So now you’ve heard about the initiation of the car troubles and my race report at Lake Logan. That only takes us to late morning on Saturday. By golly, we still have a day and a half left of the weekend. So what happened next?
The original plan was to go straight from Lake Logan to Alisha Little’s house in Lenior. You should have seen the packet of directions I had printed out. Home to Bud’s place, Bud’s place to Lake Logan, Lake Logan to Alisha’s and Alisha’s to home. At least I was somewhat organized.
So just after Canton, we’re sitting in 5mph traffic on I-40 debating whether we stop in at Asheville Ford to see how our sick car is doing. More importantly, we want to find out how soon our sick car will be well. Well, since we spent such a long time in traffic (all that delay due to two lanes being squeezed to one lane for a measley 5o yards), Asheville Ford got around to calling us before we got there. Thank goodness for cell phones. The scoop is that they “might” be done fixing the car before the end of the day Saturday. Hmmmm. “Might” isn’t enough to make us hang out in Asheville, so we headed on down the hill to Lenior.
We made it down to Lenior to see Alisha in great time once the traffic opened up, but needed to figure out how we were going to get our car back. The dealership repair center was closed on Sunday and I was laptop-less and had work to do on Monday. More stress! However, it seems that Asheville Ford is bucking the trend of regular over-charging and crappy customer service that one often finds at dealership repair centers. They agreed to let us pay by credit card over the phone and arrange for us to drop off the rental and pick up our car on Sunday by hiding keys in the gas caps. Let me just say that Asheville Ford rocks. If you’re ever in the North Carolina mountains and drive a Ford / Mercury that gives you trouble while there, this is the place to go.
On Saturday night, Alisha baked some pizzas with gluten free dough that were delicious and filling. Then she baked gluten free muffins that I ate way too many of the following day. Well, only three. One before the ride we did and two after. I did pick out the smallest ones, although if you’ve ever seen Alisha’s muffins, that’s not saying much.
So while Gary and Remy drove back to Asheville to do the car swap, Alisha and I rode a flattish ride she calls the “End of Pavement Ride.” Basically, we ride west-ish until the pavement turns to dirt. Actually, we ride a little on the dirt because we had to check out the waterfall, which was mighty nice. This particular dirt road heads straight up the mountain up to Blowing Rock or something like that. Looks like a fun ride on the (triple chain ring) cross bike in my future!
In hindsight, I really should have taken some pictures, but I don’t have internet service on my cell phone and our digital camera is a bit bulky to carry around on a bike ride. Sorry. Anyway, it was a really pretty ride and Alisha was nice enough to let me borrow a normal looking helmet so she wouldn’t be embarrassed by having to ride with dorko tri girl on a tri bike with an aero helmet. In my defense, I did bring my training wheels, so it wasn’t all that bad.
So after all that, a shower, some stretching and relaxing on the front porch, the boys returned from their adventure. Then we packed up and made it home without further incident, which was refreshing.
It was quite a weekend.
I was expecting some kind of epic disaster because that’s how my weekends that start like yours typically go. Glad you made it home safely.