The miles roll away...

I've always been a spectacularly poor judge of distance. Inches, feet, miles . . . I will always guess the distance wrong. I was pretty good with picas, in my typesetting days, but only out of constant application. So in picking my bike route for yesterday, wanting to extend a bit further than I had gone the week before (22 miles), I picked a target of Poestenkill and took off. The winds were fairly ferocious, but I had my obscenely expensive new bike jacket on so I was snug and comfy. (The jacket cost more than the bike I had previously been riding, although those numbers are not adjusted for inflation.) So, off I went, fighting wind but generally taking my time and having a nice ride, thinking I must have been doing about the same miles as last week, maybe a little more. Made a wrong turn on the way home and ended up facing a hill my legs were getting too tired to go up (in heavy traffic), so I went around it, but that only added about 20 minutes to the ride. The whole thing took much longer than I had expected, 2 hours, and even though my quads were DONE when I got up the last hill, I didn't think I had gone that far. Then I plotted the trip this morning and it turns out I had covered 36.3 miles. No wonder my quads were done. Great ride though. Brisk, sunny, lots of color in the hills, and once I got out past 150 the traffic fell away. But I am going to HAVE to get better at Rensselaer County backroads. Yes, I had a map with me, but having one and looking at one are not the same thing, and it often seemed easier to just keep rolling along than to figure out where I was rolling to.