Lots and lots of miles this weekend...

Or so it seemed anyway. I did close to thirty on Friday, twenty on Saturday and just over twenty today!

My main ride for Friday was the Long Ears Loop again. Still no baby mule but look above-- it's a black lab sitting in a tree house! This treehouse is in a goat pen and they climb all over it and play on it. The dog's name is Tika and she lives in the pen with the goats. If you go over to the fence she'll bring you a ball so you can throw it for her over and over and over and over again... This pen is another Amish farm just across the way from where the twins live. In addition to Tika and the goats there are cows, a bull, and horses of course. They also run a store that sells items in bulk. I haven't actually shopped there because I don't really need any bulk items.

This little beauty lives on a farm about a mile past the baby's farm. When I stopped to have a drink and a rest she came right over to check me out. As soon as I brought my camera out she got shy and wouldn't look at me! Until her buddy came over, too:

Later I rode down to the Cozy Crop House to do a few massages, and then rode from there to my mom's at about 10:30 pm! It's only about two miles from CCH to her house but it was DARK. I do have head and tail lights on my bike, but it was a tiny bit unnerving to be riding on somewhat lonely country roads that late at night-- the rustlings in the cornfields and long grass were the worst!

Saturday morning I went on a sixteen mile ride with the bike club and it was hard. The route was hilly as heck (because flat is a relative term in Lancaster County-- and I mean that seriously, not sarcastically, lol). It sure seemed like the pace was faster than eleven miles per hour, but that could have been because the hills were wearing me down. I don't have a problem with shorter hills, or ones where there's a downhill first to gain momentum but those long, low-grade ones just kill me. And there were plenty of those kinds of hills on this ride! The upside is that I didn't have to get off and walk any of them, and I kept the pace pretty much. I did fall behind from time to time but once I got caught up I stayed with the main group until I tired on a hill. Luckily for me I wasn't the only one struggling a bit so I had plenty of company, lol.

Today there was a twenty mile ice cream ride scheduled, but the only ones who showed up were me and the leaders (they ride a tandem). It was beastly hot-- 89 degrees with humidity at 73 percent! Like a sauna or something. Since it looked like thunderstorms could roll in we decided to ride around Lititz rather than out towards Ephrata-- that way if it did start to storm we would be close to home. We went about 15 miles, stopping for ice cream at the end. I had a root beer float and boy did it hit the spot on such a hot day!