January Long Ride

Good ride today.  The roads cleared off of slush, snow and salt with yesterday's rains.  It was cold and blustery today, but dry roads meant a good time for a longer ride.  I went north, through Appleton, then Mount Vernon and on to Gambier.  The diner I had planned for a meal wasn't open, so a coke and pop tart had to do instead.  I took the hilly back way home through Millersburg and St Louisville.   There are a lot of bridges out and roads closed.  And St Louisville was a real mess with all the sewer work going on there. 

It was nice to be out on the Fargo.  Beautiful back roads.  Rolling hills.  I only took one photo (of the abandoned nut house). But the winds made things tough.  And it never really got much above 30 or so when I started (colder with windchill).  I'm glad I layered up and didn't pay attention to the weatherman who were saying temps of lower 40s.   

Stats for the day: 66.5 miles, 3400' vertical, 15.7 mph.  Not bad.  

I registered for the Dirty Kanza 200 yesterday morning.  200 miles with 12k' feet of climbing.  Almost all of it on hilly gravel and it is very likely to have stiff winds.  I imagine today's ride is a lot like the terrain except that today I was mostly on pavement and it was cold instead of beastly hot.  I've got some work to do if I'm to extend a 67 mile ride like this to 200 miles. 

Paradise Garage has dumped the price on their 2013 Foundry Auger.  I test road this bike a while back and have had my eye on it ... that was when it was $2600.  Now it is only $1900.  It is very tempting.  I may have to trade up on my cross/gravel bike sometime soon.

Happy 2014

A new year greets us and I am back after a few months hiatus in blogging.

I took the Mukluk to PA for the annual Christmas visit with my folks.  I got out for two awesome rides.  In the first, I parked just above Pine Grove Mills and followed the ridgeline on a gravel forest road to Spruce Creek.  After dropping down to the river and climbing back up, I went over the top to the backside of the ridge and did some more forest road exploring.  Swirling winds, gently falling snow, and cold temps made it a fun event.

In the second ride, I parked at Galbraith Gap and did the fire tower climb.  A quick descent on Old Shingletown road preceded the long climb back up to Little Flat Top.  I came around on North Meadows road and finished with Longberger and Three Bridges.  This was the first time I cleaned the rock garden after Three Bridges!

This year I got in two good rides.  On New Year's day I joined a group of about 6 or 7 of us to explore the gravel on the east side of Dresden.  This is an area of reclaimed strip mining so it has the same open-savanah feel you get with the AEP recreation lands.  Weird for Ohio but it was a good outing with loads of climbing.   Today I got out for a bike path hammerfest on 3" of fresh snow that fell overnight.   I've managed to ride about 12 of the last 14 days and still have two promising weeks of hard training before the school year starts.  I hope this will give me a good fitness boost I can maintain during the spring semester.

Eli is still riding to school everyday.  He hasn't missed a day yet.  Rain, snow, bitter cold ... doesn't matter.   He just wants to ride his bike every day.  I'm proud of him.  But it is his decision, not mine to push him on.