Two Wheels Good, Found Objects, Beer and Shameless Plugs

Here's a view I really like and have missed through this long winter and cold, damp spring:

No, this wheel is not horribly out of true.  It's just an optical illusion caused by  my hand moving as 
I held the camera over the wheel.  Also, I was travelling at nearly the speed of  light....
It was supposed to be a picture of some nasty road debris.  Missed it.  This is more interesting anyway.

I don't really need an excuse for why I haven't written anything on Road Work for a while.  After all, it's my blog; I have the right to ignore it if I want to.  Suffice it to say that I've been busy. (Lame, I know.)

But I didn't get back to putting finger to keyboard solely for the purposes of complaining or explaining.

The weather has finally turned for the better (again, not complaining) and I finally got the chance recently to leave the four wheeled machine in the driveway and venture out with just two skinny bicycle tires between me and the road.

Strictly speaking, it was not my first ride of the year; I've been out several times just messing around in the neighborhood on the mountain bike.  In fact, the first cycling Road Work post of 2011 was supposed to have been focused on a little mountain bike jaunt I took a while back.  It would have been too, had I paid better attention to the weather forecast.

I'd ridden downtown for a meeting in full sunshine on a day that ended with heavy rain, hail, serious thunder & lightning and even a tornado warning (an actual confirmed tornado hit Danby two days later; it was a week of very dramatic weather).  The skies turned dark and started spitting cold water while I was in the meeting and I managed to beg a lift back up the hill.  Not really the kind of ride you want to build a blog post around (although a portion of one is OK, I hope).  I should have ridden home in the storm and written about the heroism needed to complete such a daring and audacious voyage....blah blah blah.....glad I didn't, both for the discomfort avoided and the drivel it would have caused me write.

The meeting in question actually had to do with the reason I needed to get back out on the road in the first place, namely the annual Southern Tier AIDS Program Ride for Life.  As many of you know, I have been participating in the RFL to help raise money (2011 fundraising page here.  Please refer to post title for warnings regarding shameless plugs) for STAP for a quite a while now.  This year I was asked to be a member of the Ride Committee, an offer I was very happy to accept.

We were meeting to plan out some advertising and marketing for the RFL, including some radio spots.  To spice things up a little bit, we created a character named Vance Legstrong to use in some of the spots.  No Vance spots have been recorded yet but stay tuned (you can follow Vance on Twitter @vlegstrong, If you're into that sort of thing), I'll let you know when they are going to air.  Who knows, Vance may even get his own blog one day...

All of which was a very long winded and roundabout way of saying why I was so anxious to get back out on the road and start training again.

Here are the very first moments of my 2011 Road Riding training campaign:

Again, I don't aim, I just point and press go.  

In any case and despite some lingering embarrassment regarding the gears I was compelled to use on VERY modest climbs, it was a lovely first ride.  Plus it gave me occasion almost immediately to recall something I wrote about in the first roadwork cycling post; Namely how much I enjoy the opportunity afforded by cycling to see things you miss looking through a car window or to just stop and take a look at something that has peeked your interest.  For example:

HONK! HONK! HONK!

I'd driven by this sign for months and although I may have honked once or twice had never stopped to investigate.  On the bike, all I had to do was veer to the right and pull over.  Turns out that longtime Lansing landmark restaurant Rogue's Harbor Inn has begun brewing their own beer in a little out building.  

That makes them the latest addition to what is becoming a pretty interesting Ithaca area brewing scene, pioneered of course by The Ithaca Beer Company but which now also includes The Scale House and Band Wagon Brew Pub, not mention all the home brewers (you know who you are).

Little Baby Brew Tanks!

From the look of things, they are starting out small with 2 beers on offer.  I went back later in the week and tried their Cayuga Cream Ale, and it was pretty tasty.

Of course, riding doesn't just give you a chance to stop and take a look at things you'd ordinarily drive by.  Moving at that slower pace reveals all kinds of things you'd NEVER see from your car. 

Actually, that is a bit of an argument for NOT riding, given some of what I saw by the side of the road.  

Like this bit of packaging I noticed in the ditch:

Yes.  Found on the side of the road.  I can't post a picture of the other empty package I found right next to it.  Lets just say it involved electrodes and a part of the male anatomy...

Pretty sure I don't want to know the back story on how that ended up where I found it....

  

But other things you come across make you glad to be on two wheels instead of four. Like this metallic Cephalopod:

OK, you would see this from your car.  But you might think it was a pile of metal and not a rusty octopus.

I also saw a lot of road kill, loose change, discarded pens, car parts, trash and various detritus that did not warrant a stop for a photo-op.

But when you are lucky, you see and find things that suggest stories if their own.

By far the most interesting and story suggesting thing I saw by the side of the road that day was this:

Lying at the edge of the shoulder where the grass began and any hope of finding it would have ended,
had it slid just a little bit further into the weeds!

I picked it up, assuming it was dead, with the intent of taking it home to recycle.  On a whim, I flipped it open. Three bars and more than half the battery power left.  Last call made at 11:45 the previous night, the third call in a series to a "Jeff".

I am not just being nosey here (note the use of "just").  I'm looking for clues about the owner, so I can get the phone back to them.  There was nothing under the I.C.E. number, nothing called "Home" in contacts, no obvious owner info at all.  So I poked around a little bit...like you wouldn't have done the same.

Late night last calls.  Phone by the side of a country road.  No contact info.  What had I stumble on? My mind started to race. Had a Lover's quarrel ending in squealing tires and a phone thrown vengefully from the back of a speeding motorcycle?  Man, if you squint your eyes, you can almost see the "Leader of the Pack" roaring off.   

Or perhaps it was a stolen phone used in a drug deal gone bad.  Was I only yards away from a hidden meth lab, eyes and guns trained on me as I stood at the side of the road in spandex shorts?

Maybe it was left there on purpose, waiting for a specific person to come along, pick it up and hit redial for instructions on where to leave the money as part of an elaborate ransom plan.  Did I unwittingly send some innocent to their doom with a clumsy attempt at being a good Samaritan?  

Was "Jeff" just a code name.  

I started to think I should take the phone to Verizon and let them figure out how to get it to the owner.  In the end I came to my senses, looked at missed calls and dialed the number that had called the phone 5 times in the previous 2 hours.  A man's voice came over the line, but before he said hello, I heard him yell "Hey Lorraine, I think somebody found your phone!"

Five seconds later a very giddy Lorraine was on the line, wondering where I found it and how soon she could come and pick up the phone.  Apparently, she'd left the phone on the hood of her car just before leaving for work earlier in the day and it had flown of as she made a turn.  She had driven up and down the very stretch of road where I'd come across it a dozen times, looking for it, but never finding it.

A few hours later she was driving away from my house with phone in hand.

Chalk one up for slow rides with time to look at the road beneath your wheels and the curiosity to stop and see.