Riding at Night

Today was yet another rainy dreary day. I really don't mind so don't take this as a complaint. We have had a severe drought the past year or two. So, the rain is much appreciated and I'd like it to keep up as much as it can without flooding. But... I'm not taking the kids out in the rain.

So, it started raining as we were grocery shopping. We were informed of this possibility by one of the ladies that we go to church with on the way in. do have to say one thing, it seems like every time there's a thunderstorm the meteorologists call for hail. Now, I've only seen hail twice in my life. Where is all this hail that people are seeing? It's like the definitive stay in your homes scare tactic. We had some massive storms but no hail that I could see.

The weather cleared up by the evening and my husband was going to go out on his bike to pick up dinner. This caused a massive crying fit on the part of two little boys. No one wanted Daddy to go without them and we don't have a coupler for his bike to pull the trailer. So, I put down the sweater I was knitting and caved to the pressure of everyone wanting to go out to dinner. So, we got everyone together, shod, jacketed, pulled out the trailer, found a headlight and set off for Subway. At Subway we found absolutely nowhere to chain up the bikes. So, we put them right next to the window and chained them together. Today, the hubby is going to go talk to the manager at WalMart (in the same complex) about getting a bike rack because we saw several bikes attached in unsafe places around the parking lot.

Rhys made a new friend at dinner, whose mom wasn't interested in even saying "hi" to us. But he had a blast talking to this other kid and greeting everyone who came into the restaurant. We stopped by WalMart and parked in the garden center while hubby procured a tail light for his bike. We rode with a headlight on my bike and a tail light on his bike. The kids ran around the mostly empty garden center and several people stopped to admire the bikes and the trailer. There were many comments of, "Yeah, you didn't get THAT here." I plugged The Bike Shop two towns over and handed out a 1W2W booklet or two.

stretch just because it was so dark. Hubby took the kidThen - the dark ride home... We debated about the best route to take but being as tired as I was I picked the route that we came from because it ends on a downhill stretch. That was one DARK ride punctuated by some rather gorgeous lightning. I felt like the headlight didn't really do much (other than alerting motorists of our presence) and going over the railroad tracks at night scared the snot out of me. We opted to use the sidewalk on our street for the last littles inside and I got the bikes into our storage room just in time for the next wave of storms to start. Wow! That was an adventure for me. I had never ridden at night and I'm not sure I will again, at least not in places that don't have streetlights. I will also definitely wear brighter clothing too.