Lonely Roads

The Seattle International Randonneurs had their 200k ride last weekend. I have met a number of people from the SIR and found them to be my kind of people. I wish that Seattle wasn't a 5 hour car ride away. Long slow distances with junk food and coffee sounds like a good time to me. Yesterday I was out on my 173.8 Km ride. I did not have any company and the scenery wasn't as pretty but the sun did come out and I had my NPR podcast friends to ride away the lonely hours with. It become shirtsleeve weather after a couple of hours. It was the first time my bare arms have seen daylight since last year.
I thought about a conversation I had with John Speare a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about bike lanes: the good, the bad and the incomplete. I have discovered if you want to see miles and miles of beautiful bike lanes head out to the Rathdrum Prairie. The Rathdrum Prairie is having a building boom and along with the subdivisions there are oversized 4 lane arterials with bike lanes. Up until last year these were country roads and for the most part they still travel past acre after acre of farmland. It is a strange experience to be on a road so big and so empty and have a pristine bike lane to use. Too bad these lanes are not on any of the roads that commuting cyclists actually use.