Days Like These and Times Like Those

Rain. Its like my friend Chris says, "Days like these, your just going to get wet"
Remember the scene in Shawshank Redemption when Andy Dufresne escapes to freedom? Arms spread and embracing the rain and the outdoors after being locked up for for years for something he wasn't responsible for?
I imagine my friend Chris would do exactly the same thing today outdoors if he could walk again.
Embrace it. Like one of my all time favorite cycling hero's, Tyler Hamelton said after he cracked a collarbone on the first stage of the Tour de France and finished
4th over all after 23 days. You need to embrace it.

It was about 25 years ago. Raining harder then it was here today and about 29 degrees warmer. We were not going to stay home and look out the windows. As a matter of fact, we looked forward to the difference of rain and all met without a wait as a group to start the ride.
All off road. Kind of a dueling dicks kind of thing.
The ride started out as a not so bad rain, sorta of a drizzle, but then all hell broke loose. The sky darkened and the thunder sounded from the West. We were going to get hit, hit hard and it was OK.
Just about the time it really started to pour, we rode through a huge patch of Poison Ivy. For those of you that don't know what Poison Ivy is, Poison Ivy if not washed off, after about 18 hours, makes a foreign body of your skin to you. You scratch it off and if you have germs under finger nails, it get infected and takes 3 weeks extra to get rid of the skin and the blisters and itch to go away. Not Good.
Our good friend Warren stopped to wash. I only had to make eye contact with Chris, because it was raining so hard that washing,,, well,,,Never mind!

As good as it gets. one of the fellows decided that we should take cover from the lighting in a open garage on the site of a park we were riding at called "Ridge Hill"

Funny, shortly after we got under cover, the building got hit by lighting. Really. I had never,till then, seen a light bulb blow out due to a lighting hit.

We decided that we should go back out into the rain and continue the ride.

The rain was coming so hard it made no since to talk as we rode. We worked our way through the woods and stopped at times to cross streams that we had never seen before. Theres nothing being lost on trails that you know by heart because the water is so deep things dont look the same.
We made it to the next town and along side of a lake called Lake Waban by the collage in Wellesley. Waban was an Indian, appointed by English settelers as Chef of the area to turn in any natives that were not behaving like white people. He has a lake named after him in Wellesley.
One of all time favorite things to do by bike is to find a big hill and at speed hit the water and see how far we can go, Most of the group caught on in a matter of a second. The rest of the group stood and watched.
Low gears make under water travel easy and fun.
Much to our surprise on one of our last passes, we came across a Kayaker. Funny how Kayaker's dont mind getting wet eather.
Let me tell you, the look on that guys face was worth a million bucks when me and my friend Chris passed him with our heads just above the water on track for the path along the shore,

No it was priceless.