Rear View '19 - Fall

I got the OS Bikes Blackbuck up and running again this past Fall

 Hello Readers! Once again I am doing the annual retrospective on what went down over the year of 2019. This post will focus on Fall. Previous posts have covered the other seasons for a total of four, one each week of December on Thursdays.This is the last "Rear View" post of the series. 

Fall kicked off with a ride with N.Y. Roll which went really well. We stopped in LaPorte City at Rockets Bakery and then came back via the Cedar Valley Nature Trail.

I ended up doing a couple of rides in that general direction over the Fall, seeing roads and views I hadn't seen before from a bicycle saddle. The Southeastern quarter of Black Hawk County had been a mystery to me, but no longer.

There was also a chilly early morning ride at the beginning of November with N.Y. Roll and several other folks starting out of Hudson, Iowa. We rode down to the start and I came back with N.Y. Roll for a good long one to kick off the chilly part of Fall. October was pretty much shot, since it rained nearly the entire month, and then it got super cold. We even had a bit of snow for a spell at which time I got the fat bike out for a bit of a ramble in the white stuff. That has since melted and we are just brown and chilly as the year closes out.

Of course, by now you all know that my time at Europa Cycle and Ski has come to a close since the place is going out of business. This was probably the main theme for 2019 for me, because this has been coming on for a long, long time. Unfortunately, not a lot could be said while things slid downhill for various reasons. Since that was the case, I want to apologize to local customers and those that felt left out of the loop. It was not for me to "let the cat out of the bag", as it were. That made things even harder. Keeping face and trying to work through that was a big time sap on my energy. Having a far less profitable year in terms of work satisfaction and in terms of pay added to the pile. Not knowing the future of my employment status was hard. No help at all from a rudderless management, that's for sure.

As I said the other day, I think better times, and far less stressful times, are ahead. I hope to tell a much more detailed and better story for you all in 2020, but for now, that was the year that was 2019, and I am really glad to see this one go into the past for several reasons. Definitely not one of the best years of my life, but definitely not the worst either. There were good times, certainly, but the whole employment/work situation ended the year on a down note. Well, another way to look at it is that this whole mess at the end of the year was a blessing, because I can finally move on. So, that's what I'm taking away from 2019.

Onward........