5/28/07 bike

Wow, what a beautiful day it was today!

Last Saturday we drove down to the Green River Trail adn cycled ~15 miles to Kent and then turned south on the Interurban Trail. This runs all the way to Sumner, or basically the King/Pierce county line. From there we hopped over to the Valley Hwy, which is part of the STP route, and rode through Puyallup to 'The Hill'.

'The Hill' is a 1 mile long hill at 7% grade. They say if you can conquer The Hill you can do the rest of the STP no problem. Turns out we burned up that hill! It's not as steep as the Factoria hill, nor the Bell-Red hill, both of which are slightly longer than the Puyallup Hill. It felt good knowing that 35 miles in we can smoke up that thing.

It was super nice that day. We saw 5 or 6 eagles, and we both got a little sunburned. we also smashed our speed record. We've been averaging 4+ hours on the bike when we were doing 50-60 mile rides. but this week we were on the bike just over 4.5 hours and rode 70 miles! The pace is picking up!

Sunday it rained. Yuk. At last Matt decides this is supposed to be fun so we won't have to go out and ride in the rain.

Today was just gorgeous again. It started out a little, well, a lot cloudy. There were a few threatening clouds up there when we started, but they blew over pretty quickly. We rode another 70 miles today, give or take a mile. The 'it's a good day' phrase became 'it's a great day' when we tallied the following sightings:
swan: 1
red-tailed hawk: 1 (ok, this might've been a young eagle but we're gonna call it a hawk)
herons: 5
eagles: 12

it just doesn't get any better than a sunny day, riding around the lake, watching eagles fly.

next week we're supposed to do back-to-back 80s. ugh.