Saturday, March 03, 2007

Mt Bike snowglobe

That was today's ride.

Big, fat, fluffy snowflakes fell today as I headed out from my house to Indian Springs Metro park. It was about 3pm and most of the snow and ice had melted. The roads were wet, but not too wet. However, the falling snow was accumulating a little bit, making it hard to discern puddle from pavement. I had to take some sidewalk before crossing Dixie into the neighborhoods. I promptly ran through about 15 feet of 5 inch deep not quite frozen puddle. Yuk. Well, I was dry. Luckily my feet didn't seem to get too wet, but I'm still afraid this will shorten the ride.

In an effort to get more miles this month before the trails are dry enough to ride, I'll be using routeslip.com to plan out longer rides from my front door. Today's ride was planned to take me to Indian Springs. I studied the streets and turns before leaving the house, and figured I'd wing it from there. Actually, this was a test run to see just how good I am at "winging" it. I love Robert's rides because I don't have to think too much while riding. I wasn't sure I could do the thinking and still enjoy the ride. But it was an awesome ride! There's a few bugs to ironed out in this route. A couple of the roads were too high traffic and narrow. But otherwise, it was a great time, and it looks like I'll be able to get plenty of miles from home this spring!

The ride took me by PLRA. I didn't bother even checking out the trail as there were several inches of snow everywhere that wasn't plowed. I did, however, take a shortcut from the PLRA parking lot to Gale road that took me through some of that deep snow. That was a trip. Slogging through 5 inches of snow, in 42x17 with a semi-slick on the back. And I almost made it... ;)

The dirt portion of Gale road was in terrible shape. It was a veritable mine field of potholes. I finally turned back at this point as it was getting too tiring to try to avoid all the holes. I'd hoped to be out for 2 hours whether I made it to the metro park or not. I turned around and 50 minutes. I tried to stretch it out on the way back, but it's mostly downhill on the way home, so I only managed 1:45 by the time I got back home.

Tomorrow I meet Paula and Erin in Novi for a 4 hour ride out to Kensington and back. 300 miles here I come!!

PS and now a quick note about how Fire Fox kicks IE's ASS!!! After spending a significant amount of time composing this post, I accidentally cut power to my laptop. After rebooting and launching FF, the "restore previous session" option acutally returned me to the post page with my post INTACT!!

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