Rain and such

I'm no climatologist, but I'm quite sure that it's El Nino. Others call it La Nina. Perhaps it's global warming or maybe even global weirding. Yes my friends, today's round two of ONLY IN AMERICA is the whack weather that's found only in the USA. This topic is especially pronounced to me because I returned to the home of the free and land of the brave and went immediately to Santa Barbara, CA. I had a pretty awesome stay at a pair of locations in town with amazing friends, complete with awesome hang out sessions with those friends and others, great views on some superb training rides, wine tasting, a concert, a ton of Mexican food, like butter scooter rides, MY BIRTHDAY PARTY, a bike race, and about a billion other things. Here's a gallery that shows some of said awesome adventures. And only one picture is upside-down. That's what I call successful.

Right right, the weather. After nine flawlessly sunny days in Santa Barbara, the sky opened up and it started raining. And it rained. And rained. And rained. And rained. And now it's four days later and after an afternoon of only a little bit of rain, it's raining again. A stark contrast to the perfection which I was afforded last week - and all the more ironic or unlucky or obvious on account of this taking place the moment our pre-ToCA camp started.And as it relates to ONLY IN AMERICA, the weather here in America is going whack on large account of it being so enormous. I have my teammates from all sorts of countries that definitely experience their own extremes - Australia is 120 degrees F right now and burning out of control in the south, or Norway... which is rumored to be cold at various times throughout the year - but America is so darned big that it gets a little bit of everything; actually it's so darned big it get a LOT of everything! Heck, as I've explained to a bunch of my teammates, California alone should be it's own country on account of having such a plethora of climates: beach, desert, high altitude as well as multiple mountain ranges, great petrified forests, the deepest lake in the USA (I think), and so so much more. But tack onto California the rest of the USA and you've got yourself a strikingly vast area of land and resultingly a ton of different weather.Again, I digress. The weather in the US seems to me to be ONLY IN THE USA because it changes so startlingly quickly. Take Chicago for example. The team had a publicity event there late last week where it was hovering around 15 degrees F and blowing like stink. Two days later it was a record high of 52! This week of sun followed by a week of rain is the same thing. The ice storms that wipe out power to entire regions are another example. Or how about the threat of flooding across the entire northern mid-west right now? Or when I moved out of Boulder, CO in early December where it was seriously 45 the day I left and -16 two days later. Yes, NEGATIVE sixteen. Yeah.On a side note to those out of the know, weather is the universal language of cyclists. It's lame as all get out, but as soon as you reconvene with teammates or cycling friends you inevitably ask how their weather was in their last week/vacation/month/time since you saw them last. Or else you complain about your weather. Or brag about your weather (speaking of lame). Good times. Now you know.ONLY IN AMERICA...