Womens Cat 1-2 Racers

We finished what should be our last training ride for Bike MS. Now it’s time to taper. The park was pretty crazy and I almost wrecked, when some other guy cut me off, while changing lanes, all four of them, right in front of me. Anyway, as is our want we combined today’s ride with lunch at Mission Taco, in the CWE. This was after we first stopped across the street at Left Bank Books. Anne picked up her copy of this month’s selection for the Birch Point Book Club, Summer at Firefly Beach, which she will devour. One last echo of summer.

This holiday weekend marks the unofficial end of summer. The official end will occur in a few weeks and we’ll likely still have summer weather for many more weeks after that. Is it too early to begin planning next summer’s vacation? Not for me. I have taken to choreographing our schedule using a spreadsheet and this weekend I’ve begun populating new rows for 2020. Interestingly, next year’s Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, occurs as early as it possibly can and Labor Day falls as late as it can. Making for the longest of all possible summers, unofficially speaking.

Long range planning is all well and good, but there is still almost a third of 2019 left to live. Not to worry though. Later this month, we’ll fly to DC, where we’ll rent a car and head up into the hills of Virginia and spend a long weekend in  Shenandoah National Park and also hopefully see Jefferson’s Monticello too‎.

After that we’ll host Jay and Carl. Jay has a conference in town. Hide the women and Cardinals, because Carl’s coming to town. There’s an outside chance that there might still be baseball here in town. The Redbirds are first in their division. So, for them to make the playoffs is looking pretty good. It’s more a question of will they still be in the playoffs when Jay and Carl arrive. Then there is the question of trying to score tickets to a playoff game. We’ll want to sit behind Carl, so that none of the “best fans in baseball” dump a beer on him. Continuing in the entertaining line of thought, there were noises made this summer of Dave and Maren also coming to Saint Louis. This would be for Thanksgiving. Finally, Anne’s school schedule has two full weeks off for Christmas. What to do? What to do?