A Quest for Cookies

Total for this ride: 12.5 miles
Total for this year: 1881.4 miles

This was a totally unexpected, unplanned ride.

Jill and I were just sitting down to a simple dinner when Joe popped in.  Molly was at class and he needed to use the printer so he decided to come over and hang out for a while.  The sun was still up when I finished eating, and neither one of us had anything better to do, so I asked him if he wanted to go for a ride.  Which, of course, he did.  I was kind of craving some cookies after dinner, so I suggested we ride out to our friends' house in Pumpkin Hook to see if they had any.  It's not a long ride, and I knew if we didn't linger there too long we'd get back before it got too dark.

There are a few ways to get to Pumpkin Hook.  I took the shortest and least demanding route, in the interest of saving some time.  It was actually a little chilly when we hit the road.  I wasn't uncomfortable, but I think I would have been better off if I had worn a sweatshirt.

The outbound leg of the ride was nice.  The sun was starting to get low in the sky and the shadows were growing long.  I tried to take a couple pictures of my shadow on the corn to my right, but none of them turned out as well as I would have liked.  Then I tried several of my famous "behind the back" shots to see if I could get one or two of Joe, but apparently my aim was way off.  Every shot was well to the right.  So eventually I gave up and while riding forward I turned around and aimed the camera in his direction.  Finally got one that I liked.

We got to our destination, dismounted, and rang the door bell.  No answer.  Knocked a few times.  Still nothing.  We concluded our quest for some cookies was all in vain.  We had no choice but to mount up again and head back home.

The return to Victor wasn't quite as much fun as the first half of the ride.  The sun was much lower in the sky, which meant that it was getting cooler, and when we were traveling west it was right smack in our faces.  I hoped that the glare wouldn't keep us from seeing some hazard on the shoulder, and I hoped that it wouldn't keep a car coming up from behind from seeing us.  But... we made it.

The end.