If you find yourself having to travel a long distance, I highly recommend going by bike. At least, as opposed to swimming. Swimming takes a long, long time, particularly if you have to breast-stroke the entire thing due to a complete inability to front crawl more than 10 yards before getting out of breath.

Saturday was an early morning. I had set my alarm for 4:30, but actually managed to awake about 10 minutes before that, which gave me time for a leisurely breakfast. Note: I don’t know what birds do at 5am, but they certainly are noisy doing it. It sounded like some kind of ornithological prison riot outside, and we had all our windows open to save on AC costs. I left at 5 and headed over to Brian’s house to retrieve him;