Amy and I decided to spend the day driving around Vermont since open-moonroof weather decided to suddenly grace us. Got a bit of a sunburn. 🙂 Actually, I did my 15k oil change first thing, and then we headed out. There wasn’t much of a plan, other than to head west, and we did a nice big loop out towards New York and back. Having only really heard about the damage from hurricane Irene last year, we were shocked as we moved around the state. Lots of rehab work along the rivers and washed out sheds/barns/houses. For some reason I guess we assumed it would have been mostly cleaned up by now, but there is still a lot of damage and signs of flooding. In some of the valleys and notches there were indications of a tremendous amount of water. Unthinkable amounts of water. It was hard to imagine how some of the roads and buildings were still there. Clearly some structures had already been rebuilt but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

We were enjoying the cruise too much to really stop and gape in any one particular spot, but I did get out of the car to snap a picture of one of the bridges in Queechee. I think the current state is probably mostly that of repair, but you can see how much water must have been flowing down that river to damage the bridge.

It’ll be interesting to see what they can do with that and how long it continues to take.

Other than that, the cruise was pretty fantastic. The roads are starting to even out and the WRX is so pleasant. Even without any upgraded parts it sounds so great, and it handles everything so well. The gears whine lightly and the exhaust bleats lowly. When you start to push it, the engine growls a little bit. I love driving it casually almost more than I do fast though. Just feeling it restrain itself is somewhat satisfying. And the car managed exactly 30mpg over the course of the day, which is pretty dang good considering. Lots of coasting down mountain passes helps.

Oh, I also joined Amy for the Shamrock Shuffle 5k yesterday. Normally I go to these things and then sort of regret standing on the sidelines even though I don’t particularly enjoy running. I haven’t done anything active since last summer but I figured I’d save myself the angst and just tough it out. Put in a decent 34 minutes, which isn’t fast, but at least I kept running. Amy was there to greet me at the end. 🙂

The bikes are getting tuned this week. That’s something I can really get behind.