Yesterday I planned to ride my bike for a good long while. I needed the time out on the road since my bike is my therapy and a lot has been going on lately. So to kill two birds with one stone I drove to my office and decided to ride from work to the house I am trying to buy. I wanted to check out the roads and see what a commute would look like.
In my stupidity I didn’t leave home early enough so I ended up riding in the heat of the day. It was 94 when I started and 99 when I stopped. Stinkin hot is what that is!
The ride from the office to the house was great. The roads are decent and not too hilly so it is very doable. Because of the heat and fact I haven’t ridden in a few weeks I hung out at the house for about 30 minutes to cool down and catch my breath. I rode slow and easy not trying to break any records but the heat just made it hard. Even with those factors the ride was only 42 minutes. I was hoping for under an hour and got it. With some practice and road familiarity this should be a nice 35 minute ride between home and work.
While sitting on the driveway I got to say hello to a neighbor next door, saw a mother and two sons across the street clean out the family van, and saw the neighbor directly across from me come home and walk into the house. Overall it seems like a pretty quiet street. It is a cul-de-sac so probably only gets traffic from the folks that live there. I have been by in the evening afterwork, in the mid-afternoon, and now on a Saturday. All 3 of those times it has been just as quiet. A friend has driven by a couple of different times and has reported the same thing only adding that there were some dogs out once but seemed to belong to the house directly across the street and were not a nuisance.
After cooling down a bit and eating some powerbar I decided I needed to be heading back. If I thought coming was slow and easy then going back was a crawl. About a mile down the road I stopped at a convenience store to get some powerade. I enjoyed the cool of the store for a minute before going back out and upon drinking the cold energy drink I realized how warm my water had gotten. I didn’t notice until there was a contrast so the rest of the ride my water seemed yucky and hot but I had to keep drinking to keep pedaling.
I took the same route back that I used coming. While it was a decent route coming it wasn’t so hot going back. It was much hillier but still doable. But there is a small section of a very busy road that I had to cover. Coming it was a right turn onto the busy road and right turn off of it. Going back those would both be left turns. Not to be like J. Edgar Hoover (who was afraid of left turns and refused to let his drivers ever make one) I still don’t like making a left on the bike, especially onto busy roads and off of them. To avoid doing this during this ride I walked my bike across the street before the main road and rode through a Hummer parking lot. I thought the string of car dealers might have their lots connected but they didn’t. I rode through one lot, walked the bike over the curb or grassy area, and then rode through the next lot until going through the 3rd lot that connected to the road I wanted to be on. That road had a bike path along the side of it that I stayed on because I was doing about 7 miles an hour up the hill and didn’t want to be that slow on the road.
With the little detour I made I knew that this route would not work for a morning commute because I had to add in rush hour traffic and figure the route that way to make it doable or not. Some more research is needed. When I got back to the office I noticed a buddy of mine was in so I decided to go say hello and get some ice for my water bottle for the drive home. My friend was on vacation all last week and hadn’t heard about the contract on the house. She was excited and wanted to know the route I just rode. After telling her she started naming several alternate routes off the top of her head. This made me happy because it means the route in to work can be fixed. Another friend, that lives in that area and that I call a walking mapquest, told me that out of all the ways to get from point A to point B the way I went would have been the last suggestion she would have made. Again, reassurance the route can be fixed. This friend even said that someday she would take me driving in the area so I could learn the roads, where the closest grocery, retail stores, and other needed businesses are located.
Overall I did 20 miles, didn’t pass out from the heat, stayed hydrated, and learned alot about the rideability of my potential future commute. Other than a touch of sunburn (that has already gone away) I would say it was a very successful outing on the bike.
