To Goal or Not To Goal?

My previous post seems to be pulling my relatives out of the woodwork! So far it's unanimous, setting goals is not necessary for having fun on your bike. Maybe not. The sad truth of it is that I live and die by goals. Sales goals, labor budget goals, inventory budgets, that sort of thing. If I miss my goals enough times, I basically don't eat. So you see, goals are somewhat important to me. Anyway, since goals seem to running my life right now, I decided I should have a goal that forces me to balance my life out a little bit. If I don't, the monster that is bicycle retailing will consume me whole.
I had a great ride tonight. It was one of those times when you decide at the last minute to go. The weather was threatening to be mean earlier in the day but the rain held off and the evening, although humid, turned out to be really nice. I sneaked on to the back of tonight's "Girl Power" ride. Our ride leader, Cathy, has a great route that I wanted to document using my new GPS computer toy. (Garmin Edge 205). The ride is twenty miles over some beautiful paved quiet roads, which if you are from around here you know, is a pretty rare treat., At one point we were riding on the Boulevard in Mountain Lakes which was paved recently along it's entire length. This stretch of pavement is so sweet I found myself just peddling as hard as I could for as long as I could. It was so much fun I barked like a dog when I got to the end! Sometimes the best experiences are the little ones that come about serendipitously.
The Garmin unit fascinates me. It stores all of my rides and allows me to download the data in to a variety of different mapping programs. I can also download on to a website called motionbased.com. The free "lite" version of there software allows you to see your route overlaid on to Google Earth photos. Pretty cool stuff although it is a little unnerving to know that there are 27 satellites in space watching me ride my bike. Weird.