It’s been a really long time since my feet got cold on a bike ride. I left at around 10AM with temperatures around 45°F (7C). The morning fog was almost gone and the sky was just slightly clouded. The actual ambient air temperature wasn’t so cold, but the southerly winds were pretty high, so I went out to Draper Lake. That way I could have a tailwind coming home. However, thick overcast rolled in while I was making my way around the lake.
I packed a lunch and ate on Miracle Hill. I’m probably the only person who calls it that. It’s odd how I was dressed okay for the conditions, but by the time I got home I had that wiped-out, light-headed feeling with my cold face and feet. Not enough to make me dizzy, but just enough that it was hard to focus my conscious energy on anything but riding and controlling the bike by the time I got home.
Which is just about appropriate because stuff is happening so fast my head is spinning. I really needed that time out on the hill and riding in the cool winds. All the while the repeating drumbeat in my heart is that I’m on the right path, my brain is floundering. The only thing that seems clear in my head right now is the boundless desire for one more mission in meat space. Just one more time, Lord, let me take this faith among folks who have never seen it but need to. That prayer was uppermost in my mind the whole ride.
I took the Sooner Road corridor outbound: cut through the neighborhood south of my apartment, come out next to Applebee’s, cross Air Depot and zigzag between parking lots until I get to Eddie Drive. Drop west and then south on Sandra Drive. That runs all the way down several blocks until I turn right on Foster Place. This dead ends at the edge of Rose State, but the barriers offer a pedestrian cut through big enough I can walk the bike past it. Then I just zigzag around the campus on Adair Boulevard and turn south again on Hudiburg Drive. This takes me up over I-40 and I can run down the service road all the way to Sooner Road. A couple of weeks ago I brought a cutting tool so I could remove the tree limbs blocking the path on the edge of the bridge. Now I can ride the margin against the traffic safely until I can cross the street. From there it’s bike route all the way out to the lake. I seldom face much traffic, but it’s nine miles one way.
Parks and Recreation had a crew out in a crew-cab pickup riding the main roads around the lake. They stopped now and then to pick up obvious litter along the roadside, but then the high winds just yanked it back out of the open pickup bed. Brilliant, guys. I was surprised by the number of motor vehicles taking the lake drive today, including an old Jaguar XKE circa late 1960s. Motorists are never a problem because everyone knows bikes have the right of way. Of course, no one else was riding today. Still, I’m trying to get all the saddle time I can handle with a major cold front heading our way this week. Tomorrow will be a little cooler with winds more northerly. Tomorrow night we go just below freezing. Next day is cooler still than the day before, and at night the bottom falls out, way below freezing. It will be like that a few days, then we expect to come up out of the freezer. When it’s like that I just don’t ride that much. I can walk, but it’s not the same.
Meanwhile, stuff keeps happening: The Keystone XL Pipeline may have to take another route away from the Sioux burial grounds; Italy voted against a radical change in their constitution and frustrating the EU; another VIP raped and murdered in Germany by a refugee; lots of crazy stuff locally here in the OKC Metro… sheesh. I’m just watching and waiting for my Lord’s call.
