We’re playing hooky from work Thursday and Friday for Holy Week. We’ll be going to St. Peter’s tonight, but we take most of the day to ride our bikes to Mount Vernon.

It’s really, really windy all day, making the trek something of a death march at times. Actually, with the wind pretty steadily from the northwest all day, the ride down to Mount Vernon, the ride south, is easier. And it’s not really until we’re just getting up to the bridge to cross into the city on the way back that we’re heading straight into the wind.

But at that point we’re about at the end of the forty-mile round trip. We’re tired. It’s hard.

I swear it’s even harder on me than it is on Dawn. She’s such a lithe, little thing. I feel like a big lardass. I feel like I’m almost a damn mainsail in this wind. Plus she’s on her light, new Specialized bike. Even she can pick it up, with one hand. I’m on the sturdy Bianchi commuter bike, which probably weighs twice what hers does. Then I outweigh her by sixty pounds.

A mainsail, I tell you.

Mount Vernon itself is great fun. I take the new camera, but sadly don’t have that many opportunities for pictures. I’m on the bike, pedaling and steering for so much of the trip. Then there’s no photography allowed in the house itself, the tour of which takes about forty-five minutes. But I snap a few pix.

Clearly the lawn has been visited recently by many geese. Goose shit is green, somehow disturbingly green. I of course manage to traipse in some.