On Mar 23, 8:02*am, "
wrote:
On Mar 23, 9:44*am, Andre Jute wrote:





On Mar 23, 2:33*am, John Henderson wrote:

Andre Jute wrote:
Went out today without longjohns for the first time this year.
Even took my jacket off. Now for some good rides, working up to
a short tour. It's official: I've declared the spring open to
all comers.

Andre Jute
I'd love to be a fairweather cyclist, if only the fair weather would
hold year-round

Thank you, but it's Autumn here in the southern hemisphere - and
a glorious Autumn at that. *30°C (86°F) here in Canberra today.

John

Yes, I've heard that from your fellow Canberry, Patrick Turner,
already on RAT:
"He, he, our coming winter might be just as cosy as your northern
summer, and our weather leads us to the roads so that we are always
recovering from a decent 70 miler, and with wheels never wet."

Thanks, fellers. But I'm not so sure I'd survive your cycling summer
if the autumn is 30 degrees (1). I've become accustomed to my weather,
even in a perverse way attached to it; whenever I return to Oz, I find
the summer unbearably hot. I suspect the mid-Westerners among the
Americans who're always telling us about their appalling weather do so
at least a little out of pride in their own hardiness.

Spring made an appearance in the midwest USA this weekend. *Brief
though. *Its now rainy and 50 F degrees this week. *Although 50 and
rainy is a typical midwest spring. *Summers aren't too bad. *It gets
up to 100 F every now and then. *And humid. *But if you ride early in
the day, its pleasant. *And even the hottest days are better than not
riding.





Andre Jute
Sitting inside in his cycling pants, waiting for the cold (spring,
huh?) wind to die down a little

(1) As boys in the Little Karroo, a desert with extremes of hot and
cold, we would on Wednesday afternoons after school watch the plane
from the city arrive. The attraction was British tourists coming out
onto the top step into that dry heat and keeling over. They used to
put a hooded bench on the tarmac and station the co-pilot below the
door to catch the passengers before they let them try to disembark.
The bench was to prop up the fainthearts; a bizarre detail I remember
vividly is that a porter stood by with a parasol. Can't say that I
would consider that so funny now...- Hide quoted text -

In PDX on Saturday it was oscillating between sun breaks and showers.
I was climbing around through the hills, sort of day dreaming up a two
or three mile climb when I was caught by a guy I used to race with
almost 20 years ago -- actually, he won all the local and regional
races for 35 years, and I just happened to be pack filler in the same
jersey from time to time. The guy is now 59 years old (seven years
older than me). We road together for maybe ten miles, including
another steep mile climb -- where he outsprinted me in the last 20
meters. Dropped by the first old dude of spring. Some things never
change. It was fun chatting about the old days, though. -- Jay
Beattie.