Weekend work outs

Happy Father's day to all of the great fathers out there.  My husband is a great dad to our two sons and is currently enjoying a fishing trip in Canada.  He left Thursday morning.  ;-)
Friday: I took friday off, because the electrician was scheduled to come and finish some of the electrical work in the family room.  I started the day on friday with a 6 mile run - 2 miles with Sophie and 4 without.  The run went well.  I was back to the house around 8:30 and the electrician showed up around 9:00.  Right after he left, I got ready to head out on the bike.  My plan was to do a 35 mile loop on my road bike.  It was a great bike ride.  I did this route several times last year and my time was usually 2:45, but yesterday I completed it in 2:23 - clearly having a road bike makes a big difference.  Of the 35 miles, 15 is my normal route to and from work, so there is a lot of stop signs and waiting for traffic.  On the bike trail, I was seeing a lot of 17 - 20 miles per hour pace . . . my average was 14.5.
Saturday: My son and his girlfriend came over and we took the boat out on the lake.  The temperature was a perfect 80.  I drove the boat while my son slalom skied a couple of times.  I am not the best driver, especially for pulling a slalom skier - but got him up on the first try.  I was next up and headed into the water for the first time this year.  My son is a great boat captain - but he tends to pull skiers a littler bit faster than I like - YIKES!!!!   I got up twice - no spills - and had a great time.

We also brought the dogs on the boat and they both enjoyed a little exercise in the water.    They both love their doggie life jackets.  As soon as we stop the boat - Sophie wants to jump in- Nutmeg usually has to be persuaded to jump in.  ;-)





We got home and enjoyed New York strips on the grill, corn on the cob, bread and the first of the season, Summer Shandy, a great beer by Leinenkugel's.  ;-)












Sunday:  Woke up this morning with sore shoulders.  Water skiing will do that . . . especially the first time of the season. I had taken my commuter bike to the repair shop on Thursday, for a new chain and sprocket and headed down to pick it up around 10:00.  I then headed over to my son's apartment.  The plan was to bike from his apartment to New Glarus via the Badger State and Sugar River Bike trails.  This is a 26 mile trip - with about 18 of the miles on crushed rock, which is why I used my commuter bike.  My road bike would not be very stable on this surface.  Biking on crushed rock / packed dirt is much harder than paved surfaces - holy cow!
The best part about the trail is that there is a tunnel on the path - the Stewart Railroad Tunnel, built in 1887 and 1200 feet long.  .  It isn't the longest in the state - but it claims to be the darkest . . . and I agree with that claim.
Here I am at Tunnel Rd.          Here is the sign for the Tunnel.
As we approached the tunnel, you could feel the cool air coming out of the tunnel.  It was also very foggy near the tunnel entrance due to the high humidity.
My son has a flash light on his key chain (otherwise we could have used the lights on our smart phones)  and we used that to navigate the tunnel.  Since the tunnel is not straight - there is a bend in it - you only see blackness when you look into it.   Just to clarify - we walked our bikes through the tunnel.  You could maybe bike through it if you had head lamps or a bike light - but it was really fun to wander through the cool darkness.

The last photo, give you a perspective of the size of the tunnel, this family was getting ready to enter the tunnel, just as we were exiting it.
After the tunnel, we only had about 5 more miles to get to New Glarus.  Once in town we headed to the store where Chelsea works.  We stopped at a local Subway and then loaded our bikes up and headed back to Madison.
Great weekend of exercise and fun on the water.
PS - I have just started using MarsEdit - a blog editor for Mac - I am having lots of problems with photo's - there doesn't seem to be any way to add a caption to the photo's and they are really hard to place in the text.  I will give it a couple more blog posts - but I might be going back to blogger.