Vacation in the Cascades

I haven't posted for the past couple of weeks because I have been on vacation. We went to the west coast and spent a lot of time in the Cascade mountains between Portland and Seattle. It was a great trip and I got a lot of good pictures. We spent a lot of time driving up and down mountains. It was like one long scenic drive. You can see more of the pictures from my trip here.

I did not do any biking on this vacation but saw a number of bikers while we were driving around and talked to a few. There aren't a lot of paved roads around the Cascade mountains so most of the biking is done on the county roads. They all have wide shoulders so riding with the traffic is not a problem. The view are spectacular as long as you don't mind long climbs of 1000 to 2000 feet.

The weather is very unpredictable it can be 60 degrees and sunny and then 15 mins later its 35 degrees and hailing. So as one of the bikers told me you can't depend on the weather report and have to be prepared for any type of weather whenever you go riding.

Now that I am back from vacation I miss seeing the beautiful Cascade mountain every day as it was almost like being in the Alps. It was a nice change of pace.

After 10 days of vacation it was nice to get back on the bike and start riding again. I went for a ride with Herb, Mary, and George down towards Bordentown and although the I didn't see any snow capped mountains the scenery was still nice. We ended up running into a Rotary club ride and saw a bunch of riders filing by. We ended stopping and checking on one of the bikers who had a fall. He had a couple of bad cuts on his face and some road rash on his arms and legs but he didn't appear to have broken anything. So after he called for the sage wagon we left him with a car that had stopped to check on him and continued on our ride.

Because I was on vacation I did not put in any ride in the book for June so keep watch on the blog here in case I decide to do some off the book rides.

Shades of Death

This past Wednesday I had a presentation and book signing at REI in East Hanover. This is up in north west Jersey. Since I don't get up to this area to ride as much as I want, I decided to take the day off work and do a ride up in the area. I decided to do a ride around Allamuchy since this area is nice and quiet and isn't too hilly. I also wanted to ride on Shades of Death again since I hadn't done this in a couple of years. Although the name sounds bad Shades of Death is a nice rolling road with some good scenery especially by the meadow.

The last time I rode in this area the weather was a perfect 80 degree day with calm winds(see pictures here). This time however the weather sucked. It was an overcast 40 degrees with 20 mph winds gusting much higher. It didn't really rain but there were a couple of times when I got hit with a few rain drops. I event rode through some intermittent pea size hail. If I didn't have the book signing later in the day I would have canceled the ride.

Even with the poor conditions I still enjoyed the ride, which just proves that a bad day on the bike is still better than working. I didn't stop to take a lot of pictures this time because of the weather but I did see something strange that I couldn't help but take a picture of. It was motorcycle made out of logs. It looks like something I would see in the Flintstones.

The presentation at REI went well. The store in East Hanover is relatively new and very nice. They have a full bike shop and more bike merchandise then most big outdoor stores. The store even had a special room just for presentations and events. The staff was great and the bike mechanic was pretty sharp he noticed my stretched chain on my bike almost immediately.

I had around 35-40 people of all different levels of experience. After the talk they had a lot of good questions and even after the presentation was over a number of them hung around. It is always fun talking to other bikers and exchanging stories. It is something I never get tired of.

North west Jersey has a lot of nice places to ride if you don't mind a few hills so I hope to be back up in this area later this year for some more rides.

Raritan River Ramble

This past Saturday I had a good group ride through the Sourlands. This marks the beginning of my hill training to try and get my climbing legs back. Although we climbed a few hills this route was relatively easy and I was even able to convince a few flatlanders to join me. This was a some what new route that I made up of some of the normal roads plus a few new ones I explored last year. This will definitely be one I will do again as it had some nice scenery. I will be posting the ride sheet soon to my web site but until then you can check out the route here on google maps. I have been experimenting with the new directions feature they added a little while ago and must admit the more I use it the more useful I find it. With google maps it is still a little hard to get to route to go where you want it but once you do the street level pictures at each turn are really cool and are very useful when trying to see what the road really looks like.

On the Road Again

After a cold and snowy winter, spring has brought some really nice weather. For the past few weeks I have been able to get in some nice 40ish mile rides to start building my miles.

Now that the official riding seasons is beginning I'm looking forward to doing more exploring and catching up with everybody again. I already have a lot of ideas about places I want to go this year. I didn't make it up to northwest Jersey last year so I am thinking about a trip up there in late June once my legs are in good enough shape to handle the hills up there.

For the next few weeks I have a couple or Adhoc rides in the book so keep a watch here for details and come join me for a ride.

Google Maps

It's another weekend where the crappy weather will keep me off the bike. I was able to get out last weekend for a nice 40 mile ride which felt good so I was hoping to get out again this weekend but it is not looking good.

I saw this week that Google added bicycle directions to their maps (http://maps.google.com/). My first impression after trying it was that it kinda sucked since it routed me down Rt 130, one of the major highways in the area, on one of the rides I tried to map out. However after playing with the map for a while I think it can be a useful tool for those who want to map out bike rides.

The first thing that is nice is that you can share the routes You can see my simple route by clicking here. This is just a simple route from Cranbury to Etra Park and back. To start creating a route I went to http://maps.google.com/ selected the Get Directions link on the top left then chose Bicycling from the drop down menu below the list of destinations.

To create a route what you need to do is to first decide where you want to go and then pick a few places along you route as way points. You then add the way points as destinations. For example on my route I first added Bennet Pl in Cranbury, then Disbrow Hill Rd, then Bennet Pl again. Longer routes will have more way points and with most routes you create the first and late destination will be the same.

Once you get the destination all set you will have the basic route. What you need to do now is to edit the route since a number of the roads that it takes you on aren't really roads you would want to ride a bike on. To edit the route what you do is to hover your mouse over the blue lines of route and drag the lines from the roads you don't want to ride on to the ones you do. I recommend starting at the starting point and working you way through the route road by road. This editing is a little twitchy because as you drag the blue lines around it sometimes does some strange things and starts putting some loops in for no apparent reason. With some trial and error and some patience you quickly get better at editing the route and it becomes easier.

After you finish editing the route by dragging all the blue lines around your done and have a complete bike route with a map and directions. There are a few nice things here. First you have a pretty accurate set of directions that you can now copy and paste into any document or spreadsheet so you can edit and take it along on the ride. The mile estimates are pretty good but I think the coolest thing is the pictures along the way.

If you look at the directions you will see a little camera icon to the left of the mileage on some of the directions. If click on this icon you will get a picture of the intersection. This picture is not static but is a panorama that you can zoom and pan to see the whole area. Pretty cool and useful.

Google maps is good but it still doesn't provide me everything I need to research and create a good bike route. First although I can print out the maps they aren't of the quality that I need. There is also no way to add comments to the map. In my mind nothing beats the maps from NJBikeMap. The other thing I would like to see shown in the directions is the total accumulated miles as well as the elevation change. This is why I will still use a mapping program like Topo USA for mapping out my rides. I like a lot of information when I plan rides and am more picky than most.

I still think Google maps is a good tool for planning a ride. The satellite maps and photos along the way are very useful. The roads it puts you on may or may not be ridable roads so you will have to double check and edit the route. This should get better as the product matures and people add comments to improve the map

Bicycle Repair Man!

Although a bike is a relatively simple machine that is very reliable, it does occasionally break down and require some repair. That is way it is a good idea to have a relationship with a bike mechanic at your local shop or know how to do the maintainance by yourself. I am mechanically inclined so I do most of the up keep on the bike my self but there are still a few things I don't know how to do. That's why when I saw a course on bicycle repair at Mercer County College I decided to give it a try.

The course was taught at Bernie's Bikes in Hamiliton by Chris who is one of the bike mechanics there. Chris is a great guy and really knows his stuff. Chris spend 2 hours every Wednesday for 3 weeks going over the different items of the bike to repair. He start out by showing how to fix a flat tire and then moved on to harder tasks like how to adjust the front and rear derailleur. By the end of the last class he was showing us some pretty advanded stuff like how to rebuild the bearings in a wheel.

A lot of what Chris showed the class I already kinda knew and understood from already having done a lot of work on my bike but I still picked up a lot of useful information. There is a lot of details and nuances you need to understand to do some of the repairs on a bike and until you do them yourself or see someone else do them you don't truly understand how to do it.

For example I knew that changing the rear cassette was not a hard job and just involved removing a locking ring. I had actually tried to do this on my old bike a few years ago but couldn't figure out how to do it. Now after seeing Chris do it I was able to go home remove the cassette from my rear wheel in a few minutes.

Part of taking the course was buying Park's "The Big Blue Book of Repair" book which is a decent bicycle repair manual. Bicycle Magazine also has a good book on on bicycle repair "Bicycling Magazine's Complete Guide to Bicycle Maintenance and Repair" Repair manuals are great but nothing beats seeing the different repairs actually done.

I picked up a lot watching Chris do repairs and am glad I took the course. This helped me fill in some knowledge I was missing about bicycle repair and has given me the confidence to try some of the more difficult repair tasks. I now consider myself a Bicycle Repair Man. So whenever bicycles are broken, or menaced by international communism, Bicycle Repair Man is ready! (Monty Python reference)

Snow Dog

Click Here for more Pictures

The cold weather and massive amount of snow that we have gotten has really put a cramp in my riding this winter. I am still getting plenty of exercise. In the past couple of weeks I have spent a few hours clearing the snow from the two large storms that we had recently.

Snow always makes the landscape look better (See my pictures of my yard here). After a snow storm is done and the sun comes out I always take a look around and say how beautiful it is. That only last for a few minutes once I realize that I have a couple hours work to do the clear this crap. Luckily I have a snow blower which has made clearing the snow a little easier. Most years I don't even start it up but it is years like this that make it a must have.

Even with mechanical help clearing the snow is a chore not only do I have to clear the driveway and walk ways but I have to actually shovel part of the back yard. This is because of my small dog needs a place to do her business. She has very small legs so once the snow is over 3 inches she is almost up to her chest. We got almost 2 feet of snow so this was about a foot over her head.

My dog may be small but she doesn't think she is. After I had cleared out an area for her in the back yard she saw a squirrel and quickly climbed up the 3 foot snow bank and headed to the unshoveled part of the yard. After a few steps on the snow she disappeared, under the snow, when she hit the softer stuff. She's tough so she climbed right back out but now had an extra layer of snow around her.

She shook most of it off on her way back to the house but as the picture shows her face was still covered when she got back to the door. She really enjoys playing in the snow so I know that this will not be the last time that I will have to clean her off.

Puxatony Phil predicted 6 more weeks of winter so I guess the snow and cold will be around for a while. We all the snow we have gotten I know I won't be riding on the roads anytime soon.