Busy busy beaver
Friday was a busy busy day for me. I dodged a bullet because I woke up just after 8AM thinking I had a conference call at 9AM, but when I checked my blackberry at 8:19AM the call was scheduled to begin at 9AM EST which meant I was 19 minutes late for my call. I dialed in automatically and was preparing my apologies and got the "you are the first to join your conference" notification.
Huh?
I checked my emails and saw that the call had been mercifully pushed back to 8:30AM because the organizer was having painters come to her house.
So I was listening to the call, and getting ready for my race. I spent the whole call wiping down the falcon, changing tires, and getting my bike ready for the race. When the call ended I continued packing and organizing. Unfortunately I was interrupted by an email and a call from a panicked co-worker whom I had helped the day before (and worked until 9PM to do so) which is one of the main reasons I was not more ready. Her simply question turned into a 45 minute call, which then left me leaving the house to get the car at 12:10PM, getting back to my house at 12:30PM finishing loading the car at 1PM (after making two aborted final trips from my apartment remembering I did not do a final "walk around").
I was going to head across the street to the rental office to see if the UPS guy had arrived. Instead his truck was on the street, so I went to the back of his truck and found him there. I asked for my box and he handed it to me (after showing him my driver's license). So I had my new lens. I did a horrible job loading the car, and did not mount the bike rack, so when I got to Chernoh's house it took us a while to load the car. We didn't make it out of Chernoh's alley until almost 1:30PM and did not pick Jason up until 2PM.
It was funny that when we were picking Jason up a guy walking across the street stopped and asked us if we were going to the Barry-Roubaix. He was going tomorrow. It's a small world I guess. We were back on the way to the Northwest at about 2:15-2:30pm. The ride was uneventful. Jason and Chernoh and I were chatty Cathys talking about cross, racing, our relative strategies for the race tomorrow, and a few other things. We stopped once for a late dinner at a multi-franchise fast food place, I ended up with a supreme pizza from pizza hut. I figured it had more carbs and micronutrients than a burrito from Taco Bell, chicken from Popyeyes or a burger from The (Burger) King. We were back on the road and made it to the hotel by about 5PM. Except Michigan is in the Eastern Time zone, so it was 6PM. The thought never crossed our minds. We had already decided that we were all interested in going for a ride before dark, so there was not really a moment's rest. We checked into the hotel, changed into our riding gear, and went out for 30 minutes (Jason) and 45 minutes (Chernoh and I). We all pushed it and worked out the kinks. Jason was already showered and in the bar by the time Chernoh and I got back. I didn't really get that sweaty so I just changed and went down and met Jason. We were both hungry at that point in time so we waited for Chernoh to find out what he wanted to do. It was about 2 beers (for Jason) later by the time that Chernoh joined us. His plan was to sit in the hotel room and chill doing some work and eating some cliff bars. When I texted him saying the bar had food and was serving until 9PM (10 minutes) he said he would be right down. He was glad he did because he had a beer, and also a amazing beef sandwich that had been carefully crafted and toasted to a perfect crisp.
Jason had coc a vin and I got a homemade tagliatelle pasta with snow peas, asparagus, and crab meat. It was different because pasta and snow peas were as long as the pasta was wide, and there was no real sauce to speak of. It wasn't completely dry, so it was either a very thin coating of a Extra Virgin Olive oil, or some sort of reduction of the crab meat. It was different than what I was expecting, different than anything I had every had before, but still very good. It did not however surpass the look of Chernoh's beef sandwich. Nor did it fill me up. I was still hungry and had room for desert. The desert menu had four fruity options that were not appealing and something called "pot de cream". It was described as spiced chocolate with cinnamon churros. I asked the bartender what it was and he had no idea. It sounded like it might be good so I ordered one anyway.
I was really surprised by what came out of the kitchen. It was a small coffee-cup sized ramikin of which I could see a layer of homemade whip cream and three .5" diameter churros leaning and hanging over the whipcream (because the were J shaped). I started with a churros which was sugary-cinnamon-fried batter goodness. Then I dipped my fork into the whip cream was cool and refreshing. Continuing down I hit something which gave some firm resistance to the spoon, but was easily pushed through. I pulled this out first, and it was a chocolate mousse. The flavor of which was, as advertised, spicy. A hot cayenne-infused Mexican chocolate mousse that was more savory than sweet. It was mind blowing. It was so good I made Chernoh try a taste. (Jason had his own). After a second spoonful of mousse I discovered the mousse was simply the lid for a second, deeper layer of...well...creme. It was a thick liquid that was infused with similar, but not exactly the same salty-chocolate-spicy mix. It was an amazing dinner. I love that in this day and age even small Podunk towns can have amazing well trained gourmet chefs at their small summer resort hotels. The hotel was new and fairly nice as well.
So after dinner we made our way back to the room and Jason and I had already decided we were going to the hot-tub, so we quick-changed and headed down before it closed. We sat and made small talk about growing up, but things were a lot more quiet than they were when we were in the car on the way up. We came back up to the room, made plans for the night and tomorrow morning. I had to run out to the car to get my lens and used the opportunity to wake up Morleigh (my girlfriend) and wish her a good night. We had texted very little that day because I was frantically trying to pack, load Chernoh, load Jason, drive safely to Michigan, unpack, ride, eat, call down a bit, and didn't really have a moment alone until 11PM when I called her. She was of course tired, and I didn't keep her long, but it was enough of a touch.
I made it back up the room later and Chernoh and Jason had found a YouTube video of someone who had pre ridden the course a few weeks earlier. We watched. It was compressed so you could watch the full 2 hour ride in about 10 minutes. It was nice to have a vision of what it was going to be like. Up. Gravel. A lot more up. I was really excited when I went to bed, wired to say the least. I did not toss and turn though as I willed myself to calm down and counted backwards from 1,000 to 0 to help me fall asleep. I didn't even make it into the six hundreds.
I woke up at three AM and 5AM for bio-breaks. The room was not too hot although we teased Jason about it. He told a story on the way up that last year he was registered for the Dairyland Dare, went to Dodgeville, WI, but did not end up racing because a guy who was sleeping on the floor in his room was "cold" so he turned up the heat which made it too hot for Jason to sleep. At all. So the next morning, instead of racing, Jason turned around and drove back to Chicago because he had a wedding that night, and couldn't have made trough the evening had raced without sleep. He said F the race and went home.
No comments:
Post a Comment