Mike's Bike: Weekend riding and those long miles

This past week I rode over 200 miles, which is the most I have ridden in about 18 months (I had longer weeks on the trainer, but you don't actually go anywhere, so that does not count). The gem of the week was a ride on Saturday with Sean that was meant to be over 100 miles long. The ride was going to take us over a few big climbs and then take us to the highest point in Mass., Mt. Graylock! However as these things go, it was raining the whole time, and as fun as the ride could have been riding in the rain for 6 hours is not all that fun. So instead the ride was 5 hours long and we covered 80 miles.

We did make it to the top of a big climb where we found this sweet deer statue:

The most exciting part besides the rain came when we were about to descend for a long time. I stopped at this restaurant to get some news papers to stuff down my jersey to keep me warm, however this did not go as planned either. The guy there went looking for newspaper but did not find any. He then offered me a sweatshirt, which I declined. The guy then said "Wait one minute" and then he came back with a t shirt, which had apparently came off some guys back! I tried to decline again but he was not having it , and insisted I take it. So I did, and below you can see how amazingly good I looked in the shirt, and it did in fact keep me warm.