Susan and I are planning on riding the Blue Ridge Parkway this summer, and our training officially began this past weekend. We are planning on riding for 6 day with a total distance of about 469 miles, all in the mountains, so we have plenty of training left to do. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t on our training schedule and we got rained out on Friday.
Saturday was a little cooler than it has been but still not too bad so we were able to get in 38 miles. Susan said that she had a new route that she wanted to try that she had driven the other day. I was feeling adventurous so I said sure. For those of you that don’t know, letting Susan pick a route and having her do it from memory is a BIG risk. She is still convinced that I am taking her new ways when we do our “normal” routes from the house that she has done hundreds of times now. All and all the ride turned out nice. We only spent about 4 miles on a 4 lane highway, and I only had to overrule her turn choice once. When we got on the highway I asked her if she knew this was coming and she said “no, I was listing to NPR on the way and not paying attention” which didn’t give me to much confidence that we would ever make it home. After we got off the highway was when I had to overrule the turn choice. I knew we were east of our house and she wanted to go east. Normally I would have gone with it because we could have gotten home (it would have just been a lot longer) but we didn’t bring food or money so we probably would have starved to death. For those of you that haven’t notices we aren’t exactly spindly little climbers and I proved this when we got home by eating a pizza and a half. Probably not the best way to lose weight before a ride like this but I still have plenty of time 
.
Sunday morning we went out early to try to beat the rain that was coming in. Of course as soon as we pulled out of the driveway it started raining. We decided to keep going and at least get in a short ride. In the end we made it 12 miles (we were originally planning on about 30), but we felt pretty good about it because 45 degree rain isn’t all that fun to ride in.
Tags: Blue Ridge Parkway, Cycling, Training