The Same Sky?

Today Isais blew through town.

To be fair, it wasn't quite as bad as I expected it to be.  Yes, we had a lot of rain this morning and early this afternoon. The wind broke a few twigs off trees and cardboard signs off stores.  

Worse was predicted.  The Weather Service even issued a tornado watch for this city, and a warning for Monmouth County, NJ (where I went to high school) and Suffolk County, about 50 kilometers from here.

As clouds thickened, the sky darkened, so the watch/warning was in my mind. So was this cloud formation I saw the other day:

It's hard to believe I was looking at the same sky today.

The Real Uses Of Bike Tools

Do you have a Campagnolo corkscrew?

Or a Park Tool pizza cutter?

Or a Maillard Helicomatic freewheel remover with a built-in bottle opener?

Well, then, you are misguided.  A real cyclist knows you don't need food- (or drink-) specific utensils:

I mean, you can eat pizza with a bicycle fork.  Right?

Well, all right:  As a New Yorker of Italian heritage, I would never, ever use anything besides my fingers to handle  Neopolitan or Sicilian slices. (A person of my background also does not allow any sort of topping on her pizza.  Pineapples?  Barbecued beef?  They're like chocolate chips in a bagel, as far as I'm concerned.)

So what do you eat with your cone wrench?

Girls Rule--The World!

Half a century ago, Beryl Burton broke the 12-hour time trial record.  Not "just" the women's record, mind you:  She broke the record by a full eight kilometers (five miles), which is something like a runner shaving five minutes off a marathon record.  

Almost two years ago, Denise Mueller-Korenek rode faster on a bicycle than any woman--or man--before her.  She beat a then-23-year-old record by 27.3 kilometers, or 17 miles, per hour.  At 296 kilometers per hour (183.93 mph), she rode faster than an Airbus A340 taking off.

Now, here's another addition to the pantheon of women breaking men's records:  Cat Dixon and Raz Marsden pedaled a tandem bicycle around the world in 263 days, beating the previous record by 18 days.

Cat Dixon (l) and Raz Marsden (r)

Their 29,391 km (18,263 mile) route took them through 25 countries, where they encountered everything from a continent-wide heat wave in Europe, monsoons in Asia and brush fires in Australia.  

But perhaps their most daunting challenge was one they couldn't have anticipated.  They caught one of the last ferries back to their native England--where they began their ride--on the day, in March, when the COVID-19-induced travel ban began.

Oh, and they're only a few years younger than I am!

Their feat has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records.

(Thanks to "voyage of the eye" for alerting me to Ms. Dixon's and Marsden's story.)