rain. wait... what?

I swear: I checked THREE weather sources before yesterday's ride: 1Weather (on the phone), the MSN Weather app, and The Weather 14 Days (the most pessimistic and likely to predict precipitation of the three), and ALL of them were saying, basically, "Yeah, go ahead and do the ride; ain't gonna rain today."

The Ramblin' Wrench Mobile Shop at the start location.

So it started to rain as I was driving to the start. When I got there, Dave H was waiting, and took out his phone and looked at the weather radar; we were in the middle of a cell that looked like it was gonna pass in about fifteen minutes. 

Soggy-lookin' setup huh?

Of my thirteen registrants, five were supposed to meet us along the route, and three of those texted me before the start to verify I hadn't cancelled. But it was only gonna rain fifteen more minutes, right?

I cut short my too-long pre-ride speech, and riders added warnings about riding on the wet shiny road paint and wet tar snakes. And off we went. 

And it just kept raining on us. Almost all the way until we got to Princeton.

I haven't done the ride to Princeton in a while, and hadn't used this particular route, with a real-estate tour of northern Princeton, in years, I warned people that going across Pretty Brook Road might be tough; the hills aren't high, but they're nasty.

And, of course, because I haven't done the route in a while, I took a wrong turn, and my friendly-but-insistent crew set me right. (I often say I can get lost in a bathroom; I can get lost in my living room if you rearrange the furniture.)

WE got across Pretty Brook OK, and turned up Carter, and then onto Crusher... and it rained on us the entire length of Crusher Road. I'm not ruling out the possibility that some rain god or other picked us out particularly for attention... perhaps because I had cancelled my Memorial Day ride because of threatened rain, which then did not materialize.

And then the sun came out. At the stop at Boro Bean:

Hrmph.

At the end, I had a mutiny, and the group decided to take a little shortcut back on Butler, rather than going back up to Suydam the way I'd planned. Oh, well. After the earlier wrong turn, who was I to complain?

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