Bike Ride: Minute 44

Yesterday I signed up for a 30-mile bike ride, which takes places next weekend. Since I hadn't been on my bike since my last long-distance ride, I decided I needed to practice. I went out for an hour, but only managed 5.6 miles. That was partially because I motivated my ride by finding a geocache, which entailed a lot of riding around slowly trying to figure out where I should be. (I am trying to embed the map above, which should show the part where I was spinning my wheels.) The cache I found is named McCrory's, after a store that was in this shopping center many years ago.

The shopping center has become very dilapidated -- there is a rumor that Harris Teeter is in negotiations to come in -- so there weren't a lot of people hanging around, which is good for cache stealth. One of the problems I have with geocaching, though, is that I'm not thrilled with either caches like McCrory's, which are in perfectly icky parking lot settings, or deep-woods caches that require you to bushwhack for half a mile to find them. There are a few that are "just off the beaten path," but they require me to choose carefully.

Still, I was happy to log this one, since it put me one cache closer to my "goal" of finding one in each minute of the 76th degree west of longitude. (I put "goal" in quotation marks, since I find it unlikely I'll ever finish this.) This is my 13th minute.

I looked to see if I could add to my count on next week's bike ride, but it appears to take place entirely to the west of the 77th parallel.