149th ride of 2020 - Friday, 11/13/2020

2020 mileage: 3816.2

Today's ride was challenging on two fronts -- both the weather, and a hardware issue.

I began about 11:30 in gloomy, gray, windy, chilly conditions. It was 44°, and during my ride that temperature fell to 40°, and the clouds thinned somewhat, allowing a few peeks of the sun to reach me, but the wind persisted.

Thankfully, the equip[ment issue did not involve my trike, but rather my phone. About three weeks ago I had a couple of rides when the phone ran out of power part way through. I thought I had overcome that, as it had not troubled me for several days. But today, it returned. I was listening to Interlochen Classical radio, and as I approached the halfway turnaround point of my ride, a piece in which I was highly interested came on.

When I was doing my doctoral work at Michigan State University in the mid-eighties, one of my fellow grad students and a good buddy was Jack Stamp, who is now well known in the music world as a successful composer and conductor of band music. They had announced that Jack was the conductor of the next piece, and I was enjoying it greatly ... when the phone just died. (In checking with him after I got home, Jack tells me this was likely Morton Gould's "American Salute.")

I spent 15-20 minutes trying to get it going again, as my battery pack still showed having plenty of power. Several times I was able to get the phone restarted, whereupon it went through its whole procedure of initializing and starting up ... but then each time it blinked out again within a few seconds. Finally, after numerous iterations of this frustrating cycle, I gave up and decided to just head for home. While it was frustrating to ride in silence, with no music, this was not an insuperable difficulty. I was, however, highly concerned about the fact that, should I encounter difficulties with the trike, I'd have no way of contacting Michelle. But finally, I reminded myself that, at the very worst, I could always pull over somewhere, extricate my mask, and go into a place of business and write a note explaining things and asking them to call for me.

Happily, however, that was not necessary. I rode a round trip to Matthei Botanical Gardens, but in light of the problems, I felt justified in cutting my return a bit short by traveling west along Packard and Eisenhower rather than returning all the way south to Textile Rd. With no power, I had no measured stats from MapMyRide (and no Relive video), but based on identical routes I've ridden in the past (September 23 and November 6), I'm measuring today at 27.7 miles in 3:15, a distance that was able to put me over a new mileage milestone for the year -- 3800).

This has been a good month for riding, too, which I hope to keep going. My best month for the year so far was 452.8 miles in June. But so far in November, with the month not yet half done, I've ridden 321.8 miles. If only the snow can hold off!

Finally as I neared home, I was interested, riding past the Cobblestone Farm on Packard (roughly half a mile west of Platt)), to read on the historical plaque that the house was built in 1844. While this date would be ho-hum in Europe, here in America it places as an antiquity!