Cheating the rain

So, I don’t know about anyplace else, but here’s the way it works around here.  Last night when we went to bed the forecast called for 20% chance of rain this morning, going up to 40% at around noon or so.  Great.  20% is low enough that I was sure we’d be able to get in a good ride in the morning and then if it rained in the afternoon, fine.  Then this morning when we got up it was pretty cloudy so I checked again and now the forecast called for a 95% chance of rain starting at around 10:00.  What’s up with that?  20% is nothing—I don’t even think twice about riding when it’s a 20% chance of rain.  But 95%?  That’s different.  They usually don’t say 95% unless it’s already raining.  We were scheduled to go out with another couple at 8:30.  I thought very seriously about blowing it off because I thought that we’d only be able to get in probably an hour or so of riding before it started raining.  But when we talked about it to gather a consensus, the other guy said very confidently, “Let’s ride!”  His wife was up for it, and Brenda just laughed and said ok, she was up for it too, so what could I do?  We went riding.

We figured we’d stick mostly to the trails.  If we’re on the street and it starts raining then we’d have to deal with the rain and the traffic.  If we’re on the trails and it starts raining then all we’d have to deal with would be the rain.  So we went about 10 miles on a trail and it didn’t look or feel any more like rain than it did when we started.  So we went out on the road.  We did about another 10 miles or so, including a bathroom break, and it still didn’t look or feel any more like rain than when we started.  We were so confident that all the talk about rain was just a bunch of hooey that we even stopped at one of our typical coffee shop stops.  Ha!  95%, my foot….  (Of course you know what happened when we were at the coffee shop—it started raining.) 

Ok, so we got a little wet on the way back.  At least it wasn’t a gully-washer.  It was just one of those light little rains that, if you were driving in it you’d put your wipers on intermittent and at the slowest setting.  And I bet it didn’t even last five miles.  Afterwards Brenda said she was so glad we went out.  Me too.  It was good to get in a nice easy 30 miles.  And tomorrow is supposed to be pretty nice, so we’ll see what happens then.