I tried to write a real post, but I’m too tired. Anne and I both had a good day on the bikes. Anne got 75 miles and I got 95 miles. The RF-ID thing wasn’t as successful as I had hoped it would be. Sunday is day two, so sleep is calling me now. Good night!
The Giro della Montagna or Tour of the Hill is the anchor race of the four days of racing that comprises Saint Louis’ Gateway Cup. After leaving the Japanese Festival at the gardens, I cruised a mile west to The Hill, Saint Louis’ Italian neighborhood. The women’s Cat 4/5 race was just finishing up as I arrived and the Men’s Masters Race got underway just after I got my camera deployed. My Team Kaldi’s roll call includes Edie & Rob, Sandi & Chris, Dawn and Tom from Lakeshore Tour fame and of course Susan. Everyone asked about Anne. Susan is the only one that I know that is actually racing in these events, over the Labor Day weekend. She raced Friday night at Lafayette Square and plans to race tomorrow morning in Benton Park at 10:30. She was acting as the crossing guard when I saw her today. In these crit races, especially near the finish line, crossing guards are a must so as to prevent unsuspecting spectators from trying to cross the street in front of a peloton of bicyclists traveling at thirty miles per hour. Ouch! I watched her save one little, nearly deaf and probably almost blind too, Italian grandmother when she attempted to cross the road at the wrong time. A straggling racer came clipping along the fence line a moment after Susan almost tackled said granny. I got a total of 15 miles in these last two posts and the day.
Two posts on one day, what’s up with that? Well partly, it is because Anne isn’t feeling well this weekend, but mostly it is because it is too darn hot here in Saint Louis. Saturday is shaping up to be another 100 °F day and it is too darn hot this afternoon, to go outside our little bubble of air-conditioning. The forecast for tomorrow, predicts much cooler temperatures and there is a great bicycling ride scheduled for Sunday. I hope that Anne is well enough to accompany me on it. The paper on Friday had an article in it that explained that this summer has been the fourth hottest summer on record. Hotness is measured as the average temperature for each day in the summer months of June, July and August. Coming in at number four, 2011 had an average temperature of 81.9 °F. Close behind, in the number five-spot was 2010 at 81.7 °F. Other years of interest are #6, 1954, our birth year, coming in with 81.4 °F and #7, 1980, the first year we moved to Saint Louis, with 81.3 °F, but still comfortably in the lead, in the #1 spot is 1901 with 82.7 °F.
Dave cruised into town last night and we had a late patio supper at Pi in U-City. It was late enough that we missed the dinner rush crowd there and the temperature had dropped to a comfortable enough level that we could enjoy dinner outside on the sidewalk. We ended up pretty much closing the place. Dan dropped the rents off at home and then he and Amanda dropped Dave off downtown. They went off to do something or another, it being too late to go to the City Museum like they had planned. Anyway, Dan, Amanda and the Prius were all safely home in the morning. Dave returned mid-afternoon.
This morning I went biking in the Park. I expected the usual crush of weekend warriors, bolstered by the newly arrived college students. Boy was I surprised! The Veteran’s Festival had taken over the Park. This is a new festival and first impressions didn’t leave me impressed with its organizational abilities, but like I said, this is only their first year. The festival featured military re-enactors, amusement park rides, vintage cars and a parade. Saint Louis loves parades and this one was no different. Most of the parade’s audience was composed of the aforementioned weekend warriors, who would pause in their exertions to catch parts of the parade. I was one of these individuals too and snapped a few photographs of the passing spectacle. The Clydesdales were the main attraction; a couple of jogging coeds started singing the Budweiser song to themselves, as the wagon passed. Mayor Slay made an appearance along with many veterans’ outfits. There were also many classic cars in the parade. I’ve included a few pictures of these cars at their static display on the upper Muny lot.. The orange one had mirrors on the pavement about it, to allow viewing of the car’s undercarriage. I spoke with the owner of the halftrack; he said it got between 2 and 3 miles per gallon. I got 16 miles.
Afterwards, I went grocery shopping and stopped by at the Borders store. The shelves are starting to look pretty bare, but the store was still full of bargain hunters. The literature shelves were the barest of them all, but they also offered a 70% discount, instead of the now normal discount of 60% that can be found throughout the rest of the store. Signs outside the store announced that there are only nine more days to go.
The title of today’s post is certainly a tired trope, so maybe it is time for it to be retired, but the damage caused by Irene is still being acutely felt, even if coverage of it has begun to wane. Earlier this year, we had our own little Irene, when a nameless windstorm toppled our large fir-tree, along with a half-dozen of our near neighbor’s trees too. It took us three months to repair our damage and one neighbor is only now completing her repairs, some six months after the storm. I expect that our timelines will appear brief when compared to the eventual post-Irene cleanup and repair. After all, New Orleans is still dealing with the aftermath of Katrina, even now.
Living in Saint Louis, we primarily experience tornadoes instead of hurricanes, but even so, the occasional beaten down remnant of a gulf shore hurricane makes it this far inland. A few years ago one such hurricane, hit town and disrupted the Tour of Missouri bicycling race. By the time a hurricane reaches this far north, it is usually moving pretty fast, this was certainly true of Irene, by the time it hit New England.
In 1982, Anne and I had our “Great Adventure”. We took six months off and bicycled around the USA. In early June of ’82 we were in Rhode Island. We had just visited my Aunt Merce and Uncle John and then the seashore resort town of Newport, when a sea storm moved in and sat on Little Rhody for the better part of four days. It took us those four days to eventually escape this tiny state. The remainder of this post is composed from excerpts from Anne’s log that chronicled our days of rain, in early June of 1982.
The day before this story starts, was a play day in Newport, RI, home to many wealthy people. The weather was sunny and warm. We enjoyed bowls of the world-famous clam chowder at the Black Pearl. The next morning this episode dawned ominously cloudy; the fore-tellers of the approaching storm were already above us.
Our first obstacle was not natural though, but manmade. It was the large suspension bridge that connects Newport Island to the western mainland. The approaches to the bridge warned off all us bicyclists, but we didn’t really have another choice. That is until a kind woman with a pickup truck stopped and gave us a lift. Anne rode with her in the cab and I sat in the bed with the bikes. She explained that the authorities were very serious about enforcing this bridge’s bicycle prohibition. Cyclists that had ignored the warnings and had ridden across this obviously dangerous bridge were summarily turned around and forced to ride back from where they had come. That will teach them a lesson! The rain started that afternoon.
Anne and I frequently disagreed on the subject of motels. I was always for them and Anne was the budgetary restraining force. After all, we were always carrying our own little no-tell-motel. Probably the nadir of this little episode can be best summarized by the following diary excerpt.
Well it’s rainy when we start out and it stays so all day. Although, it slacks off occasionally, it’s still pretty miserable. We’ve come about three-quarters of the way around in a circle, back to Providence. Hopefully, tomorrow we’ll leave “Little Rhody”, for other sunnier pastures.
We eventually made it to Massachusetts, by way of Connecticut. I’m still not sure of that navigation, but I suspect that it was my own. It continued to rain in the Bay Colony, but the worst was behind us. We rode through puddles that caused us to lift our feet off the pedals to keep them dry. I saw a much more extreme version of this maneuver in the Irene news. We also got severely splashed by bus #13. This little episodic adventure is in no way comparable to the depredations of Irene. Simply, this is the closest connection that our life experiences have produced to that catastrophe.
In less than a couple of week, Anne and I are going to participate in the 2011 MS-150 bicycling ride/challenge. We have trained for this event all year, including riding 506 miles in Michigan in nine days. The weekend after Labor Day, we will ride 150 miles in two days. We would appreciate your sponsoring donations. The links to Anne’s and my individual donation pages can be found below and also on the righthand side of this page in the sidebar. This is our only fundraising charity event, so your help would be appreciated.
Dan has updated his website, which is linked to here and below in the blogroll. He has added four new art projects to his website. They are listed below, check them out:
After yesterday’s bike ride and bike party, I was too tired to give much attention to describing the Tour de Wildwood, which was a pity. As I mentioned yesterday, it was a very hilly ride. I learned today, from Dan at work, one of the denizens of Wildwood, that at least by area, Wildwood is the third largest city in Missouri, just after Kansas City and Saint Louis. Some of the hills that we climbed have names, like Ossenfort, which routinely makes the list of the top ten hills in Saint Louis. Others prefer to remain anonymous. I found the two toughest hills to be a short little wall of a climb, at the very beginning of the ride. It was quite the wakeup hill. Last year, Anne ended up walking it, but not this year. The most challenging hill was the second from the last. It climbed Woods Road. It was a wooded, windy road, not particularly steep, but long and very beautiful. I want to do it again.
Anne was in the third grade today She introduced herself as Ms. Regenstreif, but also offered the kids the opportunity to call her Ms. R, because that is the first letter of her last name. One smart, young girl suggested, Ms. Rock’n Roll. Go to the head of the class!
We have house guests tonight. Cait, a classmate and friend of Dave’s from Rochester and her friend Brant. They arrived today from NY and are headed to Denver tomorrow. Cait is starting graduate school at UC Irvine in Criminal Psychology. Like ships in the night.
Anne took the picture with this post. It is from the cabin and not some other worldly sphere. The double sun is caused by refraction from the cabin’s triple-pane glass.
Team Kaldi’s had their packet pickup party tonight. The packets to be picked up were for this years up coming MS-150 bicycle ride. The packets included a T-shirt, rider numbers and information for the MS-150. Distribution of said items could have been easily accomplished through the mail, but why not throw a party instead. The team has grown to such a size that the packet pickup party has outgrown all of our team member’s houses and some of our team members have some pretty big houses. This year’s party was held at Kaldi’s roasting house. It is a coffee factory in one of the factory districts in town, but on a Sunday evening it made for a great venue. Anne and I participated in the distribution of the packets, in-between potluck eating and plain old partying. About the couple’s photos, I asked each couple if I could take their photo. I gave them time to pose and then I shot the picture. Guys, the girls rule in these photos, that is as it should be, but you guys could have tried a little bit harder. Girls can rule, but guys don’t have to drool. There are a couple of photos in this mix from Sunday morning’s Tour de Wildwood. Wildwood is the newest, western most, and one of the toniest of Saint Louis County’s municipalities. Wildwood pulled out the stops to support this ride, from high school students manning the registration tables to a comprehensive police presence on the road. Then there were the hills. There were fabulous hills on this ride, there were grueling hills on this ride and then there were these fabulously grueling hills that almost made you wish that they would never end and then they almost didn’t. We got 28 miles.
Earlier this month Anne and I completed an epic, nine-day, 500 mile, bicycle ride. You might have heard me mention it once or twice before. What has not been mentioned during the subsequent twelve days is our complete lack of bicycling, at least that is until today. If we had been smart about it, we would have biked in the morning, when it was still relatively cool, but no, we launched at high noon. Mark asked, “Is it hot enough for you, dear?” Anne replied, “That question is just so not cool.” 
Anyway, off we went. We rolled through the Park, accompanied by the muffled melodies of Loufest, a music festival that is ongoing this weekend. We passed the botanical gardens, as we rode up Tower Grove Ave. Two cyclists were assaulted by a group of six to ten men at this spot the other night, but that was night and this was day. We passed many other cyclists, including whole families on bikes. It felt very safe.
Our destination was Tower Grove Park and the Festival of Nations. This is the third year in a row that we have attended this festival and it has always been hot in the past, so it shouldn’t really come as too much of a surprise that it was hot again this year too. The Festival of Nations has three main attractions, food, shopping and musical acts. Because of the heat, it didn’t seem as though we did much at the festival, but here is my report.
We strolled up the food aisle first. I bought a pair of Cajun lemonades. They really hit the spot. They were almost too big to carry. Anne eventually had some Thai food, primarily because the lines were short. We bumped into Jim and Diana and spoke with them for a while. Next, we window shopped the ethic arts and crafts aisle. The group that impressed us the most was Cobu. Cobu is from New York City. Yako Miyamoto, the founder of Cobu is a member of STOMP, which we really love. Cobu combines elements of the Japanese traditional Taiko drumming with rhythmic Tap dancing. I love Cobu’s motto, “Dance like Drumming, Drum like Dancing”.
On the way home, we were passed by this guy on a motorized bicycle. We were going uphill when he passed us. I accused him of cheating. We caught him at the next light and he admitted feeling a little guilty about passing us. He seemed friendly enough. He killed his engine at the light, I guess to save gas. He told us that it easily push started again, at only 5 MPH. We got 16 miles.
