dam loop

just one final now stands between me and end of the term bliss. in the meantime, i finished up my two term projects and emailed them to my professors today. this was the first saturday in awhile when i have been able to sleep in a little bit and then roll out for a nice 50-miler at 10:30a. it was fantastic. the ride itself was pretty exciting. in mile number 2 of my ride, a cannon went off about 50 yds from me. seriously. i was riding through west campus about to turn in a corner when BANG! it scared the crap out of me. turns out some fraternity was having a parents weekend or something and everyone was sitting outside on the lawn in rather fancy attire for a random saturday morning. i have no idea what they were doing but my riding companion informed me that it was something to do with southern roots. i had a lot of friends in fraternities in college, but i'm not sure any of them had a cannon. texans like shooting things though so apparently things are run a little differently down here.

don't worry, i wasn't swearing in my blog title today. for our bike ride, we went on what's called a dam loop. its about 50 miles total if you ride from campus, and roughly in the middle of the ride, you ride over mansfield dam. if you're a cycling austinite and haven't done this loop in awhile (as i hadn't) i would recommend not doing it for another week or two. they seem to be repaving 620, and the road and shoulder are really torn up right now. this makes for sore hands and a sore rear. the next part of that route brings you down 2222. at some point, you hit an enormous hill on this road. fortunately, we were going down it. my riding companion said his speedometer hit 51 mph as we were speeding down it. i think my previous record for speed on a bike was about 45 mph, so as you can imagine, this was a pretty sweet hill. other than some wind, it was generally just a beautiful day to ride--sunny but not too hot.

happy cycling!