Another American Royal BBQ has come and gone.  Aside from a less-than-favorable spot in the final standings, I’d rank it as one of my favorite years.  I got down to the site on Thursday afternoon nice and early.  I hadn’t planned on going until Friday but I guess I was ready to get things started so I took the day off and got the event under way.  On the downside, I was about 1/2-sick all weekend.  I had a pretty good cold going and never did quite shake it.  (I’m no medical doctor but maybe spending three nights outdoors wearing shorts in 30 and 40 degree weather isn’t a good plan for getting well?)  Thursday was spent getting the spot all laid out and set up for the weekend.  For dinner we grilled up some cheeseburgers with good cigars for dessert.  (Again with the questionable cold-treatment methods…)  Friday we got up to find some great weather.  We spent the day getting ready for the big party;  Finalizing the booth setup, getting all the food ready, etc.  Not my favorite night of the event, but it was a good time all the same.  Saturday everybody got up and decided to take a short break.  We all left the site for a few hours to get some actual sleep and much-needed showers.  By about 1:00 we were all back and feeling refreshed, and it was time to get going on the actual competition.  Beans got turned in at 3:30, then we enjoyed some bbq’d frozen pizzas and it was time to get the longest night of the weekend started.  I was a little concerned about not being prepared for the first frost of the season that was being forecast.  I had a light jacket and a stocking cap with me, and that was about it for my cold-weather preparation.  Turned out to not be a factor.  Kevin had brought down a huge trailor, and we set up a TV in it and watched movies all night.  Still spent the whole night in a lawn-chair, but at least it was warm.  Sunday was the usual blur of activity;  Getting all the BBQ finished and turned in while cleaning up the site and trying to get out before the long lines started.  I must say, I was a bit disappointed in our showing.  It’s not like we expect to win, but come on, it was better than that!  Oh well, I think an event that big is just a crap-shoot anyway.  Our usual goal of not coming in last was met, anything above that is a bonus.

So that was the weekend of my big bike ride.  My entire summer of rather lackadaisical training, come to an end.  I spent the better part of last week convincing myself I would most likely not even finish the 80-mile route, much less my ultimate goal of the 100-mile “century.”  I even went out and started reading up on suggested training plans for 100-mile rides, as if there was anything I could do about it with one week left.  Friday night finally came, and we went out to dinner with the Munkirs.  James and I sat on one side of the table, shoveling pasta and discussing our ride strategy, while Janene & Donette sat across from us and compared insurance benefits.

Saturday morning we met up out in Peculiar at about 6:00 to find an already huge crowd gathered.  I knew it was a pretty big event but was still a little surprised by the number of people.  Turns out there were 2,000 riders registered for it;  I had no idea it was that big.  They even had a DJ set up playing music.  (Bet the neighbors really love that every year…)  The ride was supposed to start at 7:00, but teams and “VIP’S” got to start first, so by the time we finally took off it was close to 8:00.  Our “plan,” such as it was, was to just ride rest stop to rest stop until we ran out of gas.  I think the biggest fault with our training was that 80% of our rides were only 15 – 20 miles long.  That only takes about an hour, so we never really had to think about pacing ourselves;  By the time you start getting tired on a 20 mile ride you’re done.  Our longest ride of the year was 75 miles several weeks ago, and it was an epic disaster.  Although it had been a while since that ride, the pain I was in at the end of it was still pretty fresh in my mind and I wasn’t looking forward to it again.  Anyway, we rode our “plan,” and the next thing we knew we were east of Warrensburg at the lunch stop, about 50 miles into the ride.  Our plan here was to eat lunch and maybe even take a little nap.  As it turned out the food line was crazy-long, and hot dogs didn’t really sound that tasty anyway, so we ended up stretching for about 10 minutes and taking off again.  Soon enough, we were at the 70-mile mark, where you had to decide whether to keep going straight for an 80 mile finish or turn off for the optional 100 mile route.  It really wasn’t even that hard of a decision.  Aside from my stomach being all jacked up on ibuprofen and 5-hour energy shots, we both felt pretty solid.  So, we headed out on the bonus loop, and 6.5 hours after we left Peculiar we were in Sedalia with our first “century ride” under our belts.  It’s really a two-day ride, but we never had any illusions of riding back so Janene picked us up at the finish and we headed back to KC.

Sunday I took for a “recovery” day, didn’t really do much.  Donette signed me up for a massage at the gym so I headed up there and enjoyed that little treat.  Never had a massage before;  It was nice and definitely helped my aching back.  Other than a mild back-ache I felt surprisingly good.  Don’t get me wrong, I was well aware I’d been on a long bike ride.  My legs were pretty sore and I’m still suffering some discomfort in my…  Well…  Errrr…  Let’s just say I sat on a bike seat for 6.5 hours.  Other than that though I think I’m gonna live to ride another day, although that day likely will not be this week.  Two-day ride next year?  We shall see.

Went on a nice lil’ bike ride last night, one of my last before my almost foolish endeavor this weekend.  It went pretty well, with the exception of some still-lingering back pain.  Hopefully that is from my admittedly weak trip to the gym on Monday, and not an after-effect of the ill-fated 75-miler a few weeks ago.  Anyway, last night Munkirs & I went on the Mission Hills ride.  Despite a somewhat fierce headwind I got my 17 miles in at a decent pace.  The route took exactly one hour, which by my math averages out to about…  Oh roughly 17 miles per hour.  I managed to keep up with the front of the group, at the expense of my lungs.  I just can’t seem to breathe when I ride at that pace.  I don’t really understand it either;  I’m down to one or two cigars a week and I try to eat healthy on Saturdays and Thursdays.  Just don’t make no sense.

Another 3-day weekend, excellent.  I took Friday off and drove north to Kearney to participate in the Jesse James Day BBQ with Team Triple Fat Back.  If I was going to rate the actual BBQ competition itself, I would give it a “fair to poor.”  First of all, we got stuck in a crummy spot with barely enough room for all our toys.  Even more unforgivable, (not to mention quite inexplicable,) they had a grand total of four bathrooms set up for the nearly sixty teams out there.  Oh yeah, that was convenient.  Oh well, what can you expect from a low-rent town like Kearney.  (Probably 1/2 our team hails from said town, if that gives you some idea of the place in general.)  Logistics aside, we managed a pretty fair time of it.  Our arch-rivals Bone Deep BBQ (a.k.a. Red Glove) were set up directly behind us, affording us ample opportunity to lob insults back and forth all weekend.  We also shook up the cooking teams a bit, providing some variety.  One of Brice’s friends came up and did the turkey entry, Zim took over on ribs, and I teamed up with Martin to try and collectively revive the troubled brisket entries.  (Joe & Bob still did pork, & Ballew did chicken as usual.)  The results were quite positive, particularly in our brisket experiment, where we rocketed from a consistent “embarrassing” finish to “almost nearly just-below respectable.”  And, most importantly, we handily defeated Bone Deep for approximately the 1500th time in a row.

Despite actually getting a few hours of quality sleep up at the BBQ, I was pretty beat up when I got home Saturday.  I wiped out on the couch and slept soundly into Sunday.  When I finally recovered, I joined Donette and our friend Susan up at Chelly’s Cafe for some breakfast.  We’d never been there for breakfast, and I think everybody declared it a successful venture.  (With the exception of Susan’s french fries, but let’s just not talk about that.)  The only slight snag was that the menu was a bit limited.  We picked a Mexican restaurant with the idea of ordering some Mexican-style breakfast (or at least what we consider so;) French toast or biscuits and gravy weren’t really on our mind or we’d have just gone to Sharps.  Our choices were pretty much limited to juevos con chorizo or menudo.  We all went with the chorizo;  Menudo is a little too adventurous.  Everybody agreed it was good though!  After our late breakfast it was nearly football time, so I settled in on the couch and commenced to wasting the day.  I made it through most of the afternoon game when Donette finally insisted I try and fix our stupid computer, which in all fairness has been broken for quite some time.  For over a year now it’s run just fine as long as you never turn it off.  If it was powered off it would take somewhere between 10 and 10 million tries to get it to come back on again.  The obvious solution to this was to just never turn it off, but when I quite accidentally shut it down Thursday night it decided to be extra stubborn about coming back on.  So, when we still didn’t have a computer by Sunday, I grudgingly headed out to Microcenter to start buying random parts.  As luck would have it, I hit it on the first try this time around;  A flaky power supply.  As I told Donette, if I had any confidence that would actually fix it, I’d have bought something different, as the one I picked doesn’t really fit very well.  But, I got it crammed in the case and it’s up and running now, so I doubt I ever swap it for another one.  We celebrated this monumental event with a delicious pizza up at 75th Street, and called it a weekend.

Not a bad weekend, all in all.  Didn’t accomplish everything we had planned, or even a significant part of it, but then again I don’t know why we would start now.  Friday I hit happy hour down at the Brooksider, good and early so I could see everybody.  I made the social rounds down there, then Donette picked me up for a fancy dinner out on the town.  Our high-end restaurant of choice this week was the DQ at 85th & Wornall.  (Yes, as in “Dairy Queen.”)  They do a promotion every now and then where Donette’s school gets a percentage of the proceeds from food sales, so we were obligated to do our part.  Anything for the children, that’s our motto.  It was quite good as a matter of fact.  I sorta like DQ’s, at least the once a year I go there.  Had a very tasty burger and fries, and an obligatory strawberry shake for dessert.  I didn’t want to order the biggest burger and shake on the menu, but since the children would benefit more from my gluttony I did what I had to.

Saturday was sort of a bust.  Disappointing because I was looking forward to it, too.  We kicked off the day judging a BBQ competition out in Blue Springs.  We showed up at the judging tent at 10:30, got settled in and commenced to feeding.  We did this event last year too, and it was so good we were both looking forward to it again.  This year was pretty much a let-down I would say.  But for one lonely pork entry, everything I tried was, to put it nicely, “not good.”  Donette reported her table was no better.  I don’t know what the deal was, maybe the rain storms Friday night gave everybody trouble?  I have never (in my admittedly limited judging experience) given out scores that low.  Blech.  It wasn’t just us either, all the people at our tables were under-whelmed.  We were out there until about 2:30.  After that we were going to head down to the Power & Light, where the Flying Saucer was putting on a big outdoor festival.  Alas, the twenty servings of sketchy bbq had left us both feeling somewhat less than festive.  We rolled back home to try and nap it off, but never recovered enough to even consider going out again.  Blech, it’s making me a bit queasy thinking about it still.

Sunday I woke up feeling marginally recovered, and headed out on a bike ride with Munkirs.  He had the admittedly novel idea of combining our Tuesday night and Thursday night routes, which worked out very nicely.  We left from my house and wound out kind of southwest, and as luck would have it we were very near his house at the half-way point.  We stopped by his house to get some water, and Janine had made us some hot pancakes and PBJ sandwiches.    (Or maybe it was just the water…  I can’t remember.)  From there we headed back to my house, ending up right at 40 miles.  Good route, I hope we can remember it for future rides.  After the cycling Donette and I walked around the corner to our newly opened local breakfast place.  I can’t even remember the name of it.  Somebody or another’s Diner.  Mixed review on that place.  The food, when we finally got it, was actually very good.  I am going to guess conservatively we waited 45 minutes from ordering for it to show up though.  It was pretty apparent that everybody in the place was in the same situation too.  There’s only 15 tables in the whole place;  I never really figured out what the issues were.  For amusement while we waited, we watched the waitresses running around.  Nobody was getting any service, but it certainly wasn’t for a lack of motion.  All the staff was running around like crazy, they just didn’t really seem to be getting anything done.  By the time we finally got done eating breakfast, it was time for the football games.  Given the outstanding weather, I headed down to the Brooksider to watch the TV’s out on the back deck.  Had a good time of it, I stayed through the 3:00 games too.  By the time I got home Donette had headed out to Starlight with Kelly to watch Rain.  That left me to lay on the couch and watch the last football game of the day;  Fine ending to the weekend.