[Chris]

So I ate dinner (turkey sub, ftw!) and decided to go riding for a couple of hours. It snowed last night, but in typical New England fashion, it's 55* outside now and pretty damn nice:



Not a ton of light left, so I didn't have super long to ride, but I figure an hour and a half at least, no prob.



So I grabbed my bike:



And headed out. About a mile up the road, since I live in the country I came to some cows.



And a goat. Goats = always metal.



Still plenty of sun (washing out my camera lens), so it's time to get moving.



I say bye to Bessy, and head down this road:

[Chris]

And up the other side:



Which leads to another downhill, towards the river.



I get to a section of road that's been closed for ages. So I stop and have a drink.



It's pretty damn nice here.



I'm headed this way, up the closed road, which is only about 3/4 of a mile long.



Still plenty of daylight left.



Especially if you aren't taking pics directly at the sun.



This is the washed out road:



Anyway, enough of this nonsense. Time to head back to my bike and move.

[Chris]

I head down the river some more:



A few miles up:





I head around this corner:



Go another ~2 miles and stop here for another drink.



The river is completely calm. It's awesome.





(note camera case in foreground, the uber way to level your camera when it's on a crooked old picnic table.)



Off in the distance is a bridge. I'm ~6 miles from home or so, but then again.. There's a bridge.

[Chris]

Flexing at said bridge, I say "I will ride to you, bridge, dark be damned!"



And so I did:



However, the damn thing has no sidewalks, and as I'm standing there trying to take this pic without looking like a dumbass, like 10 cars go by. Plus, it's narrow as hell. Not wanting to get run over before golf season, I deem this stupid (yet scenic) bridge false, curse it for not having sidewalks, and mosey on my way.



So I head this way:




Past this badass house.



And up the road:



Now I'm hauling ass, because it's going to be dark damn soon, and I'm now about 45 minutes away from my house, on a windy, narrow road with no sidewalks. However, I stop here and grab my camera case.

[Chris]

And note again what a badass ride this is.



Coming from this way:



I'm headin' this way:



I take a different route home, further up the river towards my house:



And note that sunsets over rivers:



Really own:



I haul more ass (and take less pics) and come to the grassy knoll, which is actually a really big hill, however you can't tell by this pic.



The streetlights come on:



So I bust ass: (This is why I break digital cams all the time.. The things I do for a good picstory)



Cheers

[Andrew]

Dood, you're killin me.

Do you have racks for your car? I need to get a bunch of things before I can get back into it. I need racks, shocks, beers, and a new cycle computer. This year is going to kick ass.

[dudley]

Quote

and a new cycle computer.

Pardon my ignorance, maybe this is an old fart question, but WTF do you need a computer to ride a mountain bike for?

Where I ride, protective gear and a first-aid kit would be more appropriate

[Andrew]

Ha!

i have one now, it's just old.

Basically, it's an over-glorified speedometer. It measures speed, distance, and things like that. It always shocks me how much land we can cover in a day. I've had many 60+ mile days.

[Chris]

I picked up a Garmin Edge 205 GPS for $150, here:

http://www.amazon.com/Garmin-Edge-205-Bicy...74828640&sr=8-1

It has a USB port on it, so you can upload your routes after a ride to their database, and tag it with where you were, eg "Boston, MA, Blah Blah State Park". The GPS itself tells you everything you did - max speed, distance, elevation, etc, etc.

So you can plot your current rides, or see what other people have done and download it to your own unit and follow it. For example this guy did Dogtown in Gloucester:

http://trail.motionb...activity/157206

And it posts up his entire route like this:



So you can search on your state, activity, etc (eg: "Cycling and Massachusetts") and it'll return all the current filtered stuff people have uploaded, how long it took them, etc, etc.

It's a free site too.

[Andrew]

wow... that is completely badass!!!

[Chris]

Andrew, on Mar 26 2007, 08:01 PM, said:

wow... that is completely badass!!!

The step up from it has cadence and a wireless heartrate monitor, but I didn't go for it. For $150 the geek-factor was just too cool to pass up. What's nice is that if I go out riding for a day and come across something cool, I can send you my trip data so that you can load it into yours and basically ride my route. Or, if you find something on that website that looks like a good trip, you can download that person's entire trip.

Plus it keeps track of the currently loaded route, so if I have a normal circuit, I can time myself and effectively race myself every time I do it to try and get faster.

Plus it's backlit. And backlit LCD's are always cool, no matter if they actually give you relevant info or not. It also has no wires at all, just clips on and that's it. I always hated the magnetic speedos that you had to wire down to your forks.