St. Patrick's Day

Although you may not be able to tell it, I am plodding thru the applications. I'm up to 515, about 2/3 of the way thru. We still are getting applications from all over: Washington, Louisiana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma in this last batch. More families are registering and a few more people who weren't on the PALM mailing list (and so didn't get an application mailed to them). But there are people who I know have registered that I have not seen yet.

Tuesday was in the 50's and, since we have daylight savings time in effect and have plenty of daylight, we did our normal Tuesday night bike ride downtown. It was St Patrick's Day so we were a little worried about biking after work. We did go by Nancy Whiskey's by Tiger Stadium. It's on the other side of I-94 as far as Corktown is concerned, but it must be an Irish bar: there were 3 buses there and the parking was so dense we could hardly get our bikes thru. We pass goats on our route and they are still there. They have been joined by a pig. I wonder how that's going to work out.

The most surprising thing was the traffic on Belle Isle: there were two full lanes of traffic going over the bridge to Belle Isle and they were moving. Generally if your going to Belle Isle at 5:30 you're there to see and be seen. You're not going fast and you're stopping a lot. If you are on Belle Isle, you're not going anywhere. Not so on St. Patrick's Day. It was like rush hour.

One thing I learned on Tuesday: don't expect to do the same rides that you did at the end of the summer when you are first starting out in the spring. Like I said, we did our normal 24 mile ride at an easy pace. We started out well, but we were crawling at the end and biking wasn't fun. Even if you are in shape, you use different muscles biking. My back was hurting by the end. I should have done a shorter route so that we could have finished comfortably and felt good about our ride. Don't make my mistake. But if you do (or did), don't be discouraged. It's not spring yet.