On Thursday night we packed up in preparation for riding the tandem to work, but we knew, however, that it was an iffy proposition. The weather folks were predicting a decent chance of a couple of hours of rain in the morning. If it happened early enough, we might ride if the road wasn’t too wet. If it happened late enough, we would ride before the rain ride and everything would be dry by quitting time.
When the alarm went off at 5:00 AM I went and checked the radar on the computer. And while my calculations from watching the current loop and their future cast predicted that the narrow visible line of thunderstorm would arrive after we were inside at work, we both agreed it was too close to risk. The last thing we needed was to get soaked a mile from work and have not only our cycling clothes get wet, but the work clothes we were going to change into as well. We went back to bed.
When the alarm went off again at 5:30 we got up and unpacked everything, got dressed, made our hot beverages and headed into work where we had our pre-staged breakfast waiting for us. About a mile from work the first large raindrop hit the windshield. The amount of those big drops increased in reverse proportion exponentially as we got closer to work. By the time we pulled into the parking lot it was a full on deluge. It was coming down so heavy that we opted to forgo parking in our usual far left corner spot and get one a lot closer to the door. In spite of cutting our distance to walk in by two-thirds and having a large golf umbrella, we still got soaked from the knees down and merely damp below the waist.
Lets recap, we got up at 5:30 and left the house at 6:00 to arrive at work at 6:15 and get really wet. If we had bike ridden, the time line would have went like this, up at 5:00, out the door at 5:30 getting to work at around 6:00, or about 10 minutes ahead of the rain. So, to avoid getting wet, we adjusted our schedule just enough to cause us to get wet.