What isn’t new is the real question. I’ve been busy with all sorts of crazy holiday adventures of late. I’ll work chronologically through these endeavors.

To begin, I missed the autumn season here in New England during my trip overseas. I came back earlier from Australia than planned and therefore should still have gotten a taste of fall, but the weather jumped from warm to freezing seemingly overnight. I had my requisite 3ish weeks off of the bike to constitute an off season and was very excited to be riding again. However, with the temps dipping into the teens in the morning and merely 20s and 30s during mid-day, it’s cooooold! In fact, two days before Thanksgiving, I set out in the morning to wonderfully blue skies, but came home just two hours later caked in snow and ice! Thankfully, my neoprene booties, regular shoe covers, toe warmers, and wool socks kept my toes slightly above the freezing point. Plus, even though my glasses were thoroughly iced over, I wouldn’t have been able to see anyway with the blizzard like conditions outside! Now that’s safe.

The more recent revelations involve my shoulders. They both hurt quite a bit, but have been feeling better as the days and weeks tick by. I’m trying hard to not be a hypocondriac, so I would just explain how my knee was doing during my doctor’s visits, but then at home I’d complain to everyone else about these other aches and pains. Finally I told the doc that I have shoulder problems, which resulted in some physical tests and an MRI. Diagnosis: torn cartilage and a fractured humerus! (…the upper bone in the arm.) I know you’re all experienced radiologists, so you can clearly see the white “explosion” at the top of the bone on the right. Yup, fracture. The good news is that it’s now about six weeks post crash so it’s healing well and there’s not much to be done anyway. I still need to baby it a bit, but so far so good. Plus I’ve been doing some PT with therabands and the fine people of Access Rehabilitation. They’re wonderful and have been seeing me time and again over the years, always getting me back to full strength.

Next up, Thanksgiving! Food was of course plentiful and delicious. I made a pumpkin praline tort for dessert, which was the icing on the cake - pun intended. The company was wonderful up at my aunt and uncle’s new house in Maine. Plus my second cousins (or cousins once removed or whatever it’s called) came over with even more dessert, so we had something like five full dessert items for nine people. Remarkable.

During the post appetiser/pre entree period, Robbie and I played the world’s longest game of Jenga. Coincidentally it also turned out to be the world’s first ever draw. We played until the wooden logs darn near touched the ceiling and decided it would be wise to call it quits since a) it was time for dinner and b) we didn’t feel like picking up the mess. Honestly, it was probably 4 feet high. (We’ve been playing lots of games lately. Robbie talks about games of Scrabble in his recent entry, and I’ll point out the score is now 3 to 1, in favor of the good guy!)

The Splaines picked theirs out first, which went down in a matter of seconds thanks to the green machine. It turns out that it already has some ornaments in the form of an infestation, as seen by the sizable hole in the trunk. But they’re honorable folks, so rather than ditching the tree in the surrounding forrest and picking another, they loaded it up and headed for home. (I think Decia in particular loves it!)

Happy Holidays from the Kings!

I’m riding my bike again. I was officially cleared by the good doctors at Access Sports Medicine last Wednesday, roughly three and a half weeks after my human bowling ball experiment in Australia. It feels excellent to be able to ride again, and relatively pain free. The human body is an amazing being.

In the meantime while waiting for the all-clear to ride again, I took up hiking. They were very mellow hikes with an estimated elevation change of about 12 feet over the course of an hour long expedition. Then one day while spending time in Vermont with Mayo, we decided on a portion of the Long Trail near Bromley Mountain. Thankfully I brought my set of carabiners, because this was an epic hike. Oh, I brought my Camelback too. Wisely. The light at the end of this proverbial tunnel was left over Halloween candy. Mayo brought two pieces, which we shared at the half-way mark. In this picture, she’s hoarding one piece which warranted a tongue gesture by yours truly.
My dear friend Scott Nielsen made the trek up to Vermont the same weekend, which was superb. I don’t have any good pictures (nor any pictures, for that matter) of us hanging out, but the sky was particularly impressive which looked like an epic fire in the sky. This picture doesn’t do complete justice to the scene, but it was one of the more amazing sunsets I’ve ever seen.
Ciao.
tk

That’s right amigos, it’s time to get philosophical. I’m now nearly three weeks out from the broken tibia and life appears goes on. In that period of time I’ve concluded that it’s nearly impossible to have a concrete plan for one’s life. Actually, scrub that; I should say it’s nearly impossible to have one’s concrete plans always come to fruition. Take for example my experience in Australia: my plan was to finish stage one, next finish the week long race, then travel to New Zealand for a few more races, thus returning back to the United States on November 12th. Clearly my plan did not culminate the way I would have expected as I returned home just one week after the original departure date. It’s cliché, but life takes some unexpected twists and turns – some for the better and others not so much – and there’s only so much that one can do to affect these changes. Please understand that my Australian experience itself isn’t something that I want to dwell on, despite being the subject of three consecutive blog entries. Instead, I want it to be educational. For me, this incident gave me the opportunity to put things into perspective. Picture, if you will, everyone’s lives as a deck of cards. My particular deck has been tossed into the air and landed all scattered about – some up, others down, and pretty much all over the place and completely out of order. I know full well that I can’t ride a bike for all eternity, and that there’ll come a point when I have to move onto what some people call a “real” job (if those people only knew how much goes into being a professional cyclist… however, we’ll leave that for another day). For years I’ve thought about what I want to do in life (that is, post cycling career), and for one reason or another, lying in my hospital bed in Australia allowed me to really collect my cards, so to speak, and organize them in a respectable semblance of order. That is, I’ve laid out a basic plan for what I’d like to do when my body and mind tell me it’s time to hang up the bike.* I’ll leave you pondering what it’ll be, because I know you’re all gripped with this particular blog entry and sitting intently on the end of your seats wondering what’s next. Time will tell. After all, no one knows how much of this particular plan will actually materialize…

Subject numero dos: If you’re wondering why the heck there’s an advertising billboard at the top of the screen, it’s part of Google’s plan to take over the world… and I’m a willing participant! For everyone who clicks on the advertisement, I get some to-be-determined-type of payment. I’m not allowed to tell you to click on it and I can’t click on it myself. So that’s that.

* As mentioned above, things fall into perspective when one has dodged a serious bullet concerning one’s well-being. Example: crashing a bike really hard. That said, I love my current career, I love most things bike-related, and I don’t have any immediate plans to retire.

I’ll leave you with a picture of my recent drive to Vermont. What a beautiful state.

Adios.