I hate these things. To me, they’re just the epitome of wastefulness in addition to being butt-ugly.
Unfortunately, we’re the poorest people living in a fairly affluent area, so sometimes it seems like all I see are high end SUV’s.
Those things are not for me. Just sayin’.
Now, I’ll get off my soap box.
God bless…
TW
Toward the middle of the week, Mike and I agreed that if Saturday was a halfway decent day we were going for a ride. Well, yesterday was about that. Halfway decent. We had sunshine, but coolish temps in the low 40’s and a southwesterly wind of 10-12 mph that was just annoyingly cold.
Unlike our last ride, where I did a good job planning our route to take advantage of the wind late, I didn’t today. We went out past Strafford, which meant that we were generally fighting the wind the entire way back. Unfortunately, Mike ended up fighting a cramp from Strafford back to my house, and my legs weren’t up to par after yesterday’s hard effort, so we were pretty much dragging back with our tails between our legs.
Our goal was to just get out, but I decided I wanted to ride a few hills, and it had been a while since I had been down on Farm Road 229 east of Strafford.
Our route took us down the big hill on Farm Road 112 to the intersection with 229.
In the picture above, 112 intersects 229 at the bottom of the hill. That’s a 15% grade to come up from a dead stop, so it’s always a killer. I personally don’t think the 112 hill is quite as steep, but you’ve also got to attack it from a complete stop so no matter which direction you ride that from, it’s bad. One of these days I want to ride on around the corner pictured above and follow 229 until it dead ends to see what the rest of the road is like.
In the summertime, this stretch is gorgeous. The picture at the top of this post is looking out across one of the valleys, and there is something of a lake surrounded by pine trees at one point.
From 229, we rode back up SparkleBrook Road toward Strafford. There are a couple of really huge houses down in the valley along the creek. I suppose that creek is the namesake of the road, but I’m not sure.
We passed a couple of fields with some round bales spread around back in the corner. It looked like one side of the field (to the right) and the foreground had been picked clean, with just those back in that corner remaining. With the price of hay this year because of last summer’s droughts across Texas and the west, guys with that much still in storage are making money.
As we were approaching Strafford, Mike hollered, “Holy cow! There’s a tombstone in the ditch!”. No way. We were sure it was probably a toy, but finally decided to turn around and make sure it wasn’t a real one that had been swiped from a cemetery some place. Luckily, it was just someone’s discarded Halloween decoration.
We pulled back into my driveway with 31.5 miles under our saddles. Not bad for a Saturday in January. At least we got to ride.
Here’s a link to the GPS track.
God bless…
TW
This morning started with a longer than normal weekday run of 5 miles, which delayed my departure for work by a few minutes. Then, before I could leave, we had to stop and clean up a mess from a broken water line in our refrigerator.
The net result is that I had to really haul to get to work on time. It’s good to know I still can!
God bless…
TW
After yesterday’s washout, I was pleased to see nothing on radar this morning and 40 degrees on my backyard thermometer. While Pam and lifted this morning, the local weather dudes kept talking about drizzle, but I pretty much discounted their chatter. When I got on the bike, however, I realized that I would probably call it a light rain instead of a drizzle. By the time I got about two blocks away, I was debating turning around and swapping out a pair of pants and jacket for raingear, but decided to just go with it.
In the end, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference either way. My commuting pants and jacket had enough water repellency to keep from soaking through, and I was overdressed enough to be sweating pretty good on the inside anyway.
I kind of like riding in conditions like today. Even though it was gray, foggy, drizzly and just downright fugly, it was relatively calm and peaceful out there. At one point, I was riding along through a residential neighborhood, and I heard this bright and cheery voice calling out, “Good morning!”. It was a young lady who had come out of a house and was walking down the driveway. I gave her a wave and just grinned. It’s interactions like that one that make me appreciate the ability and opportunity to ride…even on fugly mornings like today.
God bless…
TW
Twenty-five years ago, if you had asked me about my favorite hobby, I would have told you it was photography. I had a couple of mid-level SLR cameras, enough lenses to look foolish, and a huge bag to carry it all around in. A dabbled in lighting, did a few paying gigs, and generally annoyed my wife with my obsession. By 1999 or early 2000, most of my equipment was getting pretty dated and tattered (most of it was second or third-hand anyway), so I decided to sell everything I owned and buy one new nice SLR. Well, I sold the stuff, but never could decide which new camera to buy. We went to Hawaii for our 20th anniversary that summer, so before we went, we bought a small point and shoot 35 mm camera to take with us. At that point, digital cameras were pretty rare, so one of those newfangled gadgets wasn’t on my radar yet, but I was hooked on that little camera. No bulky camera bag. It fit in my pocket, and most of all, you could whip it out and snap away without all the fuss and muss of my old SLR’s.
We bought our first digital camera in the fall of 2002. It was a fairly bulky affair, and if I recall, it was a Pentax. It served us well until I left it in a cab in Mexico on our 25th anniversary in 2005. That was not a good day. It had a weeks worth of photos on it, and Pam wasn’t happy. I’ve still not gotten past that little OOPS! We had a wedding to attend about a week later, so we rushed out and bought another Pentax very much like the first (only smaller and sleeker) as soon as we got home.
In January of 2007 , we had a massive ice storm here in Springfield so I ended up working a lot of overtime. By that time, both Pam and I were experiencing the universal truth that smaller things kept getting smaller, and we were both having trouble dealing with the small screen on our Pentax. I took some of my overtime money and paid a what seemed like a fortune for a nice little Sony with a 3-inch screen so we could see it better. The Sony had the distinction of being even smaller and easier to deal with.
For Thanksgiving 2008, Pam and I ran away from home, and to the dismay of our grown children, left them alone to fend for themselves for the holiday while we went on a cruise. The second day out, I jumped into a hot tub with our camera in my pocket. Yep…me, cameras, and vacations just don’t seem to get along. We went down to the ship’s store and paid an outlandish price for another Sony camera in the hopes that the pics on the memory stick could be salvaged. Luckily, they were fine, so at least I was spared the wrath that I had incurred three years earlier.
That little Sony is the one I’ve carried on nearly a daily basis since. I very rarely climb on my bike without stuffing it in my jersey pocket in hopes of snagging a decent picture for this blog. Unfortunately, it’s showing it’s age pretty badly now. The flash is so inconsistently useless that it might as well not be there. The zoom grinds it’s way in and out, and it takes forever to come on these days. I think it’s been sweated on too much, and you can usually see dark circles on the pics from what I think is mildew growing inside the lense. You can easily see them on the picture below.
Well, to make a long story short, we’re planning to go play in the snow next month and I decided it might be nice to have a new camera to take with us. My first insinct was to go find something reasonably priced that I wouldn’t mind hauling around in the pocket of my jersey and sweating on. You know, something in the $90-$120 range. I casually mentioned it to Pam and promptly got the response, “I know exactly what you need! I saw it in your Bicycling magazine!”.
Now, I don’t know about yours, but my sweet wife has expensive taste. It’s so bad that every time we go for ice cream, I can predict exactly what she’s gonna order by browsing for the most expensive item on the menu! When she said that, I cringed….then thought about her logic for a while and decided to just bite the bullet and do it.
My new Nikon CoolPix AW100 arrived today. It’s a “ruggedized” camera that should stand up better to the abuse I dish 0ut. I’m not keen on the built-in GPS, and have never done much with video, so in a lot of ways I feel like I paid for some bells and whistles that will remain silent, but I’m anxious to give it a try. You’ll see some of it’s pictures on here in the next few days!
Now, if I can just keep from leaving it in a cab……
God bless…
TW
