Too hot to knit

The last few days have been beastly hot, with afternoon rain. Too hot to knit, in fact. And the outlook is for more of the same. What do you do when it is too hot to knit? Exercise, of course. And the preferred exercise in this household is mountain biking.

Sunday afternoon we ventured out for an afternoon ride. Sure, the sky was overcast and grey. But it had been that way for hours. We had plenty of time before the rain. We did the first half-loop. Great fun. Couldn't be better. Started for the secondf half.

Now, the way we ride this trail, there is a decision point. You can turn left and head immediately to the parking lot and be there in 5 minutes or less. Or you can turn right and continue your ride, arriving at the parking lot about 30 minutes later. We were feeling widely scattered sprinkles during our approach to this decision point. Very widely scattered sprinkles.

So we turned right.

Mother Nature was NOT amused. Not even a little bit. We hadn't gone 30 meters when the skies opened up. Torrential downpour. But -- hey -- we were hot and exercising so this was not a problem. We kept going.

Then Mother Nature upped the ante with lightning. Of course, we felt by this time that we had reached the point of no return and it would be a quicker route to the parking lot if we continued on. This meant, of course, that we could not stop at our usual resting points because they were on high ground, beside tall trees, and we were riding lightning rods -- I mean metal bicycles.

We persevered. We pedaled madly. We went through and around mud puddles. Lakes, more like it. And we ended up at the parking lot in a record 20 minutes. Of course, we had no clean clothes (there is no changing room). We did not have towels either, because the lake -- the reason for needing towels -- was at home.

We did what any self-respecting biker would do -- threw the bikes on the car, piled in, and headed for home. This is what Doug looked like.


You can't see it, but there was actually a very small dry triangle of material on the side of his legs. The shoes and socks had already come off. The socks were wrung out. He squeezed a good half-cup of water from them. Everything was completely drenched. I didn't look much better.

We jumped in the lake completely dressed. It seemed a good way to rinse some of the mud out of the clothes before laundering.

Did I mention that we had a dinner invitation that evening? We opted to take the dry car.