One spring ritual in east Texas and southeast Texas is the arrival of the “love bugs”. Today on my bike ride as I turned off of Community Drive onto Loop 494 I started to see love bugs in the air. You may see cars and trucks with their front ends covered in multitudes of squished black bugs. These vehicles are doing their part to reduce the population of these little critters. As a biker riding into a swarm of these things can be annoying to say the least. After you get a bunch in your mouth and down your jersey the joy of biking can be tested. Fortunately today after I rode through the initial 30 or so they disappeared. The amount of rain we get seems to trigger their arrival and last year’s drought made them rare. So far today’s encounter is the most for the year. From past experience I learned the terminal velocity for a love bug is 19 mph so if you run into a swarm depending on your inclination you should go above or below that speed.

The ride began at 9:52 AM while the temperature hovered at a rather pleasant 75 degrees with mostly cloudy skies. As the ride progressed the temperature went up to 83 degrees and the clouds broke up some. Humidity of 64% made for a moist ride. Stopping at the New Caney Chevron station at US59 and FM1485 meant wiping my brow for sweat, refilling my waterbottle with ice water and using the high powered hand dryer in the rest room to remove sweat on my arms. I never tries that before and it was effective for about 10 minutes of riding. I think the real reason is the southeast breeze (6.9 mph) felt cool enough to make me think I was dry.

With 30.7 miles today my May looks like a good riding month but my wife told me yesterday she read that May is the month we usually get the most rain so I could have some rain outs. May miles total 63.31, this week totals 93.49 (1 April day included) and year to date 1998.97 miles. So close to hitting 2000. Riding time under 2 hours at 1:59:43, 11:37 time stopped and an average speed of 15.4 mph. I hit 22.7 mph as my max speed and 81.3 RPM as my average cadence.

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