Radio Silence

Wow, the entire month of July has passed with no word from me on the McApplegate goings on.

                         

Why for? Well, if you can believe it, we’ve been even busier then usual… and that’s saying something!

July 1, Andy’s office moved from South Asheville to downtown Brevard. Run a Google Maps on that from Black Mountain, folks… for a happy household, a commute like that would just not work.

So we started looking for houses in late May, I think… our only qualifiers were 1. somewhere in between his work & mine (West Asheville), and 2. ability to mountain bike from the house. Well, okay, that second qualifier was a bit of a limiter. In Western North Carolina, however, not as much as one might encounter elsewhere.

Fast forward through a week or two of looking at varying quality of houses, and we wound up making an offer on the very first house we looked at, just up the street from the Bent Creek Experimental Forest in Asheville.

And, July 19 we closed. In between all that, we were trying to pack, train, WORK (you know, so we can PAY for the new place!), and maintain our sanity. We actually wound up delaying the move for a week, because we simply hadn’t gotten enough done.

Even though we’ve officially moved, we’re not anywhere near done with the Black Mountain house: just today I was there packing up a carload of odds and ends. Sometime after next week we’ll list it either for sale or rent, but for now it sits waiting for someone to love it.

We’re barely settled into the new house (bed! Toiletries! I can sorta find my work clothes!) But this much is clear: it has not been an ideal precursor to our goal event of the season. For one more week, though, I will put that thought out of my mind as we enter the final taper for the Leadville 100, which holy crappity crap is this coming Caturday!

I think I’m in pretty good shape. I’ve got more enduro events under my belt than last year, I managed to get down to race weight again, and Andy’s already out there acclimatizing (and recovering from our stressful July).

And, we live in a place where in just 6 minutes I can ride my bike from garage door to trailhead. Life is good.

Next update? Might not be till after the Big Event. Wish us luck!

Largest purchase of our lives and I document it with a crappy cell phone photo. :-)