Bike race

Our college was hosting a mountain bike race, so Chris and I volunteered to help out with registration for the event. We figured that we could go as a family and have one of us sit at the registration table while the other walked around with Cailan and looked at all the bikes. We were supposed to be at the race course at 7 am, which meant leaving the house at 6:30 – you’d think this might be early for a toddler but as usual he was awake by 6:00. I was the one who was bleary eyed and stumbling. The weather forecast had predicted a cold morning, so we prepared by layering ourselves and Cailan with lots of warm clothes. What we hadn’t gleaned from the forecast was just how incredibly windy it would be on the exposed ridge where the race started. At the registration table, the wind tried to rip the sign-in sheets off my clipboard. It was impossible to even set a pen down on the table – the wind would swoosh it right off. More than once, a $20 bill was torn from my hands as a racer tried to give me the registration fee. Cailan had no interest in being outside in this wind, so unfortunately he and Chris spent most of the morning in the back of the Subaru eating banana muffins and making big numbers on the calculator.

We had parked so that the start of the race was visible from the car, and the first event of the morning was a race that did several laps of a short course, so Chris was at least able to watch some of the biking. It was interesting to see the wide range in the abilities of the riders and the value of their bikes; it was also interesting to see the variation in the amount of support given by the different colleges to their cycling team. One school has a big trailer just for their bike team, all shiny and painted in the school colors. That school also paid the registration fee for all its riders, something that not every school did, and from the conversations I overhead, many of the riders from that school also race on sponsored teams.

We got home in time for lunch and for Cailan to nap. In the afternoon, we went shopping and picked up, among other things, a new lamp for Cailan’s room:

He chose the lamp, specifically requesting the one that was pink, and since it was on clearance for $9.99 we agreed. In the parking lot of the shopping center, we watched a very strange dust storm that was filling the valley. The brown haze completely obscured the view of the Colorado National Monument; it felt eerie to not be able to see our surroundings, in a place where the sky is usually so clear and blue.