2 posts tagged “rain”
Today isn't quite working out the way I planned. Rather than sitting in my comfortable apartment, bloviating to my three-person audience after a good night's sleep, I had expected to wake up early and brave the elements for my first 100-mile bike ride -- called a "century" among bike geeks.
I got the idea for the endeavor from Hotrod, who has been riding these things for the past few years. He had been bugging me to buy a road bike for awhile. When it became apparent that the knee injury I incurred skiing this year was going to keep me from doing any serious distance running, I ran right out to my local bike shop, bought a shiny new toy, and started going out with Hotrod on weekly treks. I was enjoying these so much after the first couple weeks that I decided to sign up for the Seagull Century, which is taking place as I write this in Salisbury, MD, about two hours away from me.
I was all set to go until yesterday happened. The day dawned, such as it was, with a steady rain that alternated reassuringly between "biblical downpour" and "cold, pissing drizzle." Not terribly surprising, since the nice people at the National Weather Service had estimated the likelihood of rain on Friday and Saturday at 100 percent.
Prior to this weekend, I don't think I've ever seen the likelihood of rain estimated at 100 percent. This was new to me. I kinda thought the chances of rain typically rainged from 10 percent to 90 percent, always leaving open the possiblitiy that your 8-hour, 100-mile outdoor journey wouldn't be doubling as a long, cold swim. But I guess I'll defer to the scientists on this one. I talked with Hotrod about it, and we agreed that a rainy ride would build character (not to mention make for good blog fodder) so I pressed onward.
As I was getting ready to leave for Salisbury, I started to put the bike rack on my car, only to discover that my trunk had picked that moment to decide that it no longer wanted to close -- precisely what you want in a rainstorm. I attempted to fix this problem by slamming it 50 times or so with all my might and screaming obscentities at it (it's been kind of a tough week) but this, shockingly, did not do the trick. So I took it to my mechanic, and stood fuming in the rain for 20 minutes while he rigged it shut, warning me that reopening it would probably be a bad idea. Super.
So now I was ready to go. After a quick stop at the bike shop, I got on the road at around 2:45 -- just in time, or so I thought, to beat rush hour. No such luck. Apparently -- among an enormous subset of wildly indolent people -- Columbus day is an actual holiday, which makes this a holiday weekend, complete with early departures from work. Now I'm half Italian. If anyone has a right to celebrate fucking Columbus day its me, and I don't, so I don't know what all these douchebags were doing on the road, but there they were. It took me more than an hour to get out of Washington, and my patience was wearing thin.
What finally pushed me over the edge, came about an hour later when I ran smack into the tail end of a 15-mile traffic jam approaching the Bay Bridge, which is the only point of egress to Maryland's Eastern Shore. You might not think that a rainy pseudo-holiday weekend in October would send people flocking to the beach, but you'd be wrong. This was the worst kind of traffic jam. I was dead stopped for most of it, punctuated by short crawls forward, riding my brake the whole way. I estimated it would take me close to two hours at that rate to travel the 15 miles to the bridge. Barring traffic (hah!), my destination was another hour and a half or so beyond that. The straw that broke this camel's back came when I got out of the unmoving procession to find a rest stop, only to have Maryland's backassward roads put me back on the highway a half mile back from where I'd been -- a half mile that had taken me 15 minutes to traverse.
Fearing a total loss of my sanity, I turned my car around and headed home. Nobody likes pointlessly painful excersises more than I, but piling this tragi-comic string of errors on top of an already rotten two weeks was making me a danger to others. I'll look forward to Hotrod's write up. Now where did I put that remote?
The conventional wisdom is that Washington D.C. is a city of transplants. That always struck me as a little bit bigoted, because what it really means is that all the white people who live there come from someplace else. The (much larger) black community in D.C. is deeply rooted in the city.
But for the sake of this rant, the somewhat ignorant conventional wisdom is useful, so we're going to roll with it for now. I once posited that if Washington D.C. is a city of transplants, the overwhelming majority of its transplanted residents must have emigrated from the Gobi Desert.
There is no other reasonable explanation for why the commonplace and predictable (away from fashionable Gobi Desert addresses) occurence of water falling from the sky causes such ridiculous pandemonium in this city. I'm about to run off to the store, and I'll be shocked if I'm able to find a roll of toilet paper and a gallon of milk on the shelves. And god forbid that the aforementioned water falls in the (again, predictable) form of ice crystals. Washingtonians will sell their first-born for a loaf of Wonder bread in advance of a snowstorm.
It would be one thing if it were just the citizenry that lost its collective mind when it rained (one fantastically annoying thing, but still) but the city itself, a city that has witnessed roughly the same rain and snowfall for centuries, always seems woefully unprepared for the big annual rain and snowstorms. Percipitation can't happen in D.C. without something breaking. Every year whent it snows, closures last longer than necessary because the city can't clear the roads, and every year when it rains, one or more metro stations (usually the same ones -- I'm looking at you, Federal Triangle) get swamped and screw up the morning commute.
I spent an hour and a half on a metro train this morning with a few hundred of my closest friends, because they apparently ran out of buckets and sand bags at Federal Triangle again. So frustrating.
UPDATE: Ok, so they may have a point with this whole "rain disaster" thing. I made my grocery run and let's just say I floated about halfway there. It's really coming down. Seriously. I may need an ark.
