"Look-- it's an Eeyore!"

Okay, well finals are at the end of this next week, so let me take a moment to talk about my life outside of nursing. This morning I got up a little early and drove down south to my friend, Judith's house to go for our first of several training bike rides. We decided we are going to sign up for the AIDS hill country ride in April (she's trying to convince me that a century (100 mi) is reasonable- still working on that one...). Along with her partner, Alicia, we headed out for a 25 mile ride.

They live pretty close to the start of the ride we looked at (they printed it off of ACA's website), so we decided to ride to Austin High School and then catch up with the route. It turns out that it's the same place where the Tour De Cure ended last May. Unfortunately, it was a little further than we thought (and with some killer hills that had me sucking for air). But when we did finally get out on the Old San Antonio Hwy, it was great riding. There were still some hills, but the scenery was much preferred to being stuck behind a bus breathing in fumes.

We turned around at about 13 miles out to make the ride a total of 26 miles. On the way back we saw probably a dozen deer just sitting in a field, and then a little ways down we saw a bunch of different animals. The funny thing is that as we were going by, i completely spaced and just pointed and yelled, "Look, it's an Eeyore!". I'm sure at some point I must have seen a donkey in real life, but it was still pretty neat and they were only about 20 feet off the road. Alicia, who was leading the way, did her best donkey noise. And that was when I knew I had found my perfect riding buddies.

It was a long, hard ride, but pretty decent for our first ride back in the saddle. We averaged about 13mph with plenty of hills, and that's not a bad place to start. Near the end we were going up a particularly rough hill and I started to stand up to pound up the last few feet, but my legs wobbled and i quickly sat back down. Even though I nearly bonked, I was still happy at the end of the ride. I'm really looking forward to many more rides, and excited to have a couple of stronger riders to train with.