When I woke up Tuesday morning it was 80 degrees warmer where I was staying, in West Palm Beach, Florida than my home town. It topped out at an 82 degree difference. I played tennis with my wife in the morning, went to the beach as a family, went for a short bike ride, played some more tennis, ate dinner and played cards till it was time for bed. Wednesday, it rained in the morning but the sun was out and it was in the mid-60’s by the time we were on our way to the airport.

The next morning, I woke up to this:

Admittedly, that was just the windchill but still, that’s an 85 degree difference in 24 hours. Not only that, I went into the office to find my carpeting completely saturated, my pipes had burst the day before and there was a small glacier in my parking lot because of it. Thursday was spent cleaning up and letting the plumbers fix everything… My day was spent with the front door ajar so they could get the vacuum hoses in to get the water out. Needless to say, I didn’t get a ride in on the trainer. Friday was no better because I was way behind at work after a week off and the flood/glacier debacle at my office. Oh, and this:

Folks, that’s the actual temperature on Friday morning.

Finally, yesterday morning I was able to don the cycling shoes again and put in an excellent 26 miles in an hour on the trainer.

Missing two days, I still managed to burn more than 3,500 calories last week with all of the tennis, bike riding and my one indoor cycling workout (I didn’t include golf because we rode in a cart). That’s my kind of vacation right there. If I didn’t lose a bit of weight, I stayed the same… I know for a fact I didn’t gain any weight.

But wait, there’s a bombshell here. My wife and I didn’t take our bikes to Florida. The logistics were just too much. I know I made it sound like we did in a post, but I didn’t want to publish the fact that we were gone and our bikes were home alone… We were going to rent bikes but decided to save our money because we had a garage full of bikes to ride… The only hitch was the type of bike we had to choose from:

I spent my vacation pushing that at 16 mph. Now, the idea was to swap out the pedals for my Keo classics, get all duded up in my best Tuesday night kit and have my wife take a photo of me for the blog but it just didn’t work out – we were way too busy having fun to mess around with all of that for a photo (one of the beautiful benefits of ADHD – I have fun at a hellish pace too).

In any event, I took Bella to her swim meet yesterday afternoon and I’ve got Josie this morning (it’s a two-day meet) so I can head home early, get my ride in and then head to the bowling ally.

As for the leisure bike, my previous statements on them stand… They feel like riding a La-Z-Boy on the short, slow treks. Trying to put some pedal down over a distance, they are less comfortable than a 3″ thick gel saddle on a $4,000 race bike after a 75 mile ride (that’s really not good). As I like to say though, it sure beat polishing the couch with my butt.