Spring arrived right on schedule, just a little snow left in the shady places, sunny out and windy in the high 60’s. AB and I did our first real bike ride of the year, going out about 15 miles to the very agreeable Riley Tavern where you eat outside on picnic tables. A lot of people are watching Wisconsin’s basketball season slowly sputter out as the Badgers fail to mount a comeback against the much higher-seeded team from Baylor. Riley Tavern serves amazing ice cream sandwiches with two chocolate chip cookies instead of the rectangular brown things; they’re not made there, they’re from Mullen’s Dairy Bar in Watertown. The thing about an ice cream sandwich is, they use the rectangular brown things which are soft and not very interesting because you can bite right through them without messing up the ice cream. Any cookie with a little more of a resistance to the tooth tends to smoosh the ice cream out the side when you bite down. That’s unacceptable. Mullen’s has somehow found a way to use a cookie with a real bite but give the ice cream itself enough structural integrity to hold itself in place while you eat it. Extraordinary!
I’d figured it had been warm enough long enough for the bike trail to be dry, and that was sort of true, but in many places it was badly rutted from the people who’d ridden on it when it was muddy, and even though it wasn’t really muddy anymore, it was soft for a couple of miles, so that your weight pushed your back wheel down into the dirt, which clutched your tire so that you were perpetually in a kind of low-grade partially submerged wheelie. We fought our way through at about 5mph for the whole stretch. So a more strenuous 30 miles than the usual. But the last 5 miles home, on pavement, felt like absolute gliding.
Quomodocumque 