Courtenay Brown

These sunset photos are both from this past Saturday night. I found myself thinking "wow Reno is awesome!" as I took these but actually all day long I was just counting the minutes until we got out of the driness, heat, and seediness (it is a gambling town after all).

So, I got my camera and cable situation figured out (thank you Glenn!!) so now I have some more photos to share.Here I am in Philly with a 4-leaf clover I found in the lawn. I am so smiley because certain other people thought that looking for one would be fuitless but they were wrong: At DQ on the way home from the Mankato RR at Nature Valley, I had my first blizzard, and saw this cool car: Taitt's stylin' and comfy ride on the way back ...

UPDATE: We are no longer engaged. But the photos are still lovely, as is Devon. But we are not a We anymore.-------Here are some photos from Devon's proposal on Lemon Hill last week! I'll give you the play-by-play (thanks to Josh Kadis for the photos, which are lovely despite my unglamourous post-race outfit)....

Yesterday was the Reading race, the second leg of the Triple Crown race series here in Pennsylvania. Like in Lancaster, the women did a criterium, then the pro men did a road race. The race was a lot of fun. I was worried because it was a 1.9 mile loop, usually criterium courses are a mile or less, and I was expecting the course to feel long and boring. But it was great - there were 8 turns, some little rises and descents, plenty of varied pavement (i.e. potholes!), some wind, and a lot of spectators. We did 13 laps, none of which felt boring due to the big teams attacking, countering, etc. I tried to race ...

My teammate Taitt headed back to the West Coast on Sunday, but Martina got here yesterday! She, Devon and I went for a ride today...Here we are after an encounter (verbal, not physical!) with a crazed middle-aged mom in a crappy car: Here are some little geese along the bike path: We saw two deer, but one ran off snorting when Devon did his wild-turkey imitation: A cute shop dog ...

Yesterday was the Lancaster race - a crit for me, a road race for the boys. Lancaster is part of Philly week, now referred to as the"Triple Crown", and this is the first year they have had a series of women's races. Lancaster and Thursday's race at Reading are not NRC races for us, but since Liberty Classic (on Sunday) is the biggest women's race on the NRC calendar, everyone is here for the first two races.Anyway, the race was harder than I expected. The course was windy and there was a lot of bad pavement, plus on top of the usual pro women's teams we also had T-Mobile. I hung in there, once again had a ...

Sadly I don't have pictures from this race. But it was awesome! It's a really cool technical course in Arlington VA, 1K long with lots of corners, questionable pavement, wind... no time to get bored! We started with 60 girls, including the usual heavy-hitters from Colavita, Cheerwine, Lipton, and Victory Brewing since it was an NRC race. My mom was there cheering (and once again there is no way I would have known she was there because she is a very quiet cheerleader but Devon was with her vociferously!) and she said that almost immediately there were girls who got "left behind" and "told to stop racing" (i.e. dropped and pulled). I felt like I had a great race, ...

Captech Classic is this cool race in downtown Richmond. It goes up hill, then down, then back up again. I am great at going downhill but uphill is not exactly my forte... anyway I did manage to get my first ever call-up at an NRC race which was pretty awesome, apparently I am the "McGuire Danger Woman"! I did not finish this hard windy race, but Taitt did which was pretty awesome. Brenda Lyons was second, which was also awesome. Next year I will give it another go, with more attentive positioning and better preparation.I took some action shots of the men's race while I was in the feed zone at the top of the hill, but ...

Here are some more photos from the trip:me and taitt riding down cumberstone rd.then we saved another turtle! we actually have saved 3 turtles so far this trip but for the third one i did not have my camera :(the coffeeshop where we goofed off on the internet in nice air conditioning sporting our farmer tans