Knocking Off a Century Ride on the Lady Bird Lake Trail

Today is our last day in Austin, so we thought we would see how many miles we could do before we spend the next three weeks going to Memphis (and beyond).

We didn't want to go too far out of town because we wanted to "save" those roads for when we were actually touring. We also wanted to carry the amount of weight we would be touring with, but not actually carry our stuff. So, we filled the panniers with stuff we found laying around the apartment building. The big score was an old tire rim I strapped to the rear rack of Betsy. That was good for about 20 or 30 pounds!

We headed for the trail with our loads of apartment building junk. We got a few approving looks from a couple of homeless guys. One even asked for the tire rim. I said I needed it for the weight.

We got on the trail near the Congress St. Bridge. Since it was pretty early in the morning, we saw some of the bats returning from their night of bug hunting.

We rode counterclockwise to the end, across the bridge, to the other end, and across the other bridge. When we returned to Congress, we started with lap two. As we completed lap after lap, I thought to myself, this must be what a Crit is like! I decided to work on my cornering skills on the next lap. I only knocked one person down (their fault--they shouldn't have been on the course anyway). Of course, I didn't crash.

When we finished the ninth lap, I saw someone holding a sign saying we had one lap to go. I think I heard a bell too. Christian was keeping up pretty good. I told him to go ahead so I could draft off him for awhile. He did and I was able to pull a bagel out of my handlebar bag and eat it.

Before we got back to Congress, we turned off the trail at Trinity and headed up to 6th Ave. to listen to some music and have a couple of Shiner Bocks. We had managed to ride 100 miles without ever leaving the Lady Bird Lake Trail. Oh, and, by the way...APRIL FOOL'S!

The real story is that we rode a whopping 2 miles to the grocery store to get food for the Hill Country. The rest of the day we did laundry and repacked the bags--boring, but necessary. Then, this evening we went to Dillon's UT Orchestra Concert. They played Wagner and Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring". The Stravinsky was certainly not something you could fall asleep to--a great piece for the percussion section!

While we waited for Dillon to finish his duties as Assistant Stage Manager, we went in search of his recital poster. We found one by the elevator. Not quite as colorful as some of the others, but it'll do...