Dirty Bikes And Sore Legs

It was raining. Three of us took off on the shiny roads not exactly sure where we'd end up. One green blob covered the entire radar screen with the darkest shades of green to our south, which is where we'd planned on riding. It appeared that the lighter shades of green were north. We decided to see how wet we were when we arrived in Wayzata, and then take it from there.
The rain actually felt good, but it made it hard to see, and road spray is never fun. I threw a rear fender on the Cannondale, so, at least, I wasn't getting my butt cleaned. Got to Wayzata and everybody was game to continue on. Decided to take a now paved abandoned railroad bed trail to St. Bonnifacious. This is a very nice trail, with wood planked bridge decks that were wet enough to reflect the surrounding trees, and several tunnels of branches that gave us only a little protection from the rain.
The grasses, leafs and flowers all looked plumper as they took in the drink from above.
St. Bonni was the end of the trail and the beginning of some up and down. Yes! every ones favorite, rollers!
I'm not exactly sure what got into me, but for some reason I needed to put down some serious watts on that wet asphalt. What's even more inexplicable is Amy and Steven figured they should too. Stomping on the pedals, hearts wanting to break out of our chests, serious heavy breathing, then coast down the other side just so we could do it again on the next incline. I don't know, maybe 8 miles of that til we got to Watertown when things finally flattened out a little for us.
Started to see a little blue sky. Made it up to Delano where we walked into the Shell gas station with road grit stained faces to get our cheesy crackers, Gatorade, and other nutritious fare for the ride home. By the time we'd refueled and cleaned up blue skies and sun dominated what was once wet and gray.
We were honestly surprised to see that we'd averaged 20.1 mph to Delano, although, Amy said she knew it without even looking at her computer.
The remainder of the ride was kind of typical, with lots of sun and dry roads. Got home and the heat had started to build. We actually felt fortunate to have ridden in the rain, because that heat and humidity got brutal this afternoon. You know, it wound up being a really good ride, pretty hard, but a really good ride. 82/20.4 Sorry Steven, I know that wasn't the ride plan I advertised.

It's art fair weekend here in Minneapolis, so this afternoon I went over to the Loring Park Art Fair
stopped at the sculpture garden on the way home

all on the simple elegance of my DeRosa fixed gear.

another very slow 10 miles.