It's been awhile

My return from vacation found a blog site that I was unable to upload photos to so this is the first post since Anne and I have been home from Oregon and Kansas with stops multiple places in between. We went to Oregon for the Cascade Cream Puff mountain bike race but we made a vacation out of it by first spending 4 days in Bend. The town of Bend is pretty nice with some good trails surrounding it. I snapped a photo on the ridgetop one day while riding and also a photo of a sign that shows some different priorities on some of the trial than you find around Flag. Amazing trail conditions even though it was so dry out. It is interesting to see how nice trails remain when horses aren't tearing the shit out of them and making the surface super powdery. We left Bend for Oakridge and the Cream Puff which wound up being 105 miles with around 16000 feet of climbing. The weather was nice and hot with temps reaching the mid 90's and humidities probably between 60-80 percent. I had no idea what to expect and made a few mistakes with my strategy and just barely made the time cut and finished the race in just under the allotted 15 hours. My goal was to finish and that is what I accomplished as seen by this fine photo taken by Anne just after I received my finishers hat. My main mistake was spending too much time at aid stations because I was worried about food and fluid intake. I need to grab more stuff and go and eat on the bike. Having done this I probably would have saved about an hour over the course of the day as there were 9 aid stations. The race was very well organized and the aid stations were phenomenal along with all of the volunteers. Oh yeah, the trails were pretty sweet also. Some of the sections were just brutal and seemed to be never ending but if you analyze each section individually each one was awesome. The day after the race we jumped in the car and did a quick trip through a smokey Crater Lake National Park and headed on through Northern California into Reno for the night. Reno is one of the cheapest places to stay that I have been lately. We paid half as much for a room in Reno as we did in Winnemucca, NV on the way up. The next day was a haul as we had to get all the way across Nevada and back to Flag only to have to drive to Albuquerque the following day to fly to K.C. We went to Kansas to celebrate Anne's Grandparents 60th Anniversary which is pretty impressive. We then flew back to ABQ and stopped quickly at my brothers to see family and pick up Yampa. My parents in Los Alamos graciously took care of Yampa while we were gone and my Dad drove her down to my Brothers so we could get back home a bit quicker. When we finally got back to Flag there was a message from Steve Garro of Coconino Cycles saying that my frame was done. Monday came and I dragged myself out of bed and grabbed my collection of 29er part and off I went to Garro's house to build a bike. The bike is definitely a work of art and has already received multiple compliments out on the trails this week. I snapped a quick photo of the headbadge on the way down Little Bear a couple of days ago to show the root beer paint in the sun and the sweet hand cast headbadge with a kick ass design. I rode up Mt. Elden earlier today and was loving climbing on a hard tail. The efficiency gained was nice to overcome the different gear ratios that come with riding a 29 inch wheeled bike over a 26 inch and I was that I was able to ride up in the middle ring and the same cogs on the rear as with my Turner. I did miss the Turner coming back down but what can you expect. I was going to title my blog "Invasion from all points south" today due to the fact that I saw between 50-100 people out today mostly being from Phoenix and Tucson and on DH bikes being shuttled to the top of the mountain. I did see a few people that looked completely lost looking at Cosmic Ray's trail guide which made me chuckle. Rest assured that I asked them if they needed any help and they politely declined and I was one my way. Sorry for the long blog but like I said: it's been awhile.