djkashuba 

Tim's Birthday Ride, Above Strawberry Ca. by djk762, on Flickr


Tim's Birthday Ride, Above Strawberry Ca. by djk762, on Flickr


Ebisu by djk762, on Flickr

Birthday ride for a friend. Strawberry/ Silver Fork Ca. The Ebisu was my favorite bike on the ride. Great group of riders great variety of bikes.

-D

Peugeotlover

The Specialized Rockhopper had been neglected for months, whilst I had built up my legs with the road bikes.
In about 2.5 hours on the saddle, I covered 18 miles of trails, steep climbs (what climb isn't steep?), descents, many stops for pictures of what was encountered.

Peugeotlover

72 degrees is a perfect temperature for being outside.
There were geese fishing by the dam; kayak'ers practicing their skills;
bees on the yellow flowers; butterflies on the purple flowers, soybeans in the field ready for harvest.

JJScaliger

Nice pictures peugeotlover!

I rode 49 miles today. The weather was beautiful here in RI and Eastern CT. 70 degrees and sunny, light wind. I took the De Rosa. Fall is closing in!

JBC353

Yesterday I rode down to the end of Weems Road, on the east end of town. Pretty quiet now that Labor Day has come and gone. My favorite holiday, Labor Day.




Then back up Weems Road to Indiantown Farm to check on the beans. They are starting to turn and the stalks are loaded.




There will be a lot of beans cut in this field.




Going back I went through Benson Road to see if the corn had been cut yet. The guy who farms these fields has started cutting corn on other fields in the neighborhood but not here yet.

JAG410 

Finished my new Fatback and rode to the park for pics before getting it muddy on the trail.

gomango

Nice.

Which model is that?

JAG410 

It doesn't have a model name other than "steel". They make aluminum, titanium, steel, and now carbon fiber. The steel ones are built by Waterford.

Sixty Fiver

A nice group of ladies asked me to join them on a ride... my wife and daughter were among those ladies.

My daughter and her Raleigh 20...

EBH

This sunny afternoon, along the fjord...

RubberLegs

So...THAT is what it looks like in the summer! :-) I've only been there once, in January, it was not quite so green then! ;-) I did no cycling, we took the train and boat

EBH

Summer!? We call it the green winter...

RubberLegs

We took the train from Oslo to Bergen, and Ship up to Kirkenes....it was a touch chilly up there...a bit of ice on the harbor as we pulled in for that last stop! Looks like some beautiful cycling country....I would need some lower gears!

EBH

That's a trip I'd love to do some day.

jimmuller 

Lovely pics, all!

I can finally post more pics from our rides in Acadia Natl Park these past two weeks. I rode about 140 miles, half of which were on the tandem. Went up Cadillac Mt. once on the Centurion. I need to go back to work so I can rest from our vacation.

Here's a stop overlooking Bar Harbor, about halfway up Cadillac.


A few more pics, near and at the top of Cadillac.




Here's a pic from yesterday on the Park Loop Road.


Finally, a pic of us with the tandem, overlooking Eagle Lake.


The run up Cadillac was easier than I remembered it. Don't know how much of that was the bike, but it certainly worked out well! As I was going up I saw one other cyclist coming down. About two thirds of the way up I stopped to eat something and noticed a Bud Lite can in the brush on the side of the road. I picked it up, threw it into a trash bag I was carrying, and tossed it into a trashcan at the top. What kind of a bug lite would toss out a beer can in a place like this? On the way down I saw five other folks grinding their way up. One yelled something but I was going so fast I couldn't hear what he said over the whistling of the wind.

Riding in ANP, especially on Cadillac, is a transcendent experience, truly uplifting. It is also very existential - you live in the moment, absorb the air and the views (when you aren't watching the road), revel in the alternating exertion and wind in your helmet. You really can't explain to someone what it's like to ride a bike for the sheer enjoyment. Riding in ANP is an extreme example.

I had some great conversations with other cyclists, mostly about the bike with the noteworthy color scheme. Sharon pointed out that while we were sitting eating lunch on top of Cadillac everyone who walked by glanced at or stared at it. One man commented on it, said it looked great. When I went through the entry station on the PLR I handed my Senior Pass and ID to the pretty woman working the gate, said I was vintage rider on a vintage bike. She said she loved the colors. I said it was said to have been inspired by Miami Vice, and she replied "Oh, yeah!" So at least she was old enough to know about MV. On another ride several days later, as I put the bike into the bike rack at the Jordan Pond House right next to a pair of CF bikes I asked the owners who were sitting there if that was okay. The guy said that's beautiful and probably worth a whole lot more than our two bikes. (Yeah, right, scratches and all.) You know, style is as important as getting there!

JJScaliger

Nice pictures EBH and Jim!

I drove to the east side of Narragansett Bay today and took it easy with a nice relaxing 36 mile ride. Beautiful day in the upper 70s and sunny, a little windy near the water. Tiverton-Little Compton-Adamsville-Sakonnet Point all in RI (very close to MA.)

Spite Tower (1905) Adamsville RI



A water tower built over a well to supply running water for the new indoor plumbing of these local elites (the Church family). Chauffeur's quarters on 1st floor. Several legends on how it got its name, all are fanciful.



marker at Little Compton Congregational Church



Sakonnet Point







Sakonnet Point Lighthouse



I posted a pic of this lighthouse before, but it was a foggy day. I need to get a better camera, this light house appeared much closer with the naked eye than this image represents. Check out the whitecaps.



Little Compton



Tiverton

northbend 

Great photos everyone! I haven't been out since last weekend. Finally was able to sneak a short one in tonight over to the Snoqualmie Brewery to fill the growler. Not much but I'll take anything I can get this week.

Lascauxcaveman 

My night shift manager has been asking me for more hours, so I said "You can take over at noon" and then hit the road. Clear and sunny today, but the weather man says the local rain starts in earnest tomorrow, so today was a 'last chance' ride for awhile. Managed a 57-miler, without really meaning to. Yay!

The Olympic Discovery Trail conveniently passes one block north of my workplace in downtown Port Angeles, WA, so I headed east on that. It's a trail of many bridges; the first one crossing Morse Creek, with a salmon counting weir currently installed. Not much action, as far as I could see. "Let's see... OK. One! Oh, no. That's a stick... never mind."


Then five or six miles of and and down hilly stuff later, there's a bike bridge that runs under the highway bridge. When I stopped to take this picture I ran into my old buddy Bud, who I completely forgot was a biker. He said he sees me out on the trails fairly often, but I never hear him when he hollers at me. My hearing is so bad, you may as well consider me completely deaf when the wind is in my ears.


Then things flatten out and you zig and zag through farm country; you know, ride a mile, then take a hard left, then ride a mile and take a hard right. You can tell the designers of this trail found some of the landowners more cooperative than others. Anyway, it beats riding on Highway 101. Also, "Moo."



At about mile 18, there's the Dungeness River, where the humpies (pink salmon) are running and spawning in numbers not seen in 20 years or so. We're talking a LOT of fish breeding going on. Ooooh yeah. Sex-AAY.


The happening place to be is under a bridge, of course. It's Railroad Bridge Park, near Sequim, WA, a popular site for birders year round, but this year, the crowd is all about humpies. And who can blame them? Gimme some o' that hawt humpy action. Fishy-sexy. Bow-chicka-wow-wow. Actually, it kinda stinks like dead fish, because a lot of them expire before they make with the mating. A funky kinda smell. Sex and death. Woody Allen should be making nature documentaries here. Whe I stopped, there was a little kid poking a salmon carcass with stick, trying to get the stinky thing back in the river.


Here is the Dungeness River as seen from the railroad bridge (funny, the don't say 'trestel' for some reason.) Anyway, my pretty-in-pink bike is way pinker than those green sexy stinky pinky-humpy fish.


Moving right along, once you hit Sequim proper, there's Big Box this and chain-store that, so I popped into Jack in the Box for a big chicken whatever combo for about $4.30. It got me home, anyway. Gnarly soulpatch dude with his chubby GF at the table next to me said "Nice bike, dude." I said, "And it's probably older than you; it's a 1987."

"No. Way."

Way.



I kept riding east, kinda got lost for awhile and ended up at Port Williams Park, which appears to be mostly a boat launch with no beach at high tide. I was there at high tide, but took a photo anyway. If you squint, you can make out Mt Baker there, framed in my main triangle.


From there, it's a short hop to Dungeness Bay, where I used to keep my crab pots, back when I was gainfully unemployed and therefore had the time for gourmet gleaning such as that. Dungeness crabs are seriously delicious treats (and seriously expensive, when you have buy them at the grocery store), so I kinda miss those days. The bay is formed by a natural sandspit made up of silt flowing out of the Dungeness River for about the last 100,000 years or so, and the bay has a maximum depth of about 10 feet (maybe) at low tide, when you walk out at least a half mile to empty your crab pots. At that point you're about knee-deep. The Dungeness Lighthouse is somewhere out there on the horizon. Beyond that, Canada.


Here's the New Dungeness Schoolhouse, about a half mile down the road. Built in 1892, so yeah, it's known as the "New" Dungeness Schoolhouse, of course.



I'm going to try to post some iPhone videos of the humpies running upstream in my next post. We'll see if that works here.

Lascauxcaveman 

The exciting Running of the Humpies documentary, produced by Steven Speilberg, directed by Woody Allen. Narrated by Dr. David Suzuki.

part one:


Nevermind, you'll have to catch it when it comes out on [strike]DVD[/strike] BlueRay.

Another stop in the ghost town of New Dungeness is Nash's Farm store. Nash Huber is well known and well regarded as a pioneer of organic farming in our corner of the state; or, if you recall that 75 years ago all farming was organic, he's just some old guy who remembers what his grandpa told him. Anyway, I bought some apples, and I don't care if they were 100% organic or 80% poison, they were some seriously good apples. You can see Nash's caricatured mug peeking out over the box of granny smiths there upper right.


On the way home it got pretty cloudy. As in, "Gee, those are pretty clouds."

southpawboston

Yesterday saw another short Catskill Mountain ramble for me. I had to take an overnight trip up there from Boston on family business, so I brought my Rawland with me to get a short ride in doing some more pass hunting and dirt road scouting. Ended up doing a 28 mile loop with 3200 feet of climbing (2600 feet of which was covered in only 14 miles... pass hunting, indeed!). Route: https://ridewithgps.com/trips/1825921

Started out following the Delaware river, west branch, out of Delhi. Mostly flat for the first ten miles. Stopped in at a cafe in Hamden, the next town over, for some coffee before tackling what would be a lot of hills and dirt in a very short ride.



Back across the Delaware river over this covered bridge, which was first built in 1859:



From the cafe, it was less than a mile before the climbing started. First climb was a dirt road pass, an average of 9.1% grade over a mile and a half:



At the top, it turned to pavement and I had a wonderfully delicious descent with farms and hilltops as scenery:



Passed an alpaca farm:



Lots of old and abandoned barns:



Another dirt road pass (15% grade! The photo is near the top):



And one final 2.5 mile descent to finish things off.

End of ride glamour shot:



I won't be back in the area again until Columbus day weekend, when I'll be taking a little extended weekend holiday with my family. I hope to get in at least one more ride before the end of the season... Columbus day weekend is usually the peak foliage weekend, so it should be a pretty weekend for a ride.

Chrome Molly

A relatively flat 95 miler up to the sculpture park in Taylor's Falls MN.

gomango

What time were you there today?

We were there at about 11:30 or so......

Chrome Molly

Right around noon. Were you riding bikes, or there by car? I ran into a few C&V likers down in Marine when I stopped at the General Store. Lots of traffic there for their art festival. Everyone was out enjoying the day after the cloudy start.

gomango

I was on my Merckx and the other 7 were on various gravel rigs.

I have a great backroad route off the Gateway out of St. Paul.

The others were heading to a friend's farm near North Branch, while I rode to my brother's place in Lindstrom.

74 miles today. About 50% on farm/gravel roads.

JAG410 

Jealous of my fellow Minnesotans that got out for long rides today. I only did 10 miles on my fatbike. It's almost time to put the roadies away for the season, I should be taking advantage of nice days like today!