We've been Simpsonized!

If Kate and Luke were characters on the Simpsons this is what we would look like. Find out what your Simpsons character looks like: www.simpsonizeme.com

Hope Ride

Here are the pictures from the Hope Ride that we did with Annie and Jim on Saturday. The ride started and finished in Hope, IN, a small town about 35 miles south-east of Indianapolis. It is true Indiana farmland around there, flat, with the only hills coming from the small river valleys that dot the landscape.

The ride left early (although we did not leave until an hour after the ride "officially" started), so it was nice and cool for the first few miles. The route wound its way around Bartholomew Co (where Columbus is), sticking mostly to small, very rural roads that were not much more than single lanes. Annie and Jim had several friends who they ride with from Bloomington, so we all started out together.


After a while the group started to drift apart as we all started to ride at different paces. At the first SAG stop, Kate and I waited to the others got there before heading out again. There were lots of soy bean fields that normally would have been bright yellow, but were mostly just dull tan, because the weather has been so dry this summer.

We did the fifty mile route, which took us through several small towns and lots of farm land. We passed a nature reserve that would have had an amazing waterfall in it, but the creek was completely dry. The day turned out to be quite hot, so the last 20 miles or so were a little less comfortable than the morning had been.

They certainly took care of us on this ride: we got breakfast, 3 sag stops, lunch, and root beer floats at the end. One of the nice things about the organization of the ride was that it seemed that the whole town got together to put it on.

It was a really nice day, but our legs were tired by the end of it all.

Pentagla

I saw this bike on a trip to Mt. Tsukuba back in July. I thought it deserved a Lug Bros. post. Ever heard of the maker?

Dust

These are the after affects of ride last night for the cyclocross practice, well and also the head first plunge I took off my bike in a sand pit. We still have not had rain for weeks, and the course just gets drier and drier. That of course means, more and more dust. My throat still is scratchy from inhaling all the dust I did last night.

It was not a great ride, I was still struggling to keep up with the front of the group more than I would like. And then on the second to last lap, I started to ride through one of the sand pits and my front tire starting tracking through a deep rut. About 2/3rds of the way through the pit, my front wheel jacknifed and I went flying over my handlebars. I landed really hard on my shoulder and banged my head after that. I was not badly injuried, but decided that was enough and packed it in for the night.
My face was clean compared my legs and arms, but I did not get pictures of those. This last picture was of how dirty my bike was. It was so dusty that there was almost no grease left my bike chain.

Unidentified Family Member

Happy Birthday Dan!

Tonight Linnea and I rode around the lake in honor of Dan's birthday. The Paramount and the Yee Haa were side by side until Linnea requested some space to ride no-handed. She did this, without incident along the pave part of the bike trail. When we got back on the road she held on with at least one hand. The evening was perfect, cool and sunny with a light wind. We saw lots of duck butts sticking up in the air, one sailboat and a few other bikers as we made our way around the lake. The Paramount is a great bike. I like the feel of the shifting very much. Though, for me it is really a five speed. Since we did not go far, I was able to push a bit going up the hill and managed to stay out of the easiest gear. We remembered to take photos after the ride. My favorite fall flowers, jerusalem artichokes, are in the background.
We did talk about the birthday guy as we rode and though of many biking trips from the past. Happy Birthday, Dan

Kate's First Post

Today Luke and I meet Harmony and Brenna over at my parents to go for a ride. The girls were here for the weekend and it was just another beautiful day - perfect for a bike ride. The girls really like riding bikes, but have outgrown the ones they have here so they borrowed Nonna and Grampy's bikes. Don't we look like serious bikers in the first picture?

We only did about 8 miles, through a few of the subdivisions around the neighborhood. Brenna likes to be in the lead, but Luke was hanging with her and he ended up blowing us all away on a sprint to finish the ride (showoff!). If was fun to be out with them.
We then stopped off for ice cream before returning home. Luke added about 50 miles to his day by riding back to our house and then some. He seems to be pretty tired at this point.

Anniversary Ride

Friday was our 5th anniversary, and the nice thing was that both of us had the day off from work (we had to work Saturday). We went out for a nice dinner Thursday night, and took it nice and quiet on Friday. We did however go for about a 25 mile ride from Utica out towards Charlestown then up to a state highway to Sellersburg and home. It was a beautiful sunny day, and we rode on some roads that we have not ridden on together before.

One of the roads is lined by old stone walls from when the area was first being settled by Americans. The abundance of limestone certainly means that the wall builders certainly had plenty of material to use. Kate made the comment that the walls look like the Aran Islands.

It has been so dry here for the past few months that all the grass and corn is yellowed and dry. The land on the road that we were riding on is pretty rolling, as you can see in the second picture. The farmland in the picture is part of one of the old family farms that is still working, they have a sign out front announcing that the farm is one of the old homestead farms.

The last picture is one of the great Indiana mountains (didn't know we had any huh). It rises to height of probably 100ft above the plain. Mt. Cooper (it is just a dirt pile) as it is know, is on the backside of one of the quarries between Utica and Sellersburg.

The weather has turned chilly here for at least Sunday, but it is supposed to get warm again in a few days. The break from the heat has been great, but it has been a little unusual to wake up in the morning, walk outside to let the dogs out, and come back in feeling chilled. Cyclocross season is in full swing, but I do not plan on starting to race until Sept. 30.

Trappistes Rochefort

Trappistes Rochefort 8: a nice way to end a day of riding (and to replace the calories lost on the bike as well!) The aroma is almost flower-like. I wonder if any of the Lug Bros. & Co. have tried it. I was inspired to buy it by the beer Dad and I shared while playing Scrabble in Cadillac this summer (was it Westmalle Tripel?)

I love this bike. I love having legs. I love the wind at my back. I love riding with a smile.

Back on the Buddi after a three week hiatus, I spent the first hour and a half of the ride with a silly grin on my face. It's a dream to ride, and the new crank is just right. Humans weren't made for 54 tooth chainrings. I was going downhill at 60 kilometers per hour today and the 48 tooth outer ring was plenty big. And the nice thing about 48 is you can also climb with it. I wouldn't use it on a mountain climb, but in rolling hills with a 23 tooth cog in the back, it gives you a nice pace. Long live compact cranks, I say.

It was unexpectedly sunny today, and although it was hot by lunchtime, it was a beautiful morning. We left the shop a little before nine with a small group than usual. A bunch of regulars are at a training camp in the mountains in Nagano prefecture, and since we split into two groups I ended up riding with only five others. It was a perfect match in terms of pace and riding styles, and I was with a couple of the guys I've gotten to know best-- Furuhashi-san, who owns a coffee roasting shop that provides the best coffee in the prefecture, and Kurokawa-san, a 50 year old man who could beat the pants off just about any rider half his age. After riding in such large groups just about every week, it was nice to go out just the six of us. We rode what has become my favorite course. Essentially, we make a big loop around the chain of mountains nearest to Tsukuba. It ends up being mostly flat, but with terrific views in every direction. There's also something about being on the other side of the mountain, from Tsukuba, from the Kanto plain, from Tokyo, that feels far away. I like that.

The roads are mostly narrow, and we hardly ever see a car. This is the season for harvesting rice, so the farmers are busily working in the fields and we have to avoid the mud on the roads from the harvesting tractors, but it's nice to be out in that environment. Agriculture has a much more old-time feel to it here than in the States. Rather than mega-farms owned by corporations in the cities, most of the rice is grown by farming collectives and the people you see in the fields are the old-time farmers. It would be nice to see younger folks as well, but it's nice, anyway, that it's not all corporate. The other nice thing about rice is that the look of the paddies changes so much with the seasons. In the spring, when they flood the paddies and plant the seedlings it feels like you're in the middle of a lake when you ride along the country roads. A magical experience. The summer rice is a beautiful, fresh green, and the rice now a rich golden color. Then the soil is turned over and is fallow until spring and you see how rich the soil is. In Ibaraki prefecture, in addition to rice, there are fruit orchards as well. That's another way to be aware of the seasons. The autumn fruit is just ripening now--pears, persimmons, grapes, and chestnuts--and it's fun to ride along the orchard roads and see the fruit in the trees. Persimmons, especially, have a beautiful deep orange color when they're ripe, and make an ideal countryside scene.

In the end we rode somewhere between 85 and 90 kilometers today. The last 20 were tough--the sun was hot and we were riding straight into a stiff wind--but boy did the first half of the ride feel great. The combination of being back on my road bike, the new crank, and the wind at our backs was legendary. We rode hard; we rode fast, my legs felt great, and the feeling of joy was palpable. It was like I could hold it in my hands. (But then I would have fallen off my bike. Unlike Mom I'm not an expert on riding with no hands!)

Legs not wheels

Yesterday was the first day in probably 6 weeks at least that the temp was less than 80 degrees. Kate had to work late (Anime Club), and I had my OCD group, but decided not to go because it was just too nice a day to waste.

The dogs and I waited until Kate got home to go for a long walk out along the river. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining out on the river, and there were quite a few small little sail boats out, tacking back and forth over near the KY shore. We walked up past the lime kiln that always freaks me out cause it looks like the gateway into another world (it is quite freaky in the evening going by on my bike and hearing the wind blow through it). Then we walked up into old quarry to look around. On our way up the hill, we heard a noise above our heads. Looking up we spotted a red fox peering out from the shrubs down at us. It did not flee, just looked at us for a few seconds, and then ran back along the ledge it was on. It was the first time that I had seen a fox outside of them running across the road. It had an incredibly intelligent looking face.

So, we walked around a bit in the new subdivison they are building there, went down to the edge of the water in the quarry, walked out on the dock (the dogs went out willingly, but then they started to freakout as they felt the dock move under them). Ben walked in the water a little bit, but Molly refused to go near the water, imagine that a lab that is afraid of the water.

After that we just headed home, walking through several clouds of nats that drove Kate crazy.

Guest Post: Mom & Dad's first post

The perfect afternoon, 75 degrees, low humidity, beautiful clouds in a bright blue sky, called us to the trail. We decided to ride the White Pine Trail to Tustin. We had the light wind at our back and the trail to ourselves. I find the lack of use unfortunate. The trail goes through some beautiful landscape and wetlands. If it were paved, or improved, I am sure more people would ride it. We rode fast, for us, on the southbound leg. We were going to go as far as we could in about an hour. About four miles into the ride, an owl swooped low over the path and flew along in front of us for a few hundred feet. Owls have an impressive wing span. Fortunately Powell’s was open in Tustin so we could get a cold drink. Tustin often makes me think of Lake Wobegon. Hoaglund’s Hardware comes very close to some of Keillor’s fictional parts of the city.

The ride back was slower, due to wind and creeping seat soreness. We stopped to enjoy the blossoming lily pads in the turtle ponds by the freeway. We also found the current home for our winter exchange student, Thandi. She is living southwest of Cadillac in the mystery area where the ½ and ¾ roads seem to go nowhere. But the bike trail cuts across the driveway to the house. Now we know two ways to go to her current home. The bike trail is more direct. We rode up the hill to home tired but very pleased to have been out riding on a beautiful northern Michigan day. We want to propose to family members that southern folks drive to Grand Rapids and ride the trail up to Big Rapids and we will start here and ride there as well. Then we can all ride together the second day and fetch the car when we are done. That is something to think about for the future.

2 short quick rides

Nothing really exciting, no pictures or anything. Friday, Kate and I rode the tandem up to Sellersburg and back for about a 20 mile ride and this morning, I went out and just rode some loops near Utica with some sprints thrown in as a training ride for cross.

The weather has still be pretty crummy in regards to heat and humidity. We are having a party later today with people from the library, but it is supposed to storm later.

I am off to cut the grass, cause it has become a jungle out in the back yard (thought I heard lions and hyenas last night).

Had to take my new rear wheel in to get trued this morning, cause it seemed to have gotten a little hop in it, probably just the spokes settling or whatever since it had not been ridden before. Good thing about being on first name basis with the staff is little things like that are free.

Now the rebuild of the other wheel I took in will not be free, cause I blew 2 spokes out from it due to my ineptitude in truing wheels, oh, well.

a Buddi update

Buddi's still in the shop, still crankless, but now a crank is on the way. Matsunaga-san had to track down what seemed like the last Sugino Cospea 172.5mm silver crank in all of Japan. His three main suppliers were sold out and Sugino had retired the model (it's an octalink BB and they've replaced it with crank that uses the new Shimano-style (read: butt-ugly) system.) One place had a single black unit in stock, but I didn't think it would fit the classic look of my bike, so I was just about ready to go with the Sram Rival crank when Matsunaga-san finally found a Cospea. Let's hope it really does exist. If all goes well I'll be able to ride again by the end of next week.

Choosing a crank was an embarrasingly difficult proposition. We're presented with so much choice in modern society that it can be paralyzing. Do I want aluminum or carbon, black or silver, 170mm or 172.5mm (or even 175mm) crank arms, 48/34 or 50/36? Is it worth paying more for a crank made in Italy or Japan than a crank made in Malaysia? What bottom bracket system do I want to use? How much am I willing to spend? And the biggest question of all: does any of it matter?

In the end I chose the Cospea for a simple reason: I liked the way it looked. I just have a feeling that when I'm riding I'm not going to be able to tell much of a difference. All of my choices would have performed equally well. So I figured the biggest difference was aesthetic. Have I learned a lesson? Will my famous over-analysis be absent from my next shopping adventure? I'd like to say yes, but don't count on it.

Wobbles

This morning Kate and I went out to ride the Mayor's Healthy Home Town Hike/Bike in downtown Louisville. This is an initative of the city to try and get more people out exercising. So, we got down to Waterfront park in Louisville around 9:50 for a 10:00 oclock start and there were already probably a few thousand people out to do the ride. The vast majority of these people do not ride regularly, so it was great to see them out, but it would also prove a nightmare trying to ride with them at times (more on that later).

We left the waterfront and rode back over to Indiana on the Second St. bridge, made a quick loop in Jeffersonville (basically 3 blocks) and then headed back over to Louisville and rode to Cherokee Park. Once in
the park, we chose to go the longer, hiller route around the park, before joining back up with the main route that made a circuit of the park before heading back downtown. After a while it did get spreadout but the first mile or two was rather sketchy at times, what with the fact that Kate and I got in with the group that included a lot of families with little kids, who from time to time made trying to stay upright a little difficult, oh, well, we did not crash nor did end up having to clean little kid guts out of our spokes so in the end it worked out fine.
There were all sorts of bikes out, as can by seen by the "penny farthing" that the guy in the picture is riding. good thing that he is wearing a helmet as it was quite common for people who fell from those bikes back when they were popular (mid-1800s) to not survive the crashes.

The first pictures is from before the start of the ride, and the third is taken over my shoulder as we are starting to climb the bridge. In the end, it turned out to be about a 30 mile ride, which was long enough for me cause it was getting pretty hot by the time we got home.

The hills are alive with the sound of puking

So, no pictures today, but I did a hard ride of riding out in the Knobs and climbing Moser Knob to Skyline Dr. and riding the rim of the Knobs to Dow and then riding back past St. Joseph's church through Sellersburg.

The knobs are about the hardest climbs around this area, maybe only 2 or 3 k long, but very steep in places (15-20% grades) and while I was happy to be climbing Moser at close to 10 miles an hours it certainly hurt a lot, but it was overall a good ride, and no flat tires, which I seem to have had a run of lately.

The setting sun

Today was a long day, so we did a short, easy ride at the end of it. I did not sleep well the night before because I was up worrying about the Utica 5k running race that was organizing. But, in the end that went off without any real hitches: 23 people ran in what is probably one of the smallest races around, but that is fine with me, makes it easier on me. Kate walked in the race with her mom and Dylan. Dylan won the under-20 age division (he was the only one), and Kate with third in the 20-30 age class. Sandy did not defend her metal from last year, but won one of the door prizes as consolation. We spent some time at the festival after that. It really is a good example of Utica in a nutshell, a little corny, less than classy, slightly greasy, and yet very endearing in the end cause so many people work hard to put it on (here is my "proletariat" comment for this post).

So, about the ride, we rode our tandem down to the Falls of the Ohio State Park, which really is just a straight shot down from our house. This was the place that the Lewis & Clark Expedition of Discovery left from before heading to St. Louis.
The weather was really nice, around 90 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. The first photo is of the Lewis and Clark statue, an old railroad bridge and some of the Louisville skyline in the back. The second is of looking down over the river at the fossil beds.
We then continued down to the second part of the falls, to where George Rogers Clark built his cabin on land granted to him by the government after the Revolutionary War, actually most of Clark and Floyd counties were among this grant for Clark and his men. Although, once again, no thought was given to the Indians who were already living or using the land.
The third picture is looking down stream from the second area we stopped, and finally a shot of us on our way home in the setting sun. I am already missing the sun being up until 8:30 or 9:00 like in June, the days are getting shorter.

Dan's First Post

It's Sunday afternoon and I'm icing my left leg after what was supposed to be an easy ride. For the past two weeks I was riding my road bike and was really pushing myself to see how fast I could go. This week I was back on my mountain bike (more on why later) and thought that it would be best to rest a little. Most of the top riders in the group were off at a race north of here and so the pace WAS slower than it often is, and the weather WAS cooler than it has been, but somehow we still managed to spend a lot of the time riding at 35 kilometers per hour or more (for a little exotic spice I thought I'd leave all measurements in metric!)

Tsukuba sits on the edge of the Kanto Plain, the largest flat area in all of Japan. For North Americans the word plain evokes images of endless, endless flat. Not so here. It is flat, to be sure, but it is not endless. Back in the olden days, before air pollution, residents of Edo (the old name for Tokyo) could see mountains in all directions: Mt. Fuji famously to the west, Nikko famously to the north, and Mt. Tsukuba (not quite as) famously to the east. It is this combination of the flat plains land (think rice paddies, not wheat fields) and the mountains that makes Tsukuba such a delightful place for cycling. I do miss the rolling hills of northern Michigan and southern Indiana, but at the same time there is something exciting about riding up a MOUNTAIN, and boy am I happy for the flatness when we get back down. Actually, Tsukuba and the surrounding areas are rather famous for cycling: we often see Keirin racers training when we're out for rides (you know a Keirin racer because he trains in the same ancient looking helmet they race in). The other nice thing about riding in Tsukuba is the perspective. Endless plains are dull. Green rice fields stretching out to the foot of the mountains are picturesque.

Today we rode one of our usual courses: up to the foot of Mt. Tsukuba (not up it--remember, today was an easy day) and then through the rice fields to our favorite croquette shop. I didn't grow up eating a lot of croquettes in Michigan. Wikipedia says they're a Dutch invention, and there were plenty of Dutch folk near Cadillac, but I associate them wholly with Japan. They're a staple of Japanese folk cuisine. You can get them at 7-11 all year round. (Not that I'd recommend it. When they're good, they're a true proletariat delicacy. When they're from 7-11 they're like soggy french fries.) The place we go for croquettes is a shoddy meat shop in the middle of nowhere. They don't actually have any meat in the display cases. I don't know how they stay in business. They must have regular customers (school food services? restaurants?) who make special orders. They do a brisk croquette business on Sundays, but at 50 cents to a dollar per croquette, it's not like we're bumping them into a higher tax bracket. But boy are the croquettes good. A standard croquette is basically mashed potatoes breaded and deep-fried. Some of the guys I ride with like this simplest of choices. I prefer the menchi-katsu, which is basically spiced ground pork and beef breaded and deep-fried, and the niku-jaga, sauteed onions, ground meat, and potatoes (all, of course, breaded and deep-fried). In addition to these you can get curry croquettes, a fancier variety of potato croquette, "salad" croquettes (?), fried pork loin (a bit much for a ride), fried liver (one of the riders has gained the nickname Fried Liver Endo for his preference for this treat), and then all sorts of fried fish. All for under two dollars. The guys I ride with like to eat. I'll have more posts on our frugal gourmet in the future.

And last, although this is a wordy post already, but I promised I'd write a short gear column as well. That's my bike in the bottom picture below. No, not the Time (with full Record, a Bora wheel on the back and a handmade Italian wood-rimmed tubular on the front), the Bianchi hiding behind. Don't get me wrong, I love the bike. It's a modern classic (a lugged steel Grizzly with full Deore XT (that era XT is my favorite of all Shimano's mountain components--advanced enough to shift like a dream and brake with plenty of power, but classically styled--very elegant)). But it's just not made to keep up with guys on seven kilogram Times and DeRosas. It's a perfect town bike, but I concluded I needed something faster for the road. So I brought back my old Buddi. I'll write a whole post on the Buddi later. For now it's in the shop, crankless. A 54-42 set up just killed me on the hills. I'm going compact. Let's hope it has a crank by the next time I write.

DS