Well, the big ride is over.  I don’t believe I suffered any permanent physical damage, other than a severely bruised backside, which will hopefully heal some day.  And, I think I may have left all my knee cartilage somewhere in Jefferson City.  I will offer up a short synopsis here; pictures will have to wait until they are gathered from all sources.

DAY 1

Thursday morning we woke up bright and early in Sedalia, at the luxurious Best Western.  We were out the door by 7:30, pedaling by 8:00.  The weather was great, the birds were singing, and spirits were generally high.  We hammered along the trail at a rather brisk clip, and made good time into Boonville for our lunch break.  I had my first hint of trouble when I got off my bike… “Hey, I don’t feel too zippy.”  It occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten since lunch on Wednesday, and that perhaps this was not good planning on my part.  No biggie, I’ll chow some lunch and everything will be cool.  This was the beginning of the end for ol’ Phil.  I picked at my burger for a bit, hoping not to throw up in the middle of the restaurant.  Then we got back on the trail, and that’s when things really took a turn for the worst.  We were pedaling merrily along the trail when I got a little twinge in my right leg.  “Uh-oh, shoulda stretched out a little,” I thought.  About 30 seconds later I got an absolutely paralyzing charlie horse in my right thigh.  Through the blinding pain, I managed to stop, somehow get my foot out of the pedal, and put my weight on my left leg.  This resulted in the same cramp in my left thigh.  Man, it HURT.  Naturally, some joker comes riding up right then.  Probably one of three people we saw all day and he has to roll up just when I’m near death.  He brilliantly greets me with “Hey, how’s it going?”  Well let me see… I’m laying in the middle of a gravel trail, thrashing around like I’ve been maced, muttering incoherently.  My face is clenched in pain, and both my thighs are visibly spasming like something out of the Aliens movie.  “Oh, I’m doing great, thanks.”  By this time the other guys were 200 yards up the trail, and I could see them fumbling furiously for their cameras, so I had to struggle back to my feet and get back on my bike.  The worst part was, we were only half-way into the ride… Still had 40 stinking miles to go.  I never did recover either.  I can easily label that day “The Single Worst Bike Ride Of My Life,” if not just plain “The Single Worst Day Of My Life.”  Every time I tried to go over 12 mph, the cramps would come back, and no amount of water, food, or bad language would make it go away.  I literally hated each and every turn of the pedal.  Not to mention the other guys had to rock-paper-scissors all afternoon for who was going to hang back with my dead butt.  It was a painful and miserable experience at best, excruciatingly humiliating at worst.

DAY 2-3

After Thursday, I would term Friday and Saturday rousing successes.  I did have what I termed my “Malady of the Day”: Namely my back on Thursday and my knees and butt on Saturday.  Tolerable ailments though, compared to Thursday.  The weather could not have been better on any of the days, aside from pretty solid head winds.  We had a few “interesting moments,” like the bizarre Bed and Breakfast Lady the first night, and the “Bridge Dash of Death” at Hermann.  There weren’t any other major incidents though, other than Todd’s bike breaking down in Hartsburg.  The local mechanic performed the last rites on it, and gave him an awesome Pee Wee Herman rental to ride for the next two days.  This performed the dual function of 1) forcing him to ride all the way to St. Charles with us, and 2) providing us endless amusement watching him ride it.  All in all, I am pretty sure I had a good time.  The total damage was 201 miles when Doni and Dakin picked us up in St. Charles.  Three weeks from now, it could well be the best thing I’ve ever done; Get back with me when I quit hurting.  Will we do it again?  Well, that also remains to be seen.  I do feel that I am somewhat wiser for the experience, and I am now qualified to offer up these tidbits of trail wisdom:

1. Eat breakfast.  Always, always, always eat breakfast.


2. Get some skinny “Todd Tires.”


3. If you are going to ride with 20 pounds of gear, TRAIN with 20 pounds of gear.


4. Ride with your mouth closed.  This is not a breathing tip.


5. Don’t draft behind Todd, it’s not worth it.


6. Martin has to be the first one into every town.  Don’t worry about it, just let ‘im go.

Well that’s kind of a long entry so I will have to detail the rest of the weekend later.  Obviously I have skipped some detail of the trip, but “What happens on the trail, stays on the trail.”

Man, I’ve been getting just absolutely pummelled at work.  Beat down, I tell ‘ya.  All these short work-weeks are catching up with me I guess.  Sheesh.  It’s really cutting into my Internet time, I’ll tell you that much.

Anyway… Last weekend was our Chicago trip.  We flew out there bright and early Friday with the Martins and Belangers.  We headed down to Wrigley field with the Martins that afternoon and found a GREAT deal on four bleacher tickets.  (Just a tinge of sarcasm there… I have never paid that much for a sporting event in my life, and likely never will again.)  I would say it was worth it though; it was definitely an “experience”.  Plus, it was a double-header so we got two-fer-one.  By the end of the third inning, Doni was bestest friends with the entire section of course.  That girl is chatty, bless her heart.  We met some nice kids from New Orleans, St. Louis, and various other locales.  The Cubbies lost the first game, but won the second handily.  (Far as we know anyway… we didn’t actually make it to the end of the game; the team seemed to have the game under control, but Martin and I were losing control of the girls fast.)

Saturday I can’t really recall what we did all morning… not much I don’t imagine.  We hit the Lincoln Park zoo for a bit early in the afternoon, and then met up with Belanger down at the Pier later.  Listened to some tunes and “crowd watched” down there for a while, and then went and met Liz and some friends of hers for dinner.  We went to “Bin36” and it was pretty cool.  A little on the foo-foo side, but we had a blast.  Ate a bunch of wacky appetizers, and had some wine that our “interesting but nice” waiter suggested for us.  All in all, I’ll rate is as “inexpensive, fun… Two thumbs up”.  After that, for some reason I wasn’t really in the loop on, we went back to Lincoln Park and began a mission to visit every establishment that ended with “apostrophe S.”  For example, “Durkin’s” or “Kelly’s”.  Gotta have a theme I guess.  This little project ended badly.  Very badly.  That’s all I got to say about that.

Sunday we went and checked out the rest of the zoo… Pretty cool zoo overall, if a bit small-ish.  There was also some kind of false advertising on the hippos, which are of course a significant attraction of any self-respecting zoo.  The sign listing the animals clearly stated “HIPPOS”, but all we could find was one lonely pygmy hippo.  Difference of roughly 1400 pounds there I would guess.  This mild disappointment was offset by a very cool polar bear display though, so it all worked out.  After that, the Martin’s had to go catch their plane, so me and Doni hung out and watched the football games all day.  We went back to one of the “apostrophe s” places, and found it to be quite possibly the single best place to watch football in the entire world.  A bold statement, sure, but I feel an accurate one.  They had the NFL Sunday Ticket package, and little 15″ Plasma TV’s all over the place so you could watch whatever the heck you wanted only your own little personal TV.  Man it was awesome.

Well, hopefully everyone had a good holiday.  I’m still relatively beat down from the whole Washington DC thing.  It was a good class, and I suppose I learned a lot, but I definitely have a very finite amount of storage in my old age.  By Thursday or so, I was having to dump everything I learned earlier in the week in order to make room for the new stuff.  Bad news man.  There were also several quirky things about the “attendees” that kept bothering me.  For one thing, 1800 nerds in one building is just a somewhat unnerving experience.  I’m talking hard-core nerds too, not just your garden variety low-level geeks.  And then you realize “hey… wait a minute… I don’t exactly stand out in this crowd.”  It’s a little hard on the self esteem.  And then there was the whole “chick factor”.  There were probably 100 good-looking females running around the building at any given time during the week.  Now, granted, out of 1800 people that is a pretty low percentile.  At a technical conference, however, it is totally unheard of.  Nothing short of groundbreaking, actually.  I never really got an adequate explanation on that one.  Near as I can figure, the conference sponsors rented them all out for the week to make themselves look better.  Only possible explanation, really.

As far as the weekend goes, my enjoyment was severely curtailed by being oncall.  What a drag man.  We did get to go spend all day Saturday up on Smithville lake, riding around on the Martin boat.  Good stuff… quite relaxing actually.  Then we went back to the Martin residence and tossed some cards.  (While we’re on that subject, I might throw out that the “MEN” were the victors… the “WOMEN” actually called no joy during the second game.  Up and quit, right in the middle of a hand.  Sad, really.)

Training continues for the Katy Trail ride… two weeks and counting.  We’ve also got a long weekend planned in Chicago this coming weekend.  Busy busy.  I’ve also got a few pictures from DC that I’m working on getting posted… not very interesting pictures, mind you, but “content” all the same.  If this has been rambling a bit, it’s because I’m distracted.  I don’t like being oncall.  Can’t “focus”.

Well, I’m in Washington D.C. this week.  There’s a conference for OpNet going on, and I got lucky enough to attend.  I say “lucky” with about the half the usual sarcasm; I wasn’t overly excited to go out of town, but the product is cool and I’m enjoying the classes.  Plus, the sight of 1800 geeks milling about a Conference Center is truly something to behold.  We are at the Ronald Reagan Center right in the middle of D.C.  It’s a huge building luckily, because that many people need a lot of space.  We’re clearly an annoyance to the other daily workers in the center, which also provides me no end of amusement.  That’s about all I have to say for the moment… Class starts soon and I have a pretty good hike to get there.  Yeah, I could take the bus or a cab, but public transportation frightens me.

Wow, the Kenagy’s have been busy.  We are just goin’ ON, I tell you.  Yet oddly I can’t think of a single thing we’ve done…

Last Thursday I made my inaugural bike ride in preparation for our Katy Trail run, which is now a mere month away.  I would have liked to have been training a lot more, but that’s how it goes.  My bicycle has been broken since early Winter, and I just now got if fixed.  (Actually “broken” is not quite the correct term; it was working fine until I decided to work on it.)  We went 20 miles on the Corporate Woods trail, and I lived to tell about it.  After the ride we met up at the Brooksider to rehash the details of our arduous trek.

Friday night Doni and I went out on a DATE of sorts…  We started off with dinner at the Double Dragon, down at 50th and Main.  Not too shabby… Cheap, tasty, and fast.  As a bonus, the waitress’ accents were so strong that they provided a little comedic value to the dinner.  Doni did an admirable job of translating; I honestly had no idea what they were saying.  After dinner we met up with Doni’s new co-worker Mike at the ‘Sider, but didn’t last long.  Ate too much I guess.

Saturday, I started off the day with “spinning class” at the gym.  Apparently nobody knows what spinning is, so I’ll throw out the definition that it’s stationary bike riding.  Stationary bike riding with loud, annoying music and a demented instructor, both of which contribute nicely towards distracting me from the sheer boredom and frustration of riding a bike and not actually going anywhere.  I’ve been taking these classes 2-3 times a week, also as preparation for the Katy Trail.  I figure fake bike riding is better than no bike riding.  After recovering somewhat from that event, we worked on one of our ongoing “projects” at the house.  There is now some actual hope of one day completing “The Room”, which we started the day we moved into the house.  Faint, distant hope, but hope all the same.  For the money and time we’ve sunk into it, we likely should’ve just torn it down altogether and had a new one built, but we won’t go there.  Saturday night we didn’t do anything, because I had to work.  Boo Hoo.

Sunday was easily, without a doubt, the pinnacle of our weekend.  I slept until 11:00 because of the late night working, but upon finally waking up I was immensely pleased to find we had a lunch date scheduled with none other than Mr. and Mrs. James Munkirs!  We decided to “think outside the box” so to speak, and stay away from the usual haunts like the Brooksider.  This was, after all, a special occasion.  After much negotiating, we decided on 75th Street Brewery.  Alas, upon arriving, they didn’t open until noon.  Naturally, this left us totally stymied and just a bit dismayed, so we retreated to the comfortable confines of the Brooksider.  Just goes to show what happens when you try to get fancy and branch out.  We sat out on the deck and engaged in hours of lively banter.  We caught up on old times, and just generally reveled in the wholesome conversation.  Or, we might have just talked about Float Trip.  Something like that.  After lunch it was back to work on the house, specifically “The Room”.  We put up rolled insulation in the walls and ceiling, trying to get ready for the sheetrock guy.  Man that stuff was nasty; I still itch all over.  Little fiberglass splinters in places that I am quite sure did not come into contact with the insulation.  Next time I’m going wrap myself in saran wrap before I touch that stuff.  That project took us something like 14 hours (or maybe it was 4…) and then we went over to Susan’s brand spankin’ new apartment to watch the Sopranos.  Yep, Susan sold her house and is moving down to the Plaza.  Naturally this poses something of a grave inconvenience for us, but we are trying to be supportive.