On Thursdays I pay a musician to be my friend. A local musician and teacher holds a weekly string band session. For a mere $10 I can sit in with whoever shows up for an instructional jam. Consequently, during string band season I drive on Thursdays because I have to cover 35 or 40 miles with a musical instrument.
The way I play I should pay everyone in the group. But so far they keep letting me in. Comic relief?
With Thursdays off the bike commuting list, that makes Wednesdays all the more important. The weather has established its own routine, bringing showers or outright rain week after week. If it's too nasty I lose a riding day.
Park-and-ride season puts most of my route away from traffic, but on an unpaved surface. The path may actually be less messy when it's a little wet than when it has been very dry. Path dust is fine, powdery and pervasive. It gets all over our rental bikes, coating every part not covered by the rider. My own bike develops the same gritty coating if I don't do anything about it. Regular rain keeps the dust down and the surface firm as long as the rain isn't heavy enough to turn the susceptible areas into mud.
Ideally the rain falls at night for just a couple or three hours around midnight. Not on Wednesdays, though.
Days like this are the reason they invented fenders and raincoats.
2 comments:
What about wet hands and feet?
In summer temperatures I just get wet. In cooler temperatures I might add liner gloves and wear wool socks, both of which retain some warmth when wet. As the temperature drops further, where heat loss presents a more serious threat for all sorts of problems from the extremities to the core, I might put plastic bags over my socks and neoprene covers on my shoes, but the covers are never watertight. Same with more water-repellent gloves: either they leak or they hold in sweat. So really your choice in wet weather is to be warm and wet or cold and wet.
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