A day off...

Well, pretty much everything is lined up for the convention later this week. I had everything ready to go for this morning, and had a lot of trouble sleeping last night thanks to a combination of the heat and a killer headache. I was planning on making the full ride to work today, then taking the bus home. It just wasn't in the cards. I took a sick day.

I did a lot of pedaling on Friday night, most of it after dark. I took the bus to get closer to home. With a heat index over 100 Degrees and only one water bottle with me, the whole trip home would have been miserable. I rode to The Maul to hang out with some friends before grabbing supper at the Chinese buffet. Once we were done eating, I parted ways with that group to go meet another batch of local nerds at Daily Dose. All in all, I rode more just navigating to my various social events than if I'd ridden all the way home and used my car for the night's festivities. Even after dark, the heat index stayed in the 90s until well into the night. I'd hardly call it a cool evening ride.

I've started to realize while experimenting on the roads that suburban bike commuting gives you a pretty keen sense of what residential roads go where, even if you've never used them before. In neighborhoods carved up with mile-after-mile of winding, maze-like cul-de-sacs, I can usually find a pretty direct path through without the help of a map, and usually without getting dead-ended anywhere. Friday night's after-dark jaunt through Johnson County's "Windham" subdivisions would prove to be no exception to this rule. Of course, part of my navigation skill could have come from my two years delivering pizza in Olathe, but I feel like I've learned a lot more about the lay of the land in the last 8,000 miles or so on a bike than I did covering 2,000 miles a month in the car.

I'll probably ride to work Tomorrow and Wednesday, but opt for the bus on the return trip. Wednesday night, I head to Vegas.