Week #29: It's (Another) Adventure!

After struggling with all things that were outside of my control on my unplanned trip to Oklahoma, I was faced with a couple more challenges before returning home. When trying to board my return flight in Oklahoma City, I was informed that my originally-scheduled flight from Dallas to Indianapolis had been cancelled, and that I had been moved to a flight that was leaving at 8:10 p.m. This already screwed up my plan to be in Indy by 4:30 and hit gym on the way home. Things got worse when my flight was delayed an additional two hours due to storms. In the end, I got home around 3:00 a.m. on Wednesday, and was in bed around 4:45. 

So given the fact that I was getting to bed less than an hour from when I would normally have to go to work, I called in and did my best to sleep through the morning. In the afternoon, I made up for the stress and the missed weight workout by putting in a couple of hours on the singlespeed at Brown County. That definitely made me feel better about life.

After a couple more days at home in which I managed to get both a weight and intervals session in (see, doing my to keep training up when at all possible), I headed to Chicago for a weekend with my favorite Instagram follower. Much like my last venture into Illinois, it was an adventure, and I got to test my limits in a few different ways. 

Instead of a tiny "one-star" hotel room, this weekend's accommodations provided me with my first Airbnb.com experience. We had a bit of a rough first night on the plasticy mattress of the unairconditioned third floor apartment bedroom that we had rented, not to mentioned the awkwardness of knowing that a total stranger was sleeping on a couch a couple of feet from the bedroom door. Despite the sticky insomnia, it was still fun and the next morning we were rewarded for our perseverance with the discovery of BBQ for brunch. Heck yeah! 

Yeah, this is a thing. Smoked brisket breakfast skillet for me and
pulled pork Eggs Benedict for him.

I also got to have my first music festival experience at Pitchfork. It was pretty fun, even when the temperature went from hot to cool to raining during the last show, and I got sopping wet in a strapless sundress and started getting chilled. I toughed it out and stayed until the end, though, because that was what I came to do. It helped having someone there to warm me up.

So apparently I walked into the frame of this picture partially clothed and decided that I would somehow make it better by trying to act gangster.

Finally, when it was time to head home on Sunday, I swung out to the suburbs to get in a quick ride with some folks that I had met at the Gravel Metric. We rode CX bikes on some pretty flat, not-that-technical singletrack. It was still rooty enough for me to make a dumb mistake and bite it in the first two minutes of the ride. I scraped up my arm and leg pretty badly and somehow managed to bruise my right sit bone and, ahem, other adjacent soft tissues in the fall. I'm not exactly sure how that happened, but it made getting up and getting back on my bike pretty painful. I still did it though, and ended up having a good time.

So once again venturing into Illinois turned out to be a bigger adventure than I had planned, but even looking back at all that I gained from the last time around, I can't help but think that this time was even better.