bye bye bianchi

Posted on May 9, 2012 by mike

Since I bought my Specialized Tricross my Bianchi has been sitting in my garage gathering dust. I decided it was time to sell my trusty old steed. It’s been my trusty bicycle for the last three years, and with it I had cycled over four thousand miles. As I looked at the bicycle I thought of all the rides I had done on it. Partly because I was bored I decided to look back through my emails so I could try to list them all.

Century/Charity rides

  • Foxy’s Fall Century – 30 miles in 2008, 65 miles in 2009 and 2010
  • Tour of Napa – 100 miles in 2008, 2009, and 2010
  • Tour de Cure for Diabetes – 65 miles in 2009 and 2011
  • Strawberry Fields Forever – 65 miles in 2009 and 2011
  • Sierra Century – 65 miles in 2009, 100 miles in 2010
  • Cycle for Sight – 50 miles in 2010
  • Breathe Easy Ride for Lung Cancer – 65 miles in 2010
  • Marin Century – 100 miles in 2009
  • Mercy Fall Classic – 65 miles in 2009 and 2010

Bicycle tours & overnight rides

  • Beal’s Point – 100 mile overnight trip in 2008
  • Davis to SF – 150 mile 2 night trip in 2009
  • Brannan Island – 110 mile overnight trip in 2009
  • Colusa – 120 mile somewhat failed overnight trip in 2010

So yeah. I have a lot of history with this bike. I’m glad that it’s being sold to one of my friends, so I can go back and ride it once in a while. It was a great bike. With it’s rear rack dropouts it was good enough for overnight bike trips, but at the same time it was plenty fast for century rides. In the end it’s actually going to take two bikes to replace it. My current Tricross is going to be my touring and training bike, and for now it’s my century bike. But towards the end of the year I plan to get a racier bike to be my century ride bike. I want to eventually get to riding double centuries, so I figure I’ll need something lighter and faster.

Things I’m thankful for:

  • Bikes!
  • All the memories I’ve had on this bike
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moon over mendocino

Posted on May 6, 2012 by mike

This weekend I went backpacking at the Mendocino National Forest. It’s a pretty easy and short hike, which was good because there were a bunch of kids who were going backpacking for the first time. They had mostly grown up together in church. It kind of reminded me of when I used to be a youth group leader, even though I had never gone backpacking with any of my youth kids.

The hike starts out on a gravel fire road. Joel, the youth leader, leads the way.

First challenge. Creek crossing. Victor shows the kids how it’s done.

Hiking through the woods.

Climbing the hillside up to the ridge.

I think my camera gear outweighed all my backpacking equipment. I brought my SLR, a tripod and 3 lenses.

Since I had my tripod I hiked along the creek for a bit to mess around with long exposure water shots.

But the main reason why I brought the tripod was for moon shots. This weekend was the perigee moon, also known as the Supermoon. I was actually kinda disappointed. I guess with the name Supermoon I was expecting it to be super huge– but according to the news it was only like 14% bigger.

We spent a lot of time just eating and chilling by the fire.

I spent a lot of time just lying in my hammock reading too. I guess that just shows my introverted personality.

The full group. For the most part it looks like youth on the left, old timers on the right.

Hiking down the ridge back toward civilization.

Things I’m thankful for:

  • camera gear and kindles
  • church youth groups
  • the beauty of nature
Posted in backpacking trips | Leave a comment

biking cool

Posted on April 30, 2012 by mike

Summer’s here. Summer = barbecues. It was good to be back on the grill after laying off for so long.

After the barbecue I felt like a fatty, so I decided to go biking. Today’s rides were near a town called Cool, which is just up the road from Auburn. I went to this trail called the Olmstead Loop.

It was mostly multi use trails, which are kinda boring.

The cool thing about the trail though, was the water crossings. There were a lot of them, and some of them were pretty decent sized. They were fun to ride through, but they seemed like mosquito breeding grounds. Should I be worrying about the West Nile Virus?

I didn’t have enough speed to clear this one, so I ended up trudging through knee high water.

The bad thing about multi use trails– they suck when muddy. There’s a ton of horse crap that gets mixed in with the mud, so it smells pretty bad up there. After riding through this muddy patch, there was a fast downhill section. The mud and horse crap started flying off the wheel and started splattering all over my face.

I crashed during the downhill section. Somehow I keep banging the same knee up. I guess I have a tendency to crash on my left side.

Refueling after the ride.

It was still pretty early, so I decided to hit up another trail nearby. There’s a trail network nearby at a regional park called Cronan Ranch.

The good thing about this place is that you can ride down on a trail and ride back up on a hard packed fire road.

The Ranch surrounds the South fork of the American River. It seems like a good place to take beginning riders. There’s nothing too difficult, and the scenery’s pretty decent.

People often ask me why I like biking. On days like this it’s hard to articulate why. I mean, I rode through muddy horse crap, I banged up my knee, and I’m worried I may have caught the West Nile virus. But here’s a reason to enjoy biking that the ladies can understand. You can ride through a field of wildflowers.

Things I’m thankful for:

  • spicy pork tacos
  • cookies and cream ice cream
  • new trails to explore
Posted in bike trails | Leave a comment

foresthill divide

Posted on April 23, 2012 by mike

After demoing bikes last week I came away with the revelation that the new bikes out there are nice. But they’re a little too expensive for me to justify buying one. But I figure if I ride at least twice a month I could reward myself with a new bike at the end of the year. And at the same time I could explore all the trails in the area.

So today I went riding at a trail called Foresthill Divide.

I could see why this trail is called Foresthill Divide… It rides through a forest hill.

Well okay, this part was more of a meadow hill.

Bikers are some of the nicest, most helpful people in the world. Today I got asked if I was okay while riding. “What a helpful guy,” I thought. I didn’t realize until later that the wound on my knee had re-opened and blood was dribbling down my leg.

I finished riding Foresthill Divide pretty early, so I decided to refuel and go for another ride.

So I decided to go down to the Auburn Confluence, my favorite trail. It was pretty close to Foresthill Divide, only one exit away on highway 80.

Climbing the Clementine trail.

Riding down Stonewall to get to the Confluence trail. It was pretty muddy.

The Confluence Trail. My favorite. It’s a rollercoaster ride down, but it’s always over way to quickly.

It’s got some fun singletrack.

Towards the bottom there’s some rock gardens and water features. Here you have the option of rolling over the rock garden on the left or splashing through the water on the right. I almost always pick water.

The aftermath. Blood and mud.

Post ride refueling. The best taco truck in the world. This is why I can ride so much and still be a fatty.

On a completely unrelated note– I went to this Shakespeare Improv show with some friends over the weekend. It was pretty cool, the actors ask for the title of the play, then improvise the whole thing. It had all the elements of a Shakespeare play, tragedy, love triangles, and Shakesperean accents. There were several different subplots, which seemed to be completely unrelated, but were all brought together in the end. Pretty amazing.

I think someday I’d like to take an improv class. I think I’m somewhat witty, it’s just that my brain runs too slowly. In conversation I’ll often think of something witty after the conversation has already moved on to a different topic. This is why I write instead of speak. But maybe an improv class would help my brain work faster in conversation and help me open up more.

Things I’m thankful for:

  • Shakespearean Improv
  • Beautiful trails in Auburn
  • Taco trucks
Posted in bike trails | Leave a comment

korean junk

Posted on April 17, 2012 by mike

There are some things that just can’t exist in healthy form. Kimchee fried rice is one of those things. I tried making a healthy version before, using brown rice and nitrite-free chicken sausage but it just wasn’t the same.

A good kimchee fried rice uses a liberal amount of spam. The thing is, a few months ago I had sworn I would never eat spam again. I had discovered this old can of spam in my fridge. The fat around the ring of the can had gotten all moldy, but the spam itself still looked normal. “Dude, even mold doesn’t eat this stuff,” I thought, “I probably shouldn’t be eating it either.” So I vowed never to eat spam again.

Well today I broke that vow. I had the fattest craving for kimchee fried rice, and having found a can of spam in my cupboard (sealed), I proceeded to fry up the kimchee and spam, then added rice and scrambled eggs to it, and a bit of soy sauce. That’s pretty much all there is to it.

In general, if you want good results when cooking, you want to use the freshest available ingredients. Kimchee fried rice is funny in that if you want good results when cooking it, you actually want to use leftover ingredients. It’s best with day old rice, and it gets the best flavor from slightly sour kimchee, the stuff that’s at the bottom of a month old jar of kimchee. And then of course there’s spam. I really don’t know what spam is, and I probably don’t really wanna know, but I imagine it’s some concoction of random leftover meat parts and a whole bunch of salt and fat jammed into a can. So yea, anyways, kimchee fried rice is best when it’s a random assortment of leftovers. Really, the only thing fresh in my kimchee fried rice is the eggs.

If I thought really hard I could probably come up with some profound philosophical or theological concept that I could learn from this random assortment of leftovers. Perhaps someday I would even use it as in illustration in a bible study. But for now I’ll close with these words. It’s time to eat. The end.

Things I’m thankful for:

  • Kimchee
  • Leftover rice and spam, whatever spam is…
Posted in food | Leave a comment