active Weekend

Wow, it's been almost two weeks since I posted anything. Either nothing is happening here on Bonaire during the dog days of summer, or I've just been too brain dead to notice.

Sandra and I have been getting our exercise lately. We've been clearing the thorn and other bushes off of one of the old donkey trails that we'll be using as part of our next mountain bike race, come Sept. 10. It's a 1.7 km stretch that connects two dirt roads. We head out there with the dogs after work every once in a while and chop away until the sun sets around 6:50 pm. After about 17 man hours, we've cut back all the thorns and some of the regular bushes and brush. Hmmmm.... I wonder what that is in dog hours? The dogs love running around out there in the middle of nowhere. I've included a map of the course, for those of you who know the back wilds of Bonaire.

I just used a new tool to post the image. It is easy to use, but didn't put the picture where I wanted it. I'll have to play with it some more. As always, you can click on the picture to see it bigger. In this case, if your browser is set to NOT resize images, you'll see it quite big indeed.

I went for a bike ride with some friends of Miguel on Saturday. Miguel, who beat me by 10-15 seconds in our last bike race, is starting up a fitness center type business in September. Mtn. biking will be part of his program. He also is a volunteer at Jong Bonaire, an after school center for teens. (I came in second in the mtn. bike race a on July 30, but what I don't tell people is that there were only 8 riders and three of them got lost!)

Well, the slowest rider on our ride last Sat. got a leak in her tire near the start of the ride, so they pumped it up and headed her back to town... with the suggestion that she ride fast.
ha-ha...

That left three guys and me. Turns out that one of them races bikes in Venezuela and our ride turned into a race of sorts. At least I had to ride at race pace to keep up! It was great 'cause I would never have ridden that hard by myself. It was also great 'cause there was a guy a little slower than me who we had to wait for periodically, which let me catch my breath. The poor guy was in double trouble, because not only could he not climb as fast as us, but he didn't feel comfortable descending like a bat out of you-know-where. So he was always playing catch up.

Then Sunday, there was actually some wind, so I zoomed out to Sorobon around 4 pm and got in an hour and a half of windsurfing. I've been 4 times now since June, for the first time in quite a few years, and am enjoying it a lot. My windsurfing muscles, not to mention the calluses on my hands are totally out of shape for windsurfing, so short sessions are all I can handle.

So, it will be good to vegetate in front of my computer and edit audio files all day today. It will give my aged bod a chance to recover from an active weekend.