There is nothing like a little celebration and the end of an awesome day. It is great to reflect on day well spent with family and friends. One of my favorites is when there is a bit of great mountain biking in the mix as well. I have been really fortunate to have lots of those days. Today the celebration was for different reasons.
The day started off like some of my other work trips that have had some awesome mountainbiking through in as well. Asunrise communter flight to LAX to catch a connector. The connector in this case was Seattle and I have plans for a good bit of riding during my month long stay up here. Once we got about the marine layer I was treated to pretty pictureque scene below.
One of the other guys I will be working with on this project was going to drive up versus fly. He has plans for some post-work vacation/roadtrip. He offered to drive my bike up so I was more than happy not have tear in down, put in the bike box and lug it around the airports. Shortly after getting off the plane in LAX and into the terminal things started turning for the worse. I got a phone call from by work bud. My Intense 6.6 had been stolen off the back of his truck. Somebody in Kelso WA cut the fairly beefy cable lock and took off with my cherished rig. I did have a long enough of a layover that all the phone calls were taken care of with the Kelso Police Department as well as make a few points online about the event. Needless to say I was good and bummed.
My Baby when she was new (The shock has seens been replaced with a Cane Creek Double Barrel coil shock) The setup of this bike is fairly unique and considering that “Works” translucent paint allows the unique weldmarks to show through, the underlying marks on this paint is a vittual fingerprint for this bike.
Hopefully this along with frame serial number will help it recovery. I don’t expect I’ll see the bike again.
Needless to say that I was not in a good mood when I got on the flight to Seattle. I was however fairly comfortable in seat 5C. Short BEFORE take off, the little five or so year old “princess” in row 8 started screaming crying and wailing. It was freaking blood curdling and I could see the tightening shoulders and clinched jaws of everyone within my view. Mom made good effort to try and calm the little princess down….for all of about five freaking minutes, then she just became pretty oblivious to her little freaking scream box urchin. We were given the okay to use the portable electronics you should have seen the mad scramble everyone was making to fire that those things up to try and drowned out that the baby terrorist cell. The scramble was enough that the flight attendant actually smile and had to hold back some snickers. Even with the music pumping you could still here the screaming. Now I know the difference between a kid in pain and a kid being a pain. There was not ear ache, no upset stomach, this kid was just an urchin. Come on Mom, do something, NyQuil, Sleeping Pills, Pillow across the face, sock in the mouth, something! The descent was pure torture once we had to turn off our electronic mufflers. I was fit to be tied when I got off the plane, luckily I have a couple hours of driving to do and was able to chillax a little.
Because of the length of my stay here I was able grab a condo rental for the same price as a hotel stay. I was pretty freaking stoked with the accommodations and location. It was well into the afternoon by the time I was finally able to set down and relax for good with a tasty Pacific Northwest cold one. Somedays you celebrate a day well spent, today I was simply celebrating the END of this day. The good news about this Monday is there are a lot of people out there who had something truly tragic happen today and I was not one of them. Thanks everyone who acknowledged the bummage of my day and offered encouragement and help. You guys Rock!