Rode to Buda with DuShun and Caesar today. 43 miles. Beautiful day–warm, sunny, clear. But a stiff wind out of the south, which we cursed loudly on the way down, and enjoyed quietly on the way back. At times we wound it up to 30 mph on the flats, which felt great.
The ride was excellent, but was somewhat marred when we were getting back into town and a motorist heatedly berated us for not keeping to the bike lane (which was heavy with gravel, debris, and parked cars), and other imagined violations. I countered (not heatedly) that we hadn’t done anything wrong (I know the law on this), and if he didn’t know that, he shouldn’t be allowed to drive. This riled him even more–he got out of his truck and threatened me, but didn’t actually hit me. We continued with a lively exchange of views. Dushun stepped in at this point and goaded him just a bit. He apparently felt exposed, and decided to retreat to the safety of his truck to yell at us some more. I suggested that if he were really that angry at us, he should have just run us over. At that point, the quality of his insults took a nosedive: he retreated to the old ad-hominem standbys of saying nasty things about our parentage, sexuality, and in DuShun’s case, color. We had to laugh. DuShun asked his 10-year-old son “Are you proud of your dad?”. The son realized his father was being ridiculous. When the light turned green again (he had been holding up traffic through a couple of cycles of the lights), he drove off.
Once we got through the intersection, Caesar (who had ridden across at some point) was talking to a woman who was about to call it in to the cops. We told her not to bother, but once we got back to DuShun’s place, we did.