Snake...a Snake!!

Snake Alley Crit that is! We LOVE this race! Such a great fan friendly course! We love to sit on the hill and watch the racers conquer (or struggle up) it! Almost as fun as Jingle Cross.

We headed out early this morning to Burlington, site of the world's most crookedest street, Snake Alley! It is still used for cars, but you can only go down it, not up. The bikes have to go up it! Day was supposed to be mid 70's with sun, but that did not happen. We got to the race an hour early so Keith could warm up. The boys and I headed to the hill to watch the Masters race before the Cat 5's. One poor Master was doing an earlier race (50+) and broke his front wheel, so he tried to race the Master 40+, halfway up the hill his broke his rear wheel! What bad luck! But goo dluck he had brought 2 sets of wheels so he mixed them up to get a full set and was going to try and jump in to try and race yet another race this afternoon. Not sure how he ended up doing.

Keith was awesome in his race! There was 28 starters in his field. You can read his version on his racing blog. But from our point of view, it was great! 1st lap he was front and center!! Didn't want to get caught with the slower guys in the back, so he bee-lined it for first to the hill. 2nd lap and he's again in the front!! 3rd lap he's with 2 other guys in the front. After that he started to get caught and pushed out the back. Not horribly though he stayed strong. Even managed to give us a smile for the camera on one of the later laps. They did 8 laps! Keith placed 8th out of 27 finishers! One guy quit and was later found puking his guts out, lol. Yeah I bet a lot of riders felt like that too!
After his race we got some yummy food and sat on the hill to watch the Cat 4 guys. Keith knows a couple in that race from our local rides. The one guy ended up getting 1st place! Go Carson!! We didn't stay to watch anymore racing, wanted to get to our hotel in Muscatine. Kaden fell asleep in the car on the way up. Mommy did too shortly! Gt checked in and unloaded, then we set off to hit some geocaches. UGG! There is a sprt of powertrail, meaning lots of caches in a line along a trail, pretty much. This trail was set along the Mississippi river which has had some SEVERE flooding! We found the 1st cache soaked. 2nd cache had fisherman, so we couldn't get. 3rd was missing, 4th we found 5th was missing and we gave up after that! The caches were is such poor shape, wet and dumb that it wasn't worth our energy to walk the next 5 miles seeing if they were or were not there. So we gave up and headed to the park where the race is gonna be tomorrow. Found 1 cache there, again poor shape, wet, pointless! Checked out the race course, which is confusing to me. And headed off for dinner! Went to Applebee's right by our hotel. Yummy food!! Kaden had 2 mini burgers (scarfed down in no time!), Salem had grilled cheese, I had their orientla chicken salad (not much lettuce :( ) and Keith had his favorite, the steak topped with shrimp and cheese! And we got to split a tiny hot fudge sundae for my b-day!Back to the hotel we went to the pool!! There were only 2 other kids in it. Whom we recognized from thebike races. Their sister is a junior. Anyway, the kids played in the pool and Keith and I sat in the hot tub. For once our kids weren't the rowdiest! We let ours go while the other mom kept telling hers to stop being so loud and rouwdy. Ah no biggie everyone was having fun! The pool was nice, it was very shallow, so the kids could go the whole length without it being over the heads!

After the pool we came up to the rom and chilled out until bed time. They messed around fighting for bed position then both crashed very quickly! Now it's our turn to crash! But not on the bike!!