Light list, Heavy Mud, Heavy Rain

My list for the three day weekend was very light although I had a lot of smaller mental projects that I did not bother to put on there. Late Saturday afternoon I got out on my new Veteran Sherman for a quick ride to DD.  I wanted to see how the street tire I got unexpectedly with the wheel felt doing high speed open road cruising.  The Sherman makes it stupid easy to go fast, probably a little too easy.  My top speed on the ride topped out at over 35 MPH and I spent most of the trip cruising close to 30.

I forgot, on Friday night I did some experimenting with capturing mixed reality content.  MRC is when you mesh together VR footage with live footage of a person in VR.  I had some crude success doing so.  I just wanted to test the basic concept, I need to do a lot of logistical changes if I want it to look clean.  It’s still funny.

On Sunday I had made plans to meet up with Dan, who last visited in March.  Dan is a fellow EUC rider who visits Florida occasionally.  He said he was down with taking a ride into the swamp which is always interesting.  Well I had no clue just how interesting it was going to be.

The last time I went to the swamp a couple months ago there were a lot of wet spots but it wasn’t too bad.  During that ride I only went a few miles before reversing directions.  When we started the ride Sunday there was more water/muck in the beginning but not anything too horrible.  I said repeatedly I was surprised it was still that wet because we had not had significant rain in a long time at that point.  We also only saw a couple of gators during the first half of the ride.  Well both things were going to change a lot.

When we hit the second half of the trail loop things got bad, really bad.  The muck sections were replaced with long sections of the trail that were completely underwater.  There were also sections where the trail was washed out and a small river was flowing across.  We had no choice but to carry our wheels across these sections.  My V11 weighs almost 60 pounds so this got pretty challenging pretty quickly.

The gator sightings increased in number and proximity.  Several times we had to ride by full size adult gators with only a couple feet to spare.  Dan normally let me go first since I had experience with gator riding.  I told him that they will normally stay still like a statue or dash into the water, we had gators that did both.  The most ridiculous part of the adventure came at another submerged section where we had to carry our wheels past another full sized gator, again with only a couple feet to spare.  Even I had never had to do that before and was a bit nervous.

The video of the ride is over 40 minutes long but it is well worth it IMO.  It did a good job of capturing just how ridiculous conditions got.

I was exhausted by the time we got back.  I spent most of the evening editing the footage.

I awoke Monday morning and did a double take when I looked outside.  It looked like we just experienced a tropical storm, the yard was completely flooded.  Evidently the cold front that came through overnight dumped inches of rain.  Cindy said she heard the rain all night, I was so exhausted I must have slept through it.  I was in shock that I had to put on my boots to walk out to the chickens.  I am pretty sure that I never have had standing water on the property in December during the nearly 20 years I have lived there.

Katie and DJ were over for a good portion of the day yesterday.  As is normally the case, DJ wanted to spend most of his time with me which is cute.  I did try to buzz around getting what seems like countless small indoor to do’s done throughout the day since the weather outside was not great.  Before I knew it my three day weekend was over but it certainly was filled to the brim with adventure, love, and fun which is all you can ask for.