End of an Era

It has been a couple weeks since a post again, but this time I have a good excuse.  I was in Germany last week and am just getting through the backlog of work that piled up while I was gone.  I will talk about that trip a bit, but am working on organizing my pictures into an album I'll post that will be far better than just walking through the trip in text form.  Since adding pictures to this blog has not been a successful venture for me so far (due to being lazy, or not having pictures) maybe I'll have better luck making albums and just linking to them.  But before the Germany trip was Easter.
We just finished up a health challenge at work to see who could log the most hours of exercise.  I figured I'd fare well since I train somewhat regularly, but didn't account for the fact that a full round of golf can take 6 hours or something (I don't know if that is accurate, I don't golf) or doing 8 hours of yardwork on a Saturday will all count.  Most of my exercise is strenuous enough that I don't usually go for 8 hours at a time.  Easter weekend was almost an exception.  We had Good Friday off, not because it is a holiday but because they were upgrading the power system at work and needed to power the whole factory down.  This provided a good opportunity for a Nature Center ride.  Deciding driving was dumb I biked down and did the ride, then biked home.  After a quick lunch I biked to River Falls to meet my brother and head home for Easter weekend.  A good 90 mile day, and a good headwind for the trip home and to RF.  Luckily for the trip back the wind was only kind of a headwind, but it was still 30mph wind speeds so I took it slow and steady.  Spending Easter with my family was great fun, my Aunt even hid Easter eggs for us still, even though all of us "kids" are now in our mid to late 20's.  Instead of candy the eggs have $5 or $10 bills in them, so there is pretty strong motivation to find them.  Many of the hiding places have become well known, but there are always a couple surprises out there, and it is still fun to find someone else's egg before them and walk around for a while with the smug confidence imparted by this secret knowledge.