Training Log Archive: Thompass

I had the fortune to remember this morning that the car was totaled before I left, so I went out to do my things on a bike. It's a thirty minute bike ride to get to the outskirts of Hudson, but it's not too bad. I just wanted to get a haircut, run some errands, and hang out with friends.

As I'm getting on my bike, I check into the Great Clips waiting list for convenience's sake, and I'm off. It's about 15 km ride to the store. When I get there about fifty minutes later, I find out that I've been removed from the waiting list for taking too long. Like, damn, that's ruthless. When I signed in, it was an estimated 15 minute wait time, but when I got there the wait time had extended to 60-75 minutes of waiting. This means that the wait time was, at this point, longer than it took them to take me off the list. I sure as hell wasn't going to wait that long for a hair cut so I cut my losses and went shopping, but this is still pretty absurd to me. I couldn't check in at the beginning of my ride because they considered that to be too long, but I couldn't check in at the end without waiting a time longer than their definition of "too long". I would have had to get off my bike at some point in the ride to check in using data, which would have been a massive pain in the ass, but there's no way of knowing where I should have done this. I could have done it thirty minutes in, when I arrived in Hudson, but the wait time would have likely been beyond 45 minutes at this point and I still had twenty minutes ride to go, not to mention I would be doing this on a sidewalk somewhere. Ideally I would have done it twenty minutes into my ride, with thirty minutes left on my ride and about thirty minutes of waiting time, but I would have been stopped in the middle of a small, winding road with no shoulder and unenforced speed limits. I also could have waited an hour until the waiting time surpassed an hour, then checked in and started my ride, but I would still have an additional hour to wait, except at home instead of at the store. Plus, this was impossible because I had an arranged time to meet my friend. Now, I'm thinking of all of this in retrospect, which isn't very useful, but the struggles of getting a haircut are unreal.

Also, heading down Trout Brook Road, the resemblance to Denmark is absolutely unreal. It looks exactly like Silkeborg except with more undergrowth. The forested sections without undergrowth, though, were spitting images of what we saw in Denmark; I wish I'd taken some pictures. If only we had it mapped...