Poker again and more biking

Last night after work i was going to try going to wushu again,  but sometime during the course of the day one of the muscles in my back started getting tighter and tighter so by the time i got downtown i was pretty sure trying to work out would be a really bad idea.  Instead I grabbed a quick dinner w/ several of the AnD usual suspects.  We were planning on rendezvousing with the ballet girls that night, but one of them got sick so we postponed it.

So instead we retired to SmellyDoubt's casa de completely heterosexual-partnership for some no stakes poker and Wii.  Despite being last minute, we got a good group together (bob, jto, jto's friend Dax, A, pat, stephen,mark, myself) and played one very slow,  relaxed game. 

Of course you know I didn't do badly.  It came down to me vs pat in head to head.  Once i knew i had secured atleast 2nd place I wasn't too worried anymore and we went head-to-head for a while until finally a big hand came out that had to be played.   I had A-3,  pat had A-7, so we were both confident enough to go all in...  unfortunately he won that time... but i got 2nd so i  lived to fight another day!  (so out of 5 games, I've managed to come in 1st or 2nd.

This afternoon i decided to force myself to get out of the house and get some exercise.  I took the bus to my office to get my bicycle (where i left it yesterday).  My plan was to go a little further than my last ride... this time instead of stopping at Fanling, I would push onwards to Sheung Shui Station ( 上水站 ),  the last stop on the KCR before you get to the border crossing at Lowu (which is not accessible by any other means, since its in the security zone along the border.   So Sheung Shui is as far as you can go!

I picked a good day for this ride, since it was cloudy and overcast and not super-insanely hot like it has been the last few days (still super insanely humid though).

Plus i waited til late in the day which made it a bit cooler. By the time I left  campus it was about 5:50pm.  I made it all the way to Sheung Shui station by 6:50pm.  It was just getting dark so it was good to stop.  This is what the route map looked like:

As you can see above, I put the route into gmap-pedometer,  but i forgot to copy down the route code before refreshing my browser, so i can't link to it.  but this came out to be almost exactly 10 miles.  not too bad.  Shorter than my last ride to fanling though, since I didn't start all the way from my house.

Since this is my 3rd time taking this route, i didn't get nearly as lost as the previous times,  but i didn't go exactly the same way either... so i did waste a few minutes trying to figure out which way to go. 

At Sheung Shui I locked my bike up again and left it there (rather than try to ride home (in the dark) right away.  I grabbed some gyudon at Yoshinoyas in the station (i was glad to see they had one when I walked in, as i've never stopped at this station before).

So tomorrow afternoon if the weather is cooperating, i'll head back up there by train and ride some more.  I have two choices...  go back home again - or try to go further! Since you can't get any closer to china by bike, there's no point in going north.  I was thinking about trying to go west over to the western side of the NT...  perhaps a route like this:

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=989405

Basically riding across to KCR West Line's Kam Sheung Rd....  you can take bikes on to KCR trains... so hypothetically i don't have to leave my bike way over there. :-P

Let's see if i can pull it off.

I forgot i actually stopped along the way to take a picture again.  here's the train tracks again,  this time looking north, one of the farmers is burning some brush, making an obscene cloud of air pollution!