Soggy

This morning I awoke to rain pounding on our bedroom windows, but against my better judgement, I hitched up the wagon and headed up to Ellijay for the Chilly Dawg ride, hosted by Cartecay Bikes. After checking the doppler radar, I had convinced myself that it surely would be done raining by the time we started riding. I was pretty happy to see some other people up there when I arrived - hopefully I could convince at least one of them that it wasn't too nasty to ride.

As luck would have it the rain subsided to a mist, and everyone suited up and headed out. I was too lazy to ask Chris to put my climbing gear on the SS, so I was a little worried I'd be hating life on the long climbs. Turns out it wasn't too bad and just made me get them over with that much faster. Think strong like bull...

There were only three of us who did the longer ride, and I think if I wasn't dead set on doing the longer ride, everyone would have opted for the short route. The roads up to Winding Stair Gap and Springer Mountain were pretty soupy, and more than once I could have sworn my back tire was flat because I'd lose my momentum all of sudden. Of course once I made the descent down from Springer and hit the pavement, it started pouring so that I was thoroughly saturated by the time I finished the ride.

We sat down for some post-ride chili and then I packed up and jumped in the FX to head home. I throw it in reverse to back out of the grass where I parked and conveniently get myself stuck in the mud. F'ing [expensive] piece of $hit 2WD SUV!!!! We tried pushing and putting stuff under the tires to no avail. Thankfully we were at a fire station and had some heavy equipment at our disposal, however no one was really sure how to use any of it. I also couldn't find the damn tow hook on my car so, against my better judgement, we ended up throwing a chain around the axle and pulling it out with a bigazz off-road fire truck that easily weighed 5 times that of my car. I figured it was worth the risk, as I'd never hear the end of it if I had to have Chris rescue me from that Fire Station again...

You see, he had rescued me from there a long, long time ago, when myself and two others miserably flunked the ORGT map and compass school (I know, shocking!). I was the only one who had a significant other who could/would come get us, so he had to drive up to Ellijay from GA Tech to rescue our sorry bunch.

Anyways, it doesn't appear that we did any permanent damage to the car, and I got a nice lesson when I got home where the tow hooks were and how to hook everything up...not that I plan on driving the FX on any wet, soggy grass again anytime soon.

Anyhow, it was still a good use of an otherwise crappy day, and the Cartecay folks put on a nice ride that was well worth the drive.