Random Musings and Nicknacks

The weather this year is driving me absolutely stir crazy. It is fairly well known that I will ride by bike through almost anything to get to work. Only two things will stop me: sufficient amounts of ice on the road, and sufficient amounts of snow on the road.

By that standard, out of 20 commuting days available in January, there were 13 that I could not ride [1]. February is not starting much better — In 4 years that I have been commuting by bike I have never seen a winter like this.

Today I decided to heck with it, I could hear rain outside so the roads much be clear, and it was supposed to warm up (we’ll ignore the forecast of 70kph winds for the time being) so a ride home was definitely in the cards.

Ling stopped me, she had been outside already and knew more than I did. So we negotiated we would take the car to her parking spot at 16th ave, then I would ride the rest of the way.

As we drove in it was snowing (wetly) in Richmond, hailing on the Arthur Lang bridge, raining in Marpole, snowing (much heavier) in Kerrisdale and by the time we parked we were in over an inch of slush and snow.

She couldn’t dissuade me — I insisted if I walk to Granville the road will be clear. We did, and after a few minutes I got the slush out from my cleats so I could clip in and set off for the seabus terminal. I found another weather system — the wind over the Granville bridge was quite something! It was also a *lot* colder than it was supposed to be. I don’t believe the “1 degree” the news was talking about.

Ling was right about not going the whole way — 10 minutes on the bike and my hands were frozen solid.

But good news! Its supposed to warm up 10 degrees for the ride home and I can hope for a tailwind! [2]

[1] Some may argue more like 17 days, but I figure if the snow is low enough that there are car tire ruts that get down to bare pavement, its rideable.

[2] What have we done to offend mother nature — after a month of aternately freezing and thawing the ground around the trees, she loads them up with snow and then plans to throw gale force winds at them. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s news!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.