New Chili/Soup Bowls

This is one of our purchases from Whitefish, Montana. We were surprised to find these beautiful soup bowls.....something we've been talking about buying for quite some time now because we eat a lot of soup & chili at our house. To make things simple, we just had the bowls shipped to our house. I made a few other purchases, which I will post later on.

Bike man and I spent all day doing laundry, paying bills, answering voice mail, putting away camping gear, cleaning out the car, reading emails, reading blogs and trying to catch up on regular mail. Ah...we finally got done with everything by mid afternoon. Even made a loaf of GrapeNuts bread in the bread machine. Now it's starting to feel more like home sweet home.

The sun & 70 some degree weather is perfect today, so we went for a quick 20 mile ride around Tainter Lake late in the afternoon. Holy cow, something happened when I was out west biking in the mountains. I must have conditioned myself more than I realized. Today, I attacked every hill by standing and cranking up each one. I noticed my heart rate has actually dropped as well. In just that short amount of time being out in Montana and riding in higher elevation and cycling those mountains, it really made a difference in my bike riding today. I also had the best time ever for riding the Tainter Lake route. Now I understand why athletes go out to Colorado to train in the higher elevations...it really does make a difference. Guess this means more hills for me if I want to keep my conditioning level up.

This was my last day of vacation, and I savored every single minute of it. Tomorrow is back to the real world.

PS. I miss my biking friends, Shelia, Leon, Gail, Wilson, Phil, Karen, Nancy, Jean, Marilyn, Spike, Eli, Steve, Russ, Tom, Mike, Greg, Paul, Milan, Ann, and Scott. I'm so glad I got to spend time with them on our group ride.