county road we rode on used to be the US-41 highway. This was first use of a roadway centerline. This concept is familiar to all road racers…the centerline rule.

This morning Andrea and I are prepping to leave Wisconsin and progress further north. We got up here Wednesday night (as planned) and have spent two full days with my brother and his wife. During that time we have gotten out to ride twice in the rolling hills & farm land around Fond du Lac. The day one ride was very hilly up and down heading out east to large bank of wind turbines. The economics of turbines don’t really work in west Tennessee that I have seen (I am guessing it is wind speed and probably cheap TVA power). In any case, it was cool to ride along a road in the middle of a wind farm. We even stopped and rode up to the base of one. The day was clear and sound the blades made was very quiet and peaceful.

That night we went down to SummerFest down in Milwaukee. It was a good time in general, but the crowds and drunk kids +/- a couple years of 21 were a bit annoying. The lineup on Thursday night was just okay and we saw a couple of bands playing their one or two hits. I guess that means I am getting old that I don’t know many of them.

Yesterday we went out for a ride down more south and east from Fond du Lac. No wind farms, but more good rolling roads and some nice looking lakes (Kettle Moriane State Forest). I brought my camera and took some photos of Andrea riding (and she of me). Here are the best ones.

We had the requisite cheese curds… but they apparently are not fresh enough to squeak. We need to get those on way out of the state.

The other good things about Wiscosin is the New Glarus brewery. I think we have tried maybe 5 or 6 types and they are all good. The Road Slush Stout is particularly good.

Michigan is next. Marquette and the Copper Country.

Andrea has been showing me “FAIL” pictures for a while and point out numerous “FAIL” circumstances in real life. I don’t know why I clicked on it, but this one was pretty funny.

I love the further description… “not very friendly”….

http://failblog.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/taxonomy-fail/

I went down from Chattanooga to mid-town Atlanta for a training class…. The class is at Georgia Tech which is only 1-2 miles from the Atlanta IKEA store… I stopped by to get some more storage baskets (I have a bunch I use for bike clothing, etc) and to get dinner. They always have a bunch of pretty good, basic food. Reminds me of the cafeterias that I have eaten at in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and several in Estonia….

And only $10 for all of that….

My car (Ford Escape) is now almost exactly 5 years old… I think I got it in May 2003.    Anyway, I rolled over 5-8’s today while driving to Chattanooga for the Georgia Cup race.

About an hour later, I picked up another stone chip on my windshield driving I-565 through Huntsville, Alabama….  The other one (upper) one I got while Andrea was driving my car coming back from the Pepper Crit last September (that one was on US78 in rural Mississippi)….

Today was a good long day in the saddle.  Andrea and I rode out to Outdoors (as usual) but we added some extra bits…  At the Shelby Forest Store we heard that the river (the MIssissippi) had flooded out the access road (Jackson Hill Road)…so we diverted from the group to check it out…..

So after looking at the flooded road, we doubled back up the hill (one of bigger ones around town) and rode back to mid-town.  She remembered seeing a good stencil on a boarded-up gas pump on Union Ave, so we decided to stop and capture it on my phone…

I am not sure what this (”we win”) has to do with a boarded up gas pumps (this station probably was robbed too many times), but the artistry is pretty good and well done.   In the end, I do hope more people will realize how many useless trips are taken and endeavor to reduce them….

In all, I got about 79 miles which is probably the furthest I have ridden in a while in one go.  In the middle, there was (as usual) a sprited section going through Benjestown to the Shelby Forest Store..  I was able to put in a few good efforts that make me a believer in the longer leg extension.  I probably will try to get up to the position that Rod suggested, but I am going to leave it alone (at part of the way there) through the next couple weeks (including Chattanooga Georgia Cup race and the Mississippi Gran Prix).

And I pulled the trigger on my e-file for my taxes…  I had to pay $300 this year instead of the usual $100…  Sold my Apple stock last year at pretty big profit (on a small position) to buy my Kuota.

This morning Memphis is covered with several inches of snow that looks like it will hang around for a while… another trainer day, but that can wait.

Here are some short movies I took of Andrea’s dogs playing in the snow.

Her Jack Russel:
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Her Belgian Malinois:
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The crazy weather continues in Memphis today (extreme weather perhaps..what could possibly cause that?). Last Saturday, I was racing a few hours away in Little Rock with 75F temperatures…. Today, the temperature dropped along with a winter storm giving Memphis the first real snow of the year. As I write this there is about 2″ of snow on the ground and the temperature is dropping below freezing.. So it is not looking good for riding tomorrow morning. So rode as long as I could stand on the rollers (which today was about 45 minutes).

Last night, I helped Andrea put her new groupo on her Blue bike that she got in the fall last year. She got her new SRAM Red groupo yesterday. Due to the weather, the maiden voyage will have to wait, but it sure does look good. I am still waiting for my Felt FC frame (expected this month) and my own SRAM Red group. I have been riding Force since I got my Kuota last April. I am looking forward to the improvements over Force.   After getting a chance to handle the parts during the installation makes me all the more excited to get it myself.  From everything I have heard, the demand has been great for this group.  I think it is well deserved.  Shimano and Campy should be worried.

Really it has been a crazy week in Memphis starting off last weekend when someone decided to slaughter a household of people. This “Lester Street Massacare” is giving Memphis another black mark after a number of recent “worst of” lists which put us up there in “fattest” (pork ribs anyone?) or just a bad place to do business (no citation, sorry). Aerotropolis? That is the concept that Memphis is pushing to be to get something going to leverage the air freight trade in/out of Memphis Airport.

But in the end, living anywhere is what you make of it. Memphis is not the best place I have lived, but I would say that life here is not that bad. It has it’s problems, but they are manageable.

The next post will be #100. I started this thing last April as an experiment to see how it would go, as a creative outlet, and a place to post up photos.

After getting home from work, Memphis has been and continues to be in the middle a tornado watch / warning. As one of the larger cells passed through the area, I sat down under the stairs in my garage and worked on my TT bars and waited….

So far, so good and I think the worst has past. I haven’t lost power (yet?) and decided to blog my TT shifter installation. All I need is for my frame and build kit to arrive (mid-Feb?) and then I will convert my Kuota to a TT bike…

Here is a quick overview (WMC TV5). Today it was in the mid-70’s and now a cold front is moving through creating some pretty extreme weather. This is the sort of stuff that climate change doubters can’t explain, but are all too quick to say something when there is a winter day in the 20’s. Averages and temperature differentials….