Holy crap, it’s been HOT!

Well June was pretty much a bust for riding – the weather has really been an issue. As I finish up this post it’s July 8 and the record-setting heatwave finally broke last night. For the past few weeks we’ve had unseasonably high temperatures in the mid- to upper 90′s and humidity pushing it over 100 nearly every day. This is quite unusual for June – usually that’s the month where the riding season hits its stride here in Iowa. This year, it was mostly a month to stay indoors and try to keep cool.

We did have one really nice Saturday on the bikes mid-month (obviously I am a little behind in posting about it!).

I had wanted to take a day-ride that day, but we didn’t plan far enough in advance so we decided to hit the Big Barn Open House instead. We met up with Garry and Shirley, and turns out they had come up with Garry’s son Mike and his girlfriend Tina, and their friends Charlie and Rita.

We poked around Big Barn for awhile and enjoyed the free lunch, then decided to take an extended “up around the lake” ride including the Madrid loop.

This is an easy ride with a very nice route. It takes us up the backside of Saylorville Lake with its lovely homes, across the Mile Bridge (boy the lake is LOW this year!), and up to the small town of Madrid, where we made a potty-and-beverage stop. Everyone noted the killer shrub that we had encountered in the middle of the road a few miles back (what IS IT with stuff in the road this year??) – fortunately we all got around it without being attacked.

We left Madrid going east on Highway 210, then south through the tiny town of Sheldahl and back into Polk City north of Saylorville. Stopped at the Saylorville spillway where the dammed-up lake is control-fed out into the Des Moines river. From there we took a round-about route through Johnston and down into Des Moines where we stopped at Sambetti’s for a beverage before heading home.

Although it wasn’t the epic day-ride I’d been hoping to take, it turned out to be a great afternoon anyway because of the new riding friends and of course the Iowa scenery. The next couple of weekends would turn out to be occupied with an out-of-state funeral and then the Good Guys Heartland Nationals hot rod show, all in the middle of a record-setting heat-wave.

The heat, fortunately, has broken at least for the moment – but it has felt more like August than June, so my internal “calendar” is a little off. We took a neat ride today that I’ll post about soon!

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Connor McGechan Jeremy McGrath