4th Grade Strings and who are these guys?

Yesterday, a day I've been dreading finally came. Jonas is in his first year of strings and and we had the JOY of attending his first concert. Now it's been somewhat pain full listening to him practice for the past months and I could only imagine what it was going to sound like with the whole 4th grade class screeching at once. Let me describe this screeching sound, think fingernails on a chalkboard over and over......now have 20 people do it all at once, yea, you got it. Heck, I was so excited we got there early to get 2nd row seats! Now I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised at how they sounded. With their teacher playing the piano and most of the kids hitting the right notes it wasn't too pain full. 5 very short songs later and Jonas had some proud parents. Little did I know that Jonas went first, now I had to sit through 5th grade strings, 5th grade band, and 6th grade band. ouch! It must take incredible patience to be a music teacher, gains in skill take time and kids at that age have short attention spans.

So I got home and after the ringing in my ears subsided I watched the news and saw that it was going to get colder all day today. With temps in the 30's at 8am I decide to drop off the kids at school and then ride out to SMP and hit the trails. Great plan, poor execution at the start. By 8am the wind had all ready switched to the north at 20+ mph and it was going to be a rough ride to the park. So after grinding my was out to the park I found the gates closed. What........it hasn't rained in weeks! But I don't want to "that guy", you know, the guy from the TREK Store who got a ticket for riding on closed trails. Anyway, it's getting colder by the minute so I decide to bag it and head home.




You may know these guys but I'm not telling who's riding in the middle of the day.

As I'm rolling away from the trailhead I see a car pull up with bikes on it, hmmmm, maybe I can ride after all, then I see another guy I know on the road. Now this guy you might know, he gets blamed for everything, if we get caught we can all point at him. So they unload and we roll in to the trails, past the gate, and guess what, the trails are dry, actually, they were dusty. We do quite a few laps and as we are rolling out we notice that the gate is now open, go figure. Strange ride tho, no crashes, no endo's, no black eyes, that's unusual. The guys load up and I decided to ride home with a stiff cross/tailwind. When I left the house it was 34 degrees, when I got home it was 12 degrees, that sure beats the trainer any day. Today the trails were perfect, and we had a great group of riders, what an awesome day!