Vacation at the Beach!

We packed up the car for a week of vacation and drove to our first stop, Toledo, for a trip to the zoo with Poppy.  Despite temperatures in the mid 90's, Daniel enjoyed seeing all the animals.

Seals and a sea turtle on display.

Daniel likes the fish, probably because

they are always on the move... just like Daniel.

This Meerkat knew it was hot out.

Poppy, Daniel, Daddy.

We headed north from Toledo to South Haven, Michigan for a several days at the beach on Lake Michigan.  Thanks to some friends of ours, Daniel had a DVD player to use in the car.  He found it very amusing to be watching Elmo in the car.

 "Elmo in car, Elmo in car!"

 Flying a kite with mommy.

The beach was nice, complete with a light house.

At the hotel Daniel went swimming for the first time

ever and enjoyed the water.  He also liked his swim suit.

 We dug lots of holes on the beach.

 It was a nice vacation at the beach!

MTB Ride: the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

Despite it being Saturday I set my alarm for the usual time of 6:30.  It sure is easier to wake up without pressing the snooze button for a bike ride than it is for work.  I left the house minutes before 7 with my mountain bike and gear loaded in the truck.

In the mountain bike parking lot at Mohican I ate a bowl of muesli along with a cup of coffee and at 7:38, I looked at the time on my cell phone while standing at the trailhead sign, I headed out on my first ever full lap of the course.  With KT or Ryan I had covered the entire 25 miles but never all at one time.  Having heard  riding the course in 3 hours or less is a "good time", my goal was to get back to where I was standing in less than 180 minutes.

The temperature was perfect, about 60 degrees, as I started up the opening climb.  As usual for me, it took a couple miles to feel somewhat under control.  I felt like I was riding pretty steady, never letting up on the throttle until I stopped to take a picture of a box turtle on the left edge of the trail.  Unfortunately, the cell phone picture didn't come out at all in the shaded and soft morning light, even for a cell phone picture.

While using the cell phone for the picture I noticed the time and after jumping back on the bike, I did the math to check my pace.  It wasn't looking good.  As I recall, I'd ridden about 7 miles in a bit less than an hour.  At this pace I'd end up only covering 21 miles in 3 hours, not 25 miles in 3 hours.

After finishing the pace calculation I focused on increasing my speed.  I began to ride one gear larger and made a conscious effort to reduce usage of my break levers.

Reaching  the covered bridge I stopped long enough to suck down a gingerbread GU, leftover from the holidays.  I didn't check the time but continued to the climb up Mt. Doom, knowing my pace was about to slow.  It was a good climb for me in terms of keeping the bike under control and I reached the second mountain bike parking area ready for the peanut butter sandwich I had packed.

In less than five minutes I ate my PB sandwich, drank some fluids, and continued on.  I made a time check but cannot remember what I learned, at this point I didn't make an effort to calculate pace.  I was really beginning to think I was not going to crack 3 hours, but I figured I'd ride at my limit and see what happened.  I knew the next section could be fast.

On the twisting, often downhill section through the fern forest I was finding my groove.  No brakes, lots of speed, and feeling good.  Until... my left grip and bar end hooked a 1" diameter sapling along the edge of the trail.  I never even saw the sapling but I suddenly saw the ground coming at me in a hurry.  Wham! I landed hard on my chest and right hip.

"What hurts?" I thought.  My hip.  I stood up, picked my bike up, jumped aboard and began to slowly pedal.  After a few pedal strokes I thought "hip feels okay, let's go!"

Down through the campground and onto the last couple miles of trail.  I was riding hard and had depleted my two bottles.  I felt a sense of urgency as I kept telling myself it had not yet been three hours, unsure in the back of my mind if this was true or not.  Popping out of the woods near the trail head I brought the bike to an abrupt stop and optimistically pulled out my cell phone... 10:28.  Sweet!  2 hours 50 minutes!

The Good - met my goal of breaking 3 hours
The Bad - crashed hard, sore hip, but thankfully okay
The Ugly - after checking final time on cell phone, realized my seat bag had unzipped and was now completely empty.  Lost items include inflator, multi-tool, tube, chain tool, quick link and tire levers.  Doh!

(Sorry no pictures, turtle picture didn't come out well enough to post and I was "racing" to beat my time goal so I took no further pics.)

Hot

After church Ryan and I headed out for a ride.  It was HOT.  We rode north through the Overton Valley and climbed Pleasant Home to the west.  After helping a woman get her mower unstuck from a ditch, we made our way back home via Cedar Valley.  The sweat was flowing and our bottles were drained.  Did I mention it was HOT?

Little Boy Heaven

Daniel and I were sent on a mission this morning... to exit the house and leave peace and quiet behind for mommy.  Fair enough, we were up to the task.  By pure coincidence we stumbled upon some great excitement in the form of construction equipment!  What better to entertain a little boy... and his daddy.

Daniel's initial sighting of our "playground".  He was

pretty excited, running through the field pointing.

For the next hour or more we went from machine to machine for test drives.  Then, after driving each machine, we started over and drove most of them again.  What fun!

 

Noah's Speakers

Last fall Noah, buddy from work, and I decided to build a pair of small, single driver, desktop speakers.  In the past I have built numerous subwoofers, a nice set of towers, and a similar pair of single driver, tiny speakers.


For the driver we chose a Tang Band W3-1053SC from Parts Express, it's a 3" full-range speaker.  Noah designed a vented enclosure with internal dimensions of 4" x 4" x 13" and a 1" x 3" port.  The enclosure is made of 1/2" MDF.  A 500uF NPE capacitor is wired in series with the driver to attenuate low frequencies that would not play nice with the small speaker.

Half a year later, I finally finished the speakers and gave them to Noah.  Here's a look at the project:

Almost finished... soldering terminal cups to the

Tang Band full range drivers.

The finished speakers.  Noah picked a

slate blue paint for the cabinets.

Port and driver on the front, terminal cup on the back.

How do they sound?  We've only listened to them once so far and that was in a less than optimal setup, prior to the speakers having any break in time.  First impressions were good.  Noah played a piano only track that was very clear and detailed to my ears.  I think the lower frequency response will improve as the speakers break in, but they are showing potential to play lower than their size would suggest.  I look forward to listening to them more!

Father's Day #2

Daniel made me a nice Father's Day card.

Behind the Spotlight

Here's a random, non-cycling adventure... operating a spotlight at a country music concert.  Long story short is Ryan's brother-in-law organized a country music festival and tapped into family resources for man power.  After our last ride at Mohican Ryan asked me if I'd be interested in running a spotlight.  My reply, "sure, sounds like a good adventure!"

Jo Dee Messina was the first act, no spotlights needed.

Wow, these guys look pro.

After a 5 minute lesson on how to run one of these

things we were ready to go.

Jake Owen was the second act.  Throughout the show

a guy was giving us commands over the headset.

The third act was Dierks Bentley.  It became much easier

to see what our spotlights were doing after the sun went down.

It was a pretty cool vantage point for watching a concert.

Dierk's act was full of stage lights coordinated to the

music.  Our spotlight work was also coordinated

to the show, via commands over our headset.

 After the show ended we hung out atop our scaffolding

and waited for the crowds to clear out.  It was

an adventurous evening!

First Lunch Ride

Bill, a buddy in the office, bought his first road bike, and we did our first lunchtime ride today.  The weather was nice, a little overcast to keep the sun from beating down on us, as we rode an 11 mile loop "around the block".  It should be fun to get away from the office and enjoy some fresh, mid day air on future lunchtime rides.

I said to Bill, "Sweet!  It's like we work at a company in the bike industry and people go out and ride at lunch!"  Maybe we can stir up another person or two to join us.

First thing in the morning, showing off the new bike.

We found a good loop: Geyers Chapel, Canal, 

Honeytown, Secrest, Sylvan, Hillcrest and back.

T

The new Trek, introduced to the road.

Thank the Paint

Today I left work promptly, stopped at home for a few minutes and then continued south to Loudonville.  I planned to help out with some trail work but ended up missing the guys leading the work.  Thankfully I considered this scenario before leaving home and had packed my bike and a bag of gear.  After a call to KT to let her know I was riding instead of working, I hit the trail at mile 0.

Starting up the climbing switchbacks of the opening miles I thought about how this was my first solo mountain bike ride.  This made me wonder how well I paid attention to the trail’s direction when riding with Ryan.  Oh well, I figured that trail was marked well and I’d be fine finding my way.

The trail work that had been done along the way was mostly obvious.  There were some reroutes to avoid wet areas and the shoulders of the trail had been smoothed out all along the way.  I reached the short loop turnout and stopped to decide which way to go.  KT had asked me to be home before Daniel went to bed, which seemed to dictate I do the short loop.  Hmmm… what if I continue to the covered bridge and then ride the road back to the parking lot?  It seemed too far for the available time, unless I ride faster.  I clipped in, up shifted and stayed on the full course.

Nice night for a ride.

I really started to get into a rhythm and felt like I was moving along pretty good.  After mile 8 I turned right onto the access road and pushed my pace.  Looking up ahead I saw the dirt double track abruptly disappear to the right and I thought “I’m not slowing down, going to hold my speed!”  I moved left to enter the turn and dove in to the right hander hard.  Looking ahead, I saw the exit of the corner come into view and prominently in the middle of the trail… a skunk! 

The skunk saw me, turned its back end towards my front end, and lifted its tail.  “Oh crap!”  At this point my new disc brakes were put to the test and they almost worked too well.  Hard, hard, hard on the brakes!  My rear wheel lifted off the ground, then came back down as I shifted weight back.  I came to a stop partly sideways 5 to 7 yards short of the skunk.

Mr. Skunk looked back over its shoulder at me.  I looked at him thinking, “should I abandon the bike and make a run for it?”  A second or two later Mr. Skunk lowered his tail and slowly finished crossing the trail.  I reached for my camera but thought he would disappear too soon.  As slow as he moved, I probably could have taken a picture if I had acted on my thought to do so.

Wow.  With my max heart rate for the ride established in the previous 10 seconds I clipped in to continue my ride.  I wondered why he didn’t spray me and quickly reached the obvious conclusion: he liked the paint scheme of my Gary Fisher!

The sun was getting low, but I made it

home before Daniel went to bed.

Disjointed Mohican Ride

The weather for the past couple weeks has been predictable: "scattered thunderstorms" pretty much sums it up.  Every time it seems like we'll have some dry weather another wave of wet comes through.  Knowing we may encounter a course too wet to ride, and with another forecast for "scattered thunderstorms", Ryan and I headed down to Mohican first thing in the morning.

As we pulled into the MTB parking lot we found Ryan O'Dell at his truck.  He talked about the course condition and 4" of rain that fell in a single day.  On this morning he was heading out with volunteers to do trail maintenance a couple miles into the course.  Sometime in the future I'd like to help with trail maintenance and now I know who leads such work.

Post ride down tube adornment.

Knowing people were working a couple miles into the course Ryan and I decided to drive to the snow mobile parking area (MTB parking #2) and start our ride from there.  I liked this plan as it would let me ride the only portion of the course I had not yet ridden, miles 15 to 23. 

For the first mile or two I'm trying to remember if I ever pedaled.  It was fast, flowing trail that was mostly downhill through pine forest with ferns all about.  Pretty fun and a good way to warm up.  At this point it takes me a little bit of offroad riding to get the feel, but I imagine that will improve with experience.  There were a couple short rock gardens and down hill corners to test me as the miles went on and I felt pretty good, but several uphills got the best of me.  I wasn't doing so well at keeping weight forward and kept loosing my front wheel.  In retrospect I think I was being too much of a road cyclist and pulled on the bars as I climbed to generete power.  This had the negative effect of unweighting the front wheel.  I'll have to work on that.

At the suggestion of Ryan O'Dell we didn't ride the final couple miles of trail along the campground, he said this section we still pretty wet.  Instead, we rode through the campground to get to SR3 and then road SR97 back to where we started.  We road down the road to covered bridge before plowing back into the woods for the climb up Mt. Doom.  At the bottom of the climb I had more problems weighting the front of the bike but I started to figure it out midway.  After the climb was once again fun blasting through the woods.  I remembered really liking this section the last time.

Post ride shoes.

Returning to the parking lot where we started, we caught up to four guys from Michigan.  They were from the Detroit area and had come down to stay in a cabin and ride mountain bikes for a couple days.  Hearing that these guys drove 4-5 hours to ride here made me feel fortunate to have Mohican just 20 minutes down the road from my house.  I'll have to make it a point to help out with trail work one of these days.

Squeezed in a (Mostly Dry) Ride

With a wedding to attend this afternoon and rain in the forecast I didn't think a ride would be part of today.  Late morning Daniel and I went to the basement so I could clean the Litespeed, which was still dirty from the rain we encountered on the club ride Wednesday night, and Daniel could clean his trike.  Of course 45 seconds after our cleaning session began Daniel was ready for another source of entertainment.  I hurried to finish my cleaning and in the process decided I wanted to ride my freshly cleaned bike.

Despite the massive presence of green on the radar I found a gap between blobs on the map.  After a quick lunch I rolled out for a short ride.  The plan was to ride out to Flickinger Hill and do a climb or two before coming back.  On the way out the skies were cloudy but just at the radar picture promised, dry.

Down, up, down, up, down, up on Fry Road.

After a second climb up Flickinger I decided to start the ride back home.  The skies were not terribly threatening but I remembered how small the window of non-rain was on the radar map.  After pushing it up Silver Road I was met by a very light rain that would accompany me the rest of the way home.  It was rather refreshing giving the high humidity of the day.

This was the radar image moments after I

arrived home, just south of Wooster.

About five minutes after arriving home the rain really began to come down.  I guess this has been the story of the past two weeks, intermittent strong showers.  Watching out the back door and seeing the rain soak the landscape, I was glad my ride brought me home without delay!

A not so uncommon scene these past couple weeks.

Homemade Bike Work Stand

Perhaps our first mountain bike ride at Findlay State Park was unusually sloppy.  Still, the follow-up experience of cleaning the bikes in the front yard made me realize bike washing is no longer a basement event.  In the past, with road bikes, I always carried the bikes to the basement for cleaning and storage.  A road bike washing consisted of clamping the bike into my homemade, of course, work stand and using a spray bottle of water and old cloth diaper to wipe down the bike.  This method is obviously not going to work with muddy, knobby tired bikes.

My second homemade work stand.

After a couple times washing the mountain bike in the front yard I decided an outdoor work stand would be helpful.  It's not practical to carry the one up from the basement, as it's base consists of a 40 pound piece of steel tread plate.  What would I use for the base on an outdoor stand?  And, what style stand should I build?  I think I came up with a practical solution.

The finished work stand in action.

For the base of the stand I decided to use something solid: the Earth, what a novel idea.  I figured I'll always wash the bikes in the same spot in the front yard, near the driveway and garden hose.  Instead of moving around a heavy base or trying to make some sort of tripod base, I buried a 30" pipe into the ground.  The work stand will drop into this pipe.

The base pipe is sunk into the ground.

The workstand I built about five years ago, for use in the basement, has a clamp that holds a bike by its seat post or seat tube.  It's solid and works well, but I decided to try a different style workstand for use in the front yard, one that holds the bike with a fork lock and bottom bracket cradle.  Yes, this requires the front wheel to be removed, but I figure it will be easier to clean the front wheel and the forks of a mucked up mountain bike with the front wheel removed.

Some dumpster diving provided pipe and a tee connector, quite a bit of elbow grease was needed to clean up these pieces.  (Otherwise, a couple pieces of black iron pipe and a threaded tee from Lowes would've worked just as well.)  Next I needed attachment blocks that would clamp on the pipe and also mate to the bike.  Ideally these would be made out of aluminum, and I still may do that someday, but for now I made blocks out of some hard maple and coated them in polyurethane.  I'm sure they will hold up well enough.

Rear block that cradles the bottom bracket shell.

After a quick test to determine the final length for the horizontal pipe, I cut this pipe to length and installed the blocks.  A skewer is needed for the front block and a small piece of mouse pad material is added to the back block for gripping and padding the bike's bottom bracket.  Both blocks have a 1/4" bolt for clamping and thumb knobs for pinching the blocks securely onto the pipe.  To prevent the whole stand from rotating in the buried pipe, a small bolt is threaded into the upright pipe and a corresponding notch made in the buried pipe to capture the bolt head.

Front block with fork lock.

The stand works well.  It's nice to clean a bike standing up instead of bent over, and it's certainly easier to lubricate the chain or fiddle with derailleurs with the bike up on the stand.  After use, the stand is pulled from the pipe in the ground and hung on the garage wall for storage.  I found a plastic cap to put over the buried pipe, to keep it from filling with water or junk.  I'll call it a successful project!

Daniel tested and approved.

Parade & Storm Evasion

First things this morning I drove my road bike and I to Ryan's house.  We pointed ourselves west and pedaled past Fredericksburg to Shreve for the Memorial Day parade.  KT and Daniel met us for the parade.

Daniel seemed to really enjoy the progression of the parade.  The Triway band came by playing followed by all forms of exciting vehicles including old cars, tractors, a large tow truck, a cement mixer truck, firetrucks, ambulances, and police cars.  Basically all the vehicles an almost two year old boy reads sees in his books.

Daniel's first parade experience.

 

After the parade we said good-bye to KT and Daniel and headed back towards Apple Creek.  As we climbed Harrison Road the sky was dark to the south and west.  As we continued through Fredericksburg on Harrison we began to hear thunder coming from behind.

We began trading pulls in an effort to get home before getting wet or, even worse, caught in lighting.  Turning north on Carr we saw the black skies coming our way.  Thankfully we pulled into Ryan's driveway having only felt a few drops of rain.

Within three minutes of making it to Ryan's house the storm hit with persistent lighting and hard, blowing rain.  Wow, if we had needed to ride even a mile further we would have been in a bad situation.  The good Lord was watching over us!

Mohican Quickie

KT and I made a Friday plan that ended up working so well, we hope it can be soon repeated.  It went something like this:

• I left work promptly and was home by 4:30.
• KT had loaded our bikes onto the car rack, packed most of our gear, and made some PB&J sandwiches.
• The night before we asked my parents about having Daniel down for dinner, and the grandparents were onboard with the plan as well.
• By 5:15 we had dropped off Daniel and were continuing to Loudonville on SR3.
• Despite the slog of Memorial Day trucks and campers, we were at the mountain bike parking area by 5:45 and riding to the trail head shortly thereafter.
• We rode the short loop.  KT did a good job of testing but not crossing her limits as we pedaled the course.  She did a log crossing and a couple technical sections too.  By her own admission, she had a death grip on the bars for most of the ride and says it will be a goal to loosen up and relax more the next time.
• After a short wade in the river we were back in the car and headed to my parents.  We reached their house around 7:30.
• Back home, Daniel had his bath and was off to bed by about 8:30, right on time.

And now, some blurry cell phone pictures...

When I grow up I want to be a mountain biker!

Today felt like a breakthrough day on the new mountain bike.  Ryan and I went down to Mohican to ride at the state park, and I'd say I felt pretty good on the fat tires.  

 

We spotted Chris and Lorena, from the cycling club, in the parking lot before heading to the trail head.  They were muddy and talked about the effect three previous days of rain had on the trail. 

 

With Ryan at the front, we proceeded to climb away from the trail head and settle in on the single track.  I was getting a much better feel for the bike and how to keep traction on varying terrain.  Having Ryan up ahead was a big help, as I could mimic his lines.  Plus, watching ahead was helping me keep my vision down the trail instead of on my front wheel.

After pedaling across the covered bridge we proceeded back into the woods for a climb Ryan called Mount Doom.  It was a good one, a challenge for my new found traction acquisition skills.  At the next road crossing, maybe mile 14 or 15, we diverted from the mountain bike trail to ride roads back to the parking lot, as I was expected back home.

Good stuff, good stuff!  I had a great time on the bike in the woods.  It makes me look forward to learning more on future rides, and Ryan's wheel is a good one to learn from.

My legs never looked this abused after

a road ride... well at least not on the outside.