Douglasville

Yeah, 4th of July! The girls and I rolled down to Douglasville to hang out with my brother and his family. Sophie was especially happy because their youngest just had her second birthday the day before and she'd made a card for her.

When we got there, the kids disappeared almost immediately and the frere and I hit the road for a couple of hours.



We headed west from his place on a big, left handed loop. The roads out there are just infinitely rolly. There are a few long climbs and descents, but for the most part, it just up-down-up-down over and over forever. That can be tough if you're not feeling good, but I was feeling pretty good so it was great.

There are some old dirt and gravel roads out that way too. John had figured out where some of them went and we threw a few into our ride, just to mix it up a bit. It's weird taking the road bike on dirt. You can't keep up the same pace, but you want to keep riding it like a road bike. It feels weird to sit back like you might on a mountain bike. I like getting out of my element like that though and it was cool to ride those roads.

As usual, around 3:00 or so, some weather started moving in to the south and we took shelter at a church.



Ironically, my brother had taken shelter at that same church when he first went out exploring those roads and while he was there, the building got struck by lightning twice. The second time, it set the roof on fire. Fortunately the family that owned it happened to be there and they put out the fire.

It wasn't so exciting for us though. The storm stayed to the south and we ended up revising our route a bit to stay north of it. We got rained on for a minute or so, big fat rain, but didn't get soaked and soon we could see we were out of it.

We even risked a few more dirt roads and passed a guy who might have been hauling an old car out there to dump it. As we approached, he fiddled with the bumper, but seemed to be keeping his head down so we couldn't see who he was. Over the years, I've passed various people out in the woods, driving in questionably legal places and they've always done that same thing. "My head's down, you can't see me."

We passed a bunch of folks setting up their front yards for big family get-togethers. Their grills were warming up. Fortunately they hadn't actually started grilling or the Honey Stinger gel blocks I'd eaten earlier wouldn't have seemed so satisfying.

Post-dirt we took some familiar roads back to my bro's house. It was a good spin. I think we rode about 30 miles or so.

We then rounded up the kids for some swimming...



...and ate some barbecued chicken sandwiches for dinner. That weather from earlier eventually made it's way to Douglasville though and we got screwed on the fireworks. Dangit! Pretty much all of Atlanta had to bail on the fireworks though, and several cities just postponed them to today. Maybe we'll get to see some tonight.