Tuesday May 27, 2009 - I rode my bike almost 20 miles!

This past weekend Tom and I had planned to drive the 3 hours west to Canberra, the capital of the country. Canberra is kind of like DC, it’s its own little capital territory. The weather forecast however called for showers, so we decided to push it off till next weekend. We did however head back out to Silos Estate winery north of Nowra to pick up some wine. This is the winery he had stopped at a few weeks after I got here to do a wine tasting. I had liked the Riesling when I tried it but didn’t buy any so I picked up a bottle and Tom picked up a couple bottles.

Monday I decided to be ambitious and take the bike out for a long bike ride. There is a bay to basin cycleway here where you can walk or ride from Jervis Bay down to the inland lake of St. George’s Basin. It’s about 11 km straight down to Sanctuary Point. So I could go down to Sanctuary Point and back the same way for a round trip of about 22 km, or about 13.5 miles. Or there is a loop where you go down to Sanctuary Point, go along the basin a bit, then back up another road back to Huskisson. The loop is 30.5 km or 19 miles, so of course I decided to go for the long one. It took me about 5 hours and I swear was mostly uphill. Some were steep hills and some were long, slightly uphill parts. There was some parts that were flat, but I swear there were only a few 100 m or so spurts where I didn’t have to cycle at all. For all the damn uphill I did, there should have been more freaking places where I could just relax and enjoy the ride without having to work too hard, but no. It took me so long because with all the damn uphills, I got to the point where at some points I hopped off my bike and walked along side it. When I finally finished I was exhausted, my legs and butt HATED me and my arms were hurting as well. I did however feel a huge sense of accomplishment, especially considering I biked 4 or 5 times since I’ve been here and before that it’d been maybe 8 months since I’d been on a bike. I’m pretty impressed with myself I even did it at all. I do have plans to do it again sometime though, maybe next week. However I do plan on doing it the opposite way around next time, since I feel like I went all uphill this way, we’ll see if it feels any different doing it the other way around. Still people…19 miles…props to me.

Tuesday night I went to poker and after winning last week, I followed that up with my worst performance to date. It was horrible, I had crap cards the whole night and I just didn’t play well. Let’s hope I can do better next week. There is a free to play poker tonight in Callalla (just up the bay) that Dave usually goes to. I think I will tag along (I did play there one other time a couple weeks ago) with Dave if he goes and try to redeem myself from my horrendous play last night. After all it is free and I have the chance to win money, so why not. I will have to DVR “Chuck” though. I didn’t watch it back in the States, but they started airing the first season here and I started watching from the beginning so now I am hooked. It’s a good, show I am really enjoying it!

Random thought: An acquaintance of mine (a friend of a friend) is going through a pretty tough break-up right now and she mentioned that before the actual break-up they were on a break. I’ve also been watching re-runs of “Gilmore Girls” where Logan cheats on Rory while they were on a break, with him thinking they had actually broken up. Then of course there’s the notorious “WE WERE ON A BREAK” involving Ross and Rachel from “Friends.” This got me thinking about people in a relationship who go on a break. Now I can’t say anything definitively because I’ve never been put in such a position, I can only speculate. But…WTF is up with breaks? I feel like whether on tv or in real life, breaks just don’t make sense to me. I mean, both people in the relationship have to be on exactly the same page. Are you allowed to fool around with other people, can you talk to each other, do you cut off all contact? What are the rules of a break? It seems like someone always ends up getting even more hurt, and things usually end badly anyway, I mean, what’s the point? From what I’ve heard, people only go on a break when things are bad and they’re about to break up anyway. So why not just break up, why pick an undefined length of time, with undefined restrictions to see if things change? Do things for most couples ever change? Or is it just a detour on the way to a break-up? And who else thinks me writing blog posts on relationships is a byproduct of watching too much “Sex and the City?” Now all I need is 3 good friends to go out and drink with.