Friday Follies ~~ Oh Susanna!

When I was a kid, I thought the song “Oh Susanna!” was funny.  Then I moved to Georgia.

Yesterday I spoke, at some length about the gradual changing of cycling wardrobe, with the seasons.  I’ve learned to do this.  The experience has been hard won.

About ten years ago, I started on a long and grueling event.  It was February.  The day started cold and dreary.  It was wet.  The temps were in the low 40s.  The forecast said it would stay that way.

By noon, I was peeling layers off, and trying to find ways to pack them up.  I didn’t really have enough space in my bags to manage that trick.  The Sun had come out, and the mercury was climbing rapidly.  I was climbing too!  The route had been climbing most of the morning, and the mountains were still ahead.  There was a limit to how much clothing I could actually take off.  When I hit that limit, I was still over-dressed, and overheating.  Not good.

Take another example.  A few years ago, two other stalwarts and I tackled something I called the “Insane Gaps Ride.”  The idea was to leave here at around 9:00 PM and ride to Dahlonega.  It had been a warm clear day.  The forecast was for a temperate night, with a 0% rain chance.  Now how often do you see a 0% chance of rain here?  That looked as close to perfect as one could ask for.

The first shock arrived near midnight, a bit north of Atlanta.  We were descending down to the Chattahoochee.  As we did, the temperature was dropping like a rock.  We stopped and put on everything we were carrying.  It wasn’t enough.  We were all freezing.  Worse, we were mostly descending, so we weren’t making any heat, and the windchill was ferocious.  I was starting to have some serious misgivings about the whole enterprise.

Once we crossed the river, we started to climb.  That helped.  Oddly, by the time we finished climbing out of the river valley, the temperature rose.  Remember, this is in the middle of the night.  Soon enough we were all feeling pretty comfortable again.  It was a clear starry night.  The temperature was pleasant.  We were generally climbing, so we were making plenty of heat.  I thought,  “Well, that was odd, but apparently just a weird local phenomena.  Looks like we dodged the bullet.”

It continued to warm as we rode along.  We stopped briefly and adjusted clothing, each of us dropping outer layers.  The ride was good, and conditions were excellent.  As we approached the town of Cumming, we all noticed occasional, distant and dim, flashes in the sky.  Someone remarked about “heat lightening.”

Clouds started to drift over us, from the north.  The flashes in the sky become more frequent, and a bit brighter.  By the time we were rolling through the town of Cumming, the sky was completely overcast, and we could hear the rumble of thunder.  “Maybe it’s behind us,”  someone said.  I was hoping the same thing, but I was scanning the quiet and darkened town as we rode, looking for possible shelter.  Turned out, I wasn’t the only one doing that.

Just after we rolled out of town, the first rain drops hit.  Split!  Splat!  Not frequent, but big drops.  “You think it will?”  someone asked.

“Don’t know,”  I replied.  By the time we were three miles past town it was obvious.  We were heading into a thunderstorm, and it was heading toward us.

“What do you say?”  someone asked.

“Turn back and run for it,”  I said.  We did.  We turned around and accelerated.

“I saw a car wash, just this side of the square,”  Gary shouted.  It had an overhang.  We can shelter there.”  Good plan.

The car wash did have a bit of shelter.  But we were still getting wet.  It was absolutely roaring, and the water was cascading down, as if we were underneath a major waterfall.  I pulled a space blanket out of my pack, and the three of us huddled under it for the next hour.

We hit intermittent showers for the rest of the night.

“Zero percent rainchance,” the forecast had said.  “Lows in the upper 60s,” it had said.  It was late Spring.

We saw the dawn on Auraria Road, approaching Dahlonega.  It was chilly.  We were all, again wearing everything we could put on.  It was chilly!  But with the rising of the Sun, it warmed nicely.  By the time we had climbed into Dahlonega, we were all sweating, and by 9:00 AM we had all shed everything but summer riding clothing.

“Climate is what you expect.  Weather is what you get.”  Friends, in this climate, we get a lot of weather.

It rained all night

 the day I left

The weather it was dry

The Sun so hot,

I froze to death

Susanna, don’t you cry!