Ride Lugged

Well, since I can’t seem to post pictures properly and YouTube won’t cooperate either…
here’s a funny ( my perception of the word ) link for you to waste some brain cells on.

Ebay auction feedback
This is feedback someone is leaving for others via his/her Ebay account. I kinda like it.

RobQ

so the first part of my ride was ok. it was cold out, and spitting, and for some reason the road was covered in a thin layer of mud, but other than that, nice enough. i thought i’d be smart (dumb) and wear my goretex sneakers. dont do it kids. there is a secretly large deposit of plastic mixed in with the rubber, on account its lighter than rubber and stuff. anyway, that makes them very hard to ride in. feet all over the place, never in the right place. couldnt develop my world reknowned ’spin’ for shit. so i cut my ride short @ 14 miles. sorry. no mud soaked mtn pictures. when i turned around @ the 7 mile point, god smote me and threw rain at me from every direction. hard. cold. soaking. I was goretexed out head to toe and came home with all my under layers soaked. interestingly, my waxed canvas bar bag was dry as a bone inside. go figure.

pond about halfway thru the ride. odd milky color today.

river on the road back home. looks nicer out than it is. natch.

Saw this ridiculous bike over at Swedish classified site blocket.se

It looks like what an idiot with an arc welder, one of the old Trek Y-bike full-suspensions, and a shitload of acid might do.

Broseph wants 5000 krowns ($700) for it too. MIGHT.

so i recently splurged and bought two 9 dollar aiptek cameras. i’m gunna take them out for thier first ride today, but here are some shots i took just strolling to the post office. they have odd color, but it is a super overcast day, and they have no adjustments for anything. the smaller cam is not much larger than your middle and index finger combined. the bigger one would be good for meatier hands. it would say its the size of a 1/3 used tube of tom’s toothpaste. both cams take 40 ‘high resolution pics’ @ 1.3 megapixels, or 160 at some lesser resolution. i think you basically get crappier color and more bleeding between forms at the lower res. they are powered off aaa batteries, so you can bring spares, and they weigh nothing. ok anyway, to the pics:

above pic is low res. you can see some of the color is wonky.

this pic is high res. there is a manual focus guestimator thing you can do macro shots with. this is that.

low res pic. you can see the lack of definition in the bush.

indoor night shots. interestingly grainy.

moral of story thus far: cheap cameras arnt as bad as they should be, considering the price. pluses over ’spensive cameras: um cheap, so if you take it mtn biking, or whatevering, and you drop it @ high speed or in a puddle, you dont cry about it. sometimes its nice to take photos that arnt the best, and not worry about it. also, the small size of the pics makes them ideal for uploading to a blog. no resizing nessesary.

why did i buy it if i already had a decent fuji? the fuji was heavy and not condusive to wool jersey pocket storage. this is. UPDATE: IF YOU TAKE THESE PHOTOS INTO PHOTOSHOP AND SAVE THEM, THEY CAN BE UPLOADED INTO IFOTO.

Did a 30+ miler out to Great Falls Park in the good weather last Saturday with DC Bike Massive members Joe and Tammer.

We headed out from my place, down Pennsylvania Ave. past the White House then through Georgetown to the Capitol Crescent trail . We jumped off the trail where it crosses MacArthur Blvd. and rode past all the castles of the rich fucks who live by the river there. Took that all the way to Old Angler’s Inn which is right across from Great Falls.

This is the kind of pretty reward-at-the-end type of flat-and-not-too-long rides I always hope we’ll have. City boys plan rides too.

Greensvalley road lies 9 miles from my house. You climb roughly 1000 ft in less than 2 miles, on a dirt road, to get to it. Greensvalley Rd starts easy enough, paved and everything. According to google maps, which is next to worthless, it meanders through a valley and slowly climbs up a ridgeline, dumping out on a perpendicular road. I forgot my camera on this ride, which means everything that follows will have to be taken verbatum. I’ll ride it again, someday, when I exchange my leg muscles for hydraulic super legs. Greensvalley Rd, unbeknownst to me, actually quickly goes from nice pavement to a nice dirt road. Then comes the sign, about 2 miles into the dirt: no winter maintenance. In PA that means, no maintenance, ever, in fact, we arnt sure why we bothered to build this godforsaken road in the first place. Ok so, rutted, really bumpy dirt road. No problem. I have 1.5 inch tires, its cool. So unmaintained roads automatically mean state forest. No houses around. I see two wild turkeys, huge, gobbling as the run in the opposite direction of my clattering bike. I proceed at speed down a huge hill, 35mph for at least 5 minutes, on nasty dirt. I know from experience that too much braking blows tubes.

Rounding a sharp bend, I see a sign: bridge out. In PA, they dont tell you pertinent info until it is too late. I had spent a lot of time going down, and then they tell me this. Ok no worries. Maybe it just has some debris, I can just walk across it anyway. No. I get to the bridge. There was a bridge once. About 90 years ago. Now there are two dirt mounds. So I ford the stream, which isnt too deep, but its a mtn stream, and so its cold, and too rocky to ride across.

The road mysteriously dissolved into a super nasty fire road, ala the fireroads out at the shed. A 1200 foot climb insued, that would have super sucked, but we dont have leaves on our trees yet, so the views were out of this world.

After literally 45 minutes of climbing in my granny gear, I came out on a nice dirt road, turn right. Into a massive headwind. The kind of headwind that is strong enough to require concerted pedaling whilst going down hill. This kept up for the next 15 miles. Then it started to rain. A cold driving rain. I rode up the hill towards my house, only to see Mel coming out with the rescue wagon, as I was 1.5 hours overdue for some reason.

What a great ride. Who’s up for it?

so mel and i have been laying down some road miles, now that i am outta pneumonia purgatory.  we’re trying to get her to be able to comfortably ride 40 miles before the 55 miler in mid may.  we’re at a point now where she can do 20+ miles, no problem.  but i think it will take a bit of work for both of us to get a better mileage base under our belts.  luckly school is out soon, for both of us, so we can throw down alot more.  anyway, these are pics from a recent ride we did this past weekend.  we headed out on our normal loop then included 1000+ feet of climbing, about half on a nice dirt road with a small stream running beside it. 

Mel climbing black hawk rd.  good views off to the left.  had to be there.

thats me.

proof.

this is what mel looks like when she eats too many fig newtons.  we stopped at a burned out restaurant on the side of a cliff.  the decent back down to the valley was paved.  i hit 54mph.  no shimmy, which i thought was interesting.

anyway, these pics are mainly to serve as imputus to get your lazy asses out to the may ramble.  spoke cards are in the works.  i wanna know where our czech made spoke cards are though.

OK, today (Sunday 22-04-2007) we went for a one way ride, one of the luxuries of life in a country with mass transit.

We were supposed to ride with a colleague of Verča but after not hearing from her all morning we got a call saying she was going to be working on her doctoral thesis instead of riding with us, hurumph! That girl is going to have to get her priorities straight tone day. (ed. Now we are even more hurumphed at the colleague. apparently she later decided to blow off her thesis and go for a ride. At least she is learning, right?) Anyway it was nice because we had a leisurely morning waiting and a nice late breakfast (which fueled me all day long.)

So Verča was a little reluctant to take this 50-60km ride (31-37m). It seems she had been invited to do the same ride last October by some very active (read ‘fast and strong’) guys she rides with a bit. She had passed it off and they had moaned the next day about how tired they were and how hard it was. So Verča was happy to have missed it; and today was making excuses, like ‘I have a headache’ and ‘I have to clean the bathroom’. I was a bit worried. If she was going to prefer to clean the bathroom then to go mountain biking, then I would be screwed. But I persisted, it sounded good. And we all know that I can go a little longer without cleaning the bathroom myself.

(First off we had to get out of Prague. Cross the river and drop this little set of stairs. There is a path around but Verča was sweating it, so she tried a few times then stuck it and we were off.)

(We cross the river at a big highway/beltway bridge, underneath of which is some nice legal/ignored grafitti.)

Anyway I looked at the topo map of the area (a lesson I learned to do pre-ride last Sunday to Okoř); and it didn’t seem too rough. Maybe a overall total of 250m of elevation change in 50-60km, how bad could it be right?

(Holy Crap! a steep dirt chute we had to ride up as the first bit of trail.)

Well come to find out (if you either look real closely at the map or just ride it) the trail takes about 5 turns from the river valley at 275m up to the ridge/plateau at 450m and then back down again. And it does it steeply. I’m talking about the steepest singletrack you’ve ever ridden for a km or 2 (because they were right at that border line where any steeper and your front wheel would never stay on the ground,) one of the downsides to a nation of hikers/walkers (read: billygoats.) Then from tops there are beautiful fireroad, doubletrack and singletrack descents into the next little old town. Such nice downhills, you almost forgot that there was another 3km fireroad climb just ahead.

Anyway, there were nice flat and rolling sections on the ridge, and a sweet portage section with some 5.3 climbing moves up something that would make for a beautiful series of waterfalls during the rainy season.

One real rocky descent dropped you into a small town, fresh out of some fairy tale surrounded by sheer rock cliffs.

(get ready for this picture to be repeated shamelessly as I catch us both riding together!)
Verča has lived here too long and has grown callous to the scenery. She wouldn’t even turn around as I gawked at what we had just ridden down through (see those cliffs behind my enormous head?!) If the rocks weren’t only 150m high you would think you were in the Austrian Alps.

We also zipped through Karlštejn where you may recall a post this past winter with some foggy castle on top of a hill.

Beautiful riding, beautiful weather. Sunny with a high of 18 (66F).

We rolled into Beroun 4 hours and ten minutes after we rolled out of our building, and 4 minutes before the next train back to Prague.

We quickly scooped up a pair of tickets for us and a pair for our bikes in the 1930’s train station, and hurried to our awaiting train.

A quick 30 minutes of so and the train rolled back to a station in Prague and we hopped off for a quick 3km jaunt across the river and back home.

Plus when we got back to Prague. Verča had a txt message from our friends asking when we were going to join them for beer. So after we cleaned up and had a snack we made our way up the hill to a nice outdoor beer garden, and drank the sun over the horizon.

Na shled(anou.)
-Cory a Verča

(I have good pics, and will get them out of the camera when I can and edit the post!)

OK, so up to date, but still no pictures. It seems that I don’t have a USB cable for my camera and no card reader, so the pictures I have taken so far may live inside my camera for a bit longer. (they will come though, don’t worry!)

My second Saturday here we went for a shorter ride in Zbraslav a Točná, south of Prague. I had been complaining about riding 30km on the road for a 50km ride then 30km home. The long lead ins to long rides were going to kill me if I didn’t ease into them. Anyway Verča heard my complaints and somehow her first reaction wasn’t to hit me with something. Also, it had been her sister’s birthday over the week, so we were scheduled for afternoon tea. A shorter ride was therefore in order.

We headed to the same area as the Trans-Brdy ride from last week, promising long climbs and fast dry rooty terrain. We took the main bike path south out of town, but were able to bail earlier than normal for a powerline doubletrack climb avoiding some of the masses. We ambled up some more urban interstitial singletrack as the path moseyed like a cow trail. Verča had tried to find her way through here before with little luck. There are literally so many little paths that people take everyday here, it’s hard to tell which one will go your way and which will end up at some bus stop or in some driveway somewhere.

We did find our way though, and climbed up a small dry creek bed away from the town. (It seems to be abnormally dry here, so I’m curious if we will get a bunch of rain and the trails will get muddy?) The trail up winds a singletrack through a pine forest with a couple of nice idyllic clear views back to outcroppings of the city. Nearing the top on a forest road we come to a clearing I had crossed in January. We are confronted by a few young girls learning to ride horses and a slew of folks on foot and on bikes. The weather has been great and the Czechs definitely spend more time going about outside (not much sitting in front of the tele in this culture.)

As we approached this little rural grass airfield on the edge of the plateau, we heard some goings on over a PA system. It seems there was a little Ecology setup at the airfield. (Only now writing this do I realize that it was Earth Day on Saturday, so I guess they were being earthy.) We dropped back into the woods for some nice rolling Schaffer-style riding; quick, hardpack, with no major climbing.

This looks to be a place I will probably be taking a bunch of short solo rides on. But there is plenty of exploring to do. There are probably a hundred little offshoot trails of one form or another, that weave in and out of the area. We didn’t really have a specific route we wanted to take, so we jut pedaled. As w approached the southern end of this area, we found a sharp change in terrain. This little riding enclave is bound on the south by a little 200m gorge as a creek has cut its way through the hillside to the river to the west. It exposed the rocky ground beneath the ridge, and has made for some dry loose shale on the exposed south face, much like you find in southern CA. Up another 50m on a steep loose climb and we were riding a knife edge trail of loose tan shale gravel. Here we found a couple of nice little step type drops on some harder rock outcrops and beautiful views down the hill’s very steep sides.

Getting late in the afternoon, we decided to try to find our way home. After wandering down a couple of dead end educational nature trails to view points, we found a quick and steep chute down that Verča remembered (not so happily, though.) As quickly as we came around a corner we were back to civilization and dropped to the freshly paved bike path along the river Berounka (which we will follow as well on Sunday) that flows north to the Vltava and Prague. The trail wasn’t actually done being paved yet. Strangely they were working on it on Saturday (apparently immigrant labor who hasn’t taken to the easy going Czech style just yet), so we got to take a short detour through some dusty construction site. (All these low lying areas were ravaged by floods a couple of years ago, and there is a lot of rebuilding.) We even got to ride through a nice little mudbog where a small stream was trying to find its way back to the river. (Verča however rode around a bit not as willing to be covered in mud as I am.)

A few km of bike path and we were back in the city. After a quick stop in my new shop krab cycles to get a tube and we were back home in a few with three hours and 4o-45ish km of riding.

Keep an eye out for a post on krab cycles. Verča and I dropped by there for a chat with owner Ondra Krab on Friday and to deliver some Chris King product and pimp some SIC stuff. They are a really nice shop with a downhill focus and right on the path out of town.

OK, I need to get some work done, so ciao for now.
-Cory na Praze

OK so here try this Route slip works in the Czech Republic. (although I couldn’t really follow all the trails. I missed a bunch. probably 5 or 10 miles worth, but whatever you get the idea.)

Plus some glitch make the climbing look impressive.

So Saturday was soo successful that Verča decided that we would ride to Okoř today (Sunday 15/04/2007), which is just to the northwest of Prague about 25km as the crow flies. Her friend Jakub (Kuba) who tried to ride me into the ground on Saturday siad it was pretty flat.

A very brief look at the map confirmed it. Okoř is on a small river that flows north into the Vltava (which flows north out of the center of Prague.) Rivers that run flat and slow so we should be fine, but we will take a shorter route, more direct.

We started off through the city, first on the bike path then giving up, on the main streets, and finally through little back streets. We climbed Letna (where every street BMKican video worth its salt takes a stop) and fought though thousands of rollerbladers doing circuits trying to pick up chicks. We weren’t sure exactly where the trail (which typically consist of sewer easments, back alleys, and urban singletrack) was supposed to start, so we ambled a bit. Up some residential street around some park, along some overgrown alley on the side of a big hill. Until we climbed some residential boulevard, strangely all the way to the top. We should have taken this as a sign, but it was somehow lost on us. (A week and several beers late I learned from a czech friend a use ful saying “the shortest way between two points is over the top!”)

We did find the trail. Yes, it was at the top. It disappeared into the woods for a short segment of lovely urban singletrack. In the US, the same trail exists, but it is hidden in you neighbors back yard, and you would never know it existed. Here it is clearly marked with an organized system of blazes and is well mapped. Still you do kinda have to look for it. And you have to be determined. We were just forced to ride up a paved common drive, that Trevor’s Defender would have whined over having to climb. Out of 14 speeds on th Rohloff, it’s scary how much time I spend in 1, 2, and 3?!

We meandered about, following the trail, and finally with tired legs and sore butts arrived in the town of Okoř, where we were to find a old castle that Verča had tried to describe, somewhere between a ruin and a functional centuries old stone building meticulously kept up. When I saw it through the trees, I had to laugh. If it were more in ruins, it would have been merely a pile of stones. Verča laughed too; and swore she didn’t remember it so well; and mentioned being very tired the last time she was there too.

Very hungry we found a terrace of a cafe on the edge of town Verča ran inside and ordered us a nice warm lunch and a beer and a water. When she came back outside to join me, we did a quick accounting of how much money we were carrying: me ~$11, Verča ~$2. She ran back inside to see what our bill would be, and to keep Murphy’s law alive it was ~14.50. She tried to stop something, but they said the food was already being made; and not to worry that what we had was close enough (very accommodating me thinks.) Verča was a bit annoyed, it being the first time she couldn’t pay her bill. I said not to worry, it was a bit overpriced anyway in a rather touristy town.

After eating we decided to follow the water home. Along the rivers we had much more reasonable terrain , no more freaking steep climbs followed but quick descents. It was just a nice fast rolling descent to the Vltava, with a nice unexpected 8 stair drop when the trail meandered through one small town. We actually thought we would take some other route, but ended up so quickly to the river that we rode home the more flat (and windy) way. Back though a big cool and apparently famous park on the north side of Prague, we ran into a carnival with hoards of people and back through all the rollerbladers. We decided to forgo the bike paths and took the city streets home for a much quicker return.

As always, the last bit of road home is paved with cobbles, and my sore butt and tired legs couldn’t be happier to be back at our doorstep.

So second day of riding and another hilly 85km. Yikes, we’ll see how long til Verča kills me.

(OK, so I needed to get caught up, now we can get back to the present day.)