Ride Lugged

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So Verča and I were going to go hiking in the High Tatras, a mountain range on the border between Poland and the Slovak Republic, the eastern most range of the Alps. It’s about a 8hr bus or train ride away, but with a 3-day week-end for Czech National day, we were all about it. But we kept abreast of the weather, as we readied to depart and it looked pretty crappy. So last minute we nixed it.

We weren’t about to endure a long journey to be stuck in the rain like 2 weeks ago. And we sure as hell weren’t going to go all out and summit the 2600m peak there on a hardcore dayhike where we couldn’t see a thing from inside a cloud. Anyway we scrapped that idea and decided to try later.

We stayed in Prague and decided to paint our apartment. It is now a sunny yellow-orange from the floor to 7′ up, then white, with some red accents and a couple of small red walls. (see the pivo post for the wall color.) Almost needless to say it is a huge improvement, and will be quite welcome as the length of daylight has begun to diminish here. Again surprising to no one but us, it took along time to do what with all the patch and repair of the plaster we had to do along the way. A day and a half later we were happy as the weather began to clear and we ventured back outside.

We found a cool new walk through the city with some shady places to ride, involving crossing an active train yard that we had a hard time finding our way out of, and enjoyed the end of a long day. Having been cooped up we resolved to go biking on Sunday. We were going to look at going to a bike park on the German border so Verča could try out a little downhill stuff and work on here big hit confidence.

We woke up on Sunday slowly, had a nice breakfast and balked at the price of rentals and lift passes at the park in Germany, and the Czech one had already closed for the year. We were being lazy and had settled on riding around Prague, when one of our friends called.

Matsa was in Ještěd, (you all remember the spaceship thing, right?) for the last week-end of lift served trails there, and they were renting some all-mountain bikes. We hopped in the car and were off. For $30 we rented 2 high quality czech branded taiwanese 6″ 35lb squishy pieces of crap and vowed to do what we could to work them over. This wouldn’t be hard as we waited for the lift and I realized that Verča’s no-name rear hub was probably going to explode in about 4 hours.

But lucky for us we only had just over 2 1/2 hours left of the downhill season on some seriously wet and muddy trails.

There were lots of roots and a couple of nicely built stunts. Overall it wasn’t nearly as techy as the stuff in the shed, but had some nice flowing step down North Shore bits, and some well crafted and placed jumps and drops. It was tight and twisty and would have been overkill with a real DH bike, so our rental turds were perfect.

We had a blast. Verča rode some sweet steep stuff and hit a couple of jumps. And she was definitely stoked to ride the long (and wide) boardwalk since she gets a bit afeared of them usually. It was nice to haul ass on some slippery stuff and hit some nice little jumps for me too. It is always nice to pass people when you are riding a cheapo rental too. And Verča was reassured to see that she was much more in control than a number of guys out there with some spendy equipment and she was willing to try and at least roll almost every drop.

Plus at the end of the day we dropped the muddy bikes of back at the rental shop, put on clean clothes and jetted.
It’s nice to let someone else clean the bike every once in a while.
Go ride your bike!
-C&V

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Some things are simple here, like a 17oz can of Delvita (aka Food Lion) pilsner style beer for 80 cents.

come on, grocery store brand generic beer. It would only be better if it came in a white can, that just said pivo on the side. I take that back it’s better cause it’s got beer written on it in seven languages.

Since there haven’t been many posts, I figured I’d just post this super ugly folding bike that Johnson was talking about in the comments of the last post. I’m not sure which is worse, this or a razor scooter.

Here are some messed up frankenbikes:

I’ll give this guys credit for having an idea, but that’s about it. It’s almost as bad as the wooden tandem.

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another beautiful ride and a slew of more amazing etch-a-sketch images.
this is how 15 of 19 turned out.

the others were not quite as bad. This one showed that it is autumn here, but I am not sure I took this picture?

this one showed me riding over a train bridge that had a wire grate bike path hung on the side with a river and some rapids underneath. you can see all of that in the picture right?

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This post is for you Starmer.
Does anyone know how to trick this damned thing into taking pictures?

I went for nice ride today, since I had the day off. I rode these 2 trails that Veronika had taken me on. Both are rad! The first one, when we rode it, was covered in fog and a heavy rain. The second we got to after riding for 4 and a half hours and it was dark. Not getting dark. It was so dark that we walked it just to get home, and all I could ever see was the back of Verca’s arms and legs. I saw none of the trail and it took us 3 1/2 hours to find out way back through the forest and along cliff sides by braille.

I took the pen cam, cause these trails are truly spectacular. and this was the best shot I got.

1/3 of the pics come back the color of Casey’s bianchi jersey and the majesty of the rest of them look like this:

oh well!
Go ride your bike!!
-Cory

This website has stolen the title of most best website ever from Ridelugged.  I’m pretty bummed.  Reset your bookmarks to put that on the top.

Tak jezdim do prace autobusem no a co!?

mobile keg

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50 minutes north of Prague.
We tried to go Saturday, but I left the cars headlights on overnight (the little buzzer reminding you works for Verča, but not for me), and with a dead battery we rode bikes from home. So Sunday morning with some jumper cables, we were on our way.

Kokořínsko is similar in stone to the Czech Switzerland area, with more sandstone outcroppings and little canyons. Plus more North Shore-style ecosystem. Cool, dark, and moist.

Lots of cool moss covered rock formations and wet sandy trail in these little canyon / stream valleys with century old roads leading through them, some paved in stone, others just cut or worn into the rock.

On top of the 150-300′ ridges were more cool rocks with a bit drier pine forest climate, like the higher Sierras.

Its quite a contrast from the cold humid rain forest feel at the bottom.

OK, we’ll leave you with two of the best things in life: fast women and bikes.
(or was it women and fast bikes? either way, I guess!)

Take care and keep the rubber side down!
-Cory a Verča