Moving

Well, the time as come to bid adieu to the Mid-Willamette valley. I'm exchanging:

for:
in order to attend Optometry school this fall. This means that I'm picking up my family and relocating a bit to the north. Given the volatility of the housing market, we put ours up for sale early and--amazingly, to me--it sold withing a few days. So, we're moving sooner than expected, and before I'm done with school at OSU.

But that's not the sad part. The sad part is that I'm leaving behind fantastic riding--both road and mountain--that starts right from my door. I'm leaving behind my core riding group, the guys that I spend my nights with evaluating lights and tearing up the trails after everyone else is in bed asleep.

I'm leaving behind trails like this:

And this:

And gravel roads like this--ideal for winter riding:

While I won't stop riding--day or night--I'm pretty sure that I won't have trails as good or, more importantly, as close. I'll actually have to--GASP--drive to the trail head. I hope I can manage.

It's been great living here and now I look forward to the next part of the adventure.

Against All Odds

Mother Nature doesn't like me. And she has powerful friends.

The weather has been nice, but I haven't been able to secure any daylight hours for a ride. Finally, fed up with my lack of bike-time, I got out my rollers so I could at least pretend like I was riding. Of course, with my children a) in bed and ii) taking up all the bedrooms in the house, I was left with the garage as my only option. It's been a while since I've set up my rollers in the garage. A few things have happened since then.

The largest of which was replacing my little Mazda Protege with a Toyota Land Cruiser. Now there is less room than there was. We also have a second fridge wedged in there. There happens to be just enough room between the imposing bulk of the cruiser and a structural pole.

Once I found a place for my rollers, I needed to find a place for my laptop computer so I wouldn't tear my eyes out with the tedium of working hard at not moving for 45 minutes. A few more minutes of rummaging around produced an old cooler that was fairly clean on top (my laptop is less than a week old). (Note that I refer to my laptop using a generic term. I've learned that when you use an Apple computer, you identify it when talking computers. When using a PC, it's just a computer.)

More digging. More searching. Extension cord. Headphones with extension cord. Water bottles. Crap, no movies on this laptop. Searching (home network), copying, saving. Grab the bike down from the ceiling hooks, attach the pump. Pumping up a tire that hasn't been inflated in more than a few weeks.

And then it turns from tedious to ugly.

You see, Mother Nature made some nice weather for me. Sunny, warm. Dry roads, dry trails. Mother Nature doesn't like it when you're not grateful. She gets downright spiteful. She's friends with the god of flats.

Try as I might, that tire/tube held no air. And of course, it was the rear tire. Although I was already suited up, I had to start to search for tire levers (hometrainer tires are a bear to get off) and a spare tube. When I finally wrenched my tire free, it was easy to find the hole. You see, it wasn't a hole so much as a quarter-inch gash. That was no accident. These wheels/tires never see pavement. They're only ever exposed to smooth round drums. And the gash was on the inside of the tube.

At this point, if you know me at all, you'd expect I gave in and called it a night. I did not, though. I changed my tire, mounted the wheel on the bike, and attached all the little things necessary to get my computer to both show me a movie and convey the sound into my entertainment-deprived ears.

Yes, Mother Nature, I rode in a dirty old garage. And as painful as that process was, and despite finishing after midnight, I was happy to have won that round.