Author Topic: RIDES 2017 — add yours here  (Read 84590 times)

Andre Jute

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #180 on: August 14, 2017, 11:52:34 am »
You can see why the place was so named, Eden Valley! The clouds in that third shot are spectacular.
***

It's striking that you chaps should think that scene quintessentially Irish. It is, but it wasn't inevitable that it should be. We were standing on the quay (not shown, behind the buildings, complete with a slipway from the boatyard) and someone commented that we'd chosen a day when the view was particularly pretty. I said I'd been thinking on our ride, a big loop of about 20km through a thousand shades of green, that if Michael Collins hadn't been shot (at another little village the other side of our town), we'd probably have ridden through solidly industrialized views every inch of the way, that Ireland looks the way it does only because Collins was assassinated and de Valera, who fancied himself a Ghandiesque leader of a nation of home spinners and poor peasants with a priest in charge of every street corner, was left in charge. This isn't just fancy; de Valera himself said that if Collins lived, he (de Valera) would have been no more than a footnote in the history books. Collins was an energetic, forceful modernizer, very short with the mythmakers and the old-stylers, and under him Ireland would have industrialized very, very fast, and very differently from the way it was done, by an inspired bureaucrat, after de Valera finally left office. If you're interested in lost leaders, Tim Pat Coogan's biography of Michael Collins is a superb read; he wrote an equally truthful biography of de Valera for whom he worked for many years as the editor of the de Valera family paper, the Irish Press. (And later, in our sunset years, Mr Coogan and I both wrote for the Irish Examiner.)
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Jim, I thought your photo at Brigham City was of the registrar's office at my first university, Stellenbosch, a small college town with blue hills on the horizons. Amazing how that style of architecture travelled.

Matt2matt2002

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #181 on: August 14, 2017, 02:46:52 pm »
Out for a wee spin on my Raven to the coast. Perfect weather with cloud cover helping to keep the heat down.
Nasty head wind slowed me down but finding three geocash out of 5 was a good result.
Never drink and drive. You may hit a bump  and spill your drink

jags

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #182 on: August 14, 2017, 04:58:58 pm »
lovely Matt you were lucky with the weather  we had heavy showers here today  mind you i did manage to avoid them  just 20 miles  few steep hills thrown in and  very warm .
great photo as usual.

anto.

jags

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #183 on: August 14, 2017, 05:01:50 pm »
This years's tour was a local ride up to Hadrian's Wall and back down through the Yorkshire Dales.  Here are shots over looking the Eden valley and Swaledale.

class. 8)

rualexander

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #184 on: August 14, 2017, 06:45:12 pm »
Our run down towards the Ayrshire coast yesterday, Isle of Arran in the distance.

Andre Jute

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #185 on: August 14, 2017, 09:25:24 pm »
Our run down towards the Ayrshire coast yesterday, Isle of Arran in the distance.

And he led them out [of bondage] to a land of milk and honey.

JimK

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #186 on: August 17, 2017, 02:04:11 am »
Headed west today, out into the wild lands by the lake: https://www.strava.com/activities/1137371421

Lots of space:


I got a little bluetooth shutter release button!


If you look at the strava trace, you'll see I got spun around a bit when the track dissolved:


geocycle

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #187 on: August 17, 2017, 07:57:21 am »
Great pics Jim. Love the 'selfie'. The terrain around here in northern England is best described as rolling with hardly any flat but no true mountains like yours.  Must be a very different experience when you have those vast open plains ahead of you.  I'd be dreading a head wind!
 

jags

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #188 on: August 17, 2017, 03:28:05 pm »
Great photos jim you look super cool in that pose 8)

Anto.

JimK

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #189 on: August 17, 2017, 03:56:34 pm »
One common dreaded wind here is the canyon wind. Our house is right by the mouth of North Ogden canyon - you see some bent over trees around here! I guess there is a temperature difference between the two sides of the mountains and that drives the wind. Can be really brutal to ride into, that's for sure!

rualexander

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #190 on: August 27, 2017, 10:15:25 pm »
Nice spin down the coast from Dunoon and round to Loch Striven today, bit cloudier than forecast but stayed dry, had a 'drum up' down by the loch for lunch.

Danneaux

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #191 on: August 28, 2017, 03:19:47 am »
Absolutely stunning as usual, Rual; thanks so much for posting.

All the best,

Admiring Dan.

John Saxby

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #192 on: August 28, 2017, 11:02:09 pm »
Super photos as always, Rual. The water of the loch looks very calm.

These past ten days, we've finally had some standard-issue summer weather -- sunny, light winds, warm days and fresh-to-cool evenings. It's been a blessed relief from the rainy days of late spring and early summer.

I'm doing a few days rides into the hills as prep for a short there-and-back to Toronto in early September. This will be about 10 days of riding, approx 1000 kms plus another 100 by train entering and leaving The Big Smoke. My route will take me W & N from Ottawa (in the direction of the photo below, taken this past Saturday) into the Madawaska Highlands and then westward through the Haliburton Highlands to the area near Georgian Bay, north of Toronto. All this is through the lake and river country of the southern edge of the Canadian Shield. I'll camp about 60% of the time, staying with friends and family for the balance.

I'll spend a few days in Toronto with our daughter, and will introduce myself and Osi the Raven to the fellow who is the Rohloff agent in Canada.  After that, I'll return to Ottawa via the north shore of Lake Ontario. Near Kingston, and the eastern end of the lake, I'll angle NE to Ottawa, more or less following the 200-km route of the rideau Canal, with its 49 locks. (A paddling route for another summer.)

I've tested a few tweaks on the bike over the past few weeks:

     > With encouragement from Ron Seguin in Vancouver, I've mounted a set of 26 x 1.8 Naches Pass tires from Compass Tires in Seattle. These are the standard (rather than super-light) items, but at about 340 gms they're some 30% lighter than my 26 x 1.6 Marathon Supremes (and  less puncture-resistant too, I'm told.)  Inflated, they measure 41 mm rather than the advertised 45.7.  I inflated the front tire to just over 45 PSI, the the rear to just over 50.  They were very comfortable on a first ride of about 60 kms. I was not noticeably faster over the 3-plus hours of my hilly ride, but the Raven did seem to roll a bit faster on the steeper downgrades, and was perhaps slightly faster on the milder uphills. I'll keep them for day rides. For touring, I'll continue to use either my Marathon Supremes or my Maxxis Overdrive Elite 26 x 1.75 (actual inflated width: 40 mm.)

     > Having tried both 1.6 Marathon Supremes, and 1.75 Maxxis O'drive Elites, I'm still looking for a little more volume in my touring tires.  Both of the above are good tires, and have at least a couple of seasons left in them.  In the future, I'll look closely at the 26 x 2.0 Supremes.

     > In June and July, I tried a different shoe-and-pedal arrangement. For shoes, I tried a pair of FiveTen MTB shoes -- I wanted cycling shoes that I could wear off the bike when touring. The FiveTen shoes use SPD cleats, so I mated them to a pair of Shim T-400 Click'r pedals. The experiment didn't give me better results than the Sidi shoes with Look pedals that I have been using. The FiveTen shoes are robust (but a bit clunky), and while they are better for walking than my Sidis (with Kool Kovers on the cleats), they were less comfortable after six or seven hours on the bike than my Sidis.  It came down to comparing inconveniences. I decided to keep my Sidis and Look cleats/pedals, live with an extra pair of shoes in my touring kit (lightweight Dawgs), and have supremely comfortable cycling shoes. Having comfortable feet on the bike is becoming more important as I get older--I'm having more discomfort from neuromas, and from calcification of toe joints :(  A secondary consideration is that the T-400 Click'r pedals and SPD cleats felt less positive and secure than the Look pedals and cleats.

     > Still testing the use of dry bags on my front rack, to save weight. (My Arkel T-28 panniers are well made, durable, and have very satisfying pockets, but a pair weighs almost 2 kgs.) I had a couple of drybags in my paddling kit, which I fastened to my Arkel front rack with RokShok straps. (See photo #2 below)  These gave me comparable volume and a weight saving of about 1.5 kgs.  The fastening setup proved to be OK on an overnight micro-tour in W Québec, but I'm awaiting a pair of back-ordered 13-ltr bags from Alpkit, which have better fastening loops: https://www.alpkit.com/products/airlok-xtra-13-litre

More reports to come, in due course.

   
« Last Edit: August 28, 2017, 11:07:49 pm by John Saxby »

geocycle

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #193 on: August 29, 2017, 09:19:50 am »
Sounds a great trip John! Look forward to the updates.

Having some cloudy days here but got up into the Bowland Fells.  Have treated the RST to new stem bars and ergon biokork grips.  Decided to go silver for a change to match the seat post.  Front wheel rim has done 23,000 miles and now the blocks are slipping a bit on heavy braking so must think about replacing and get sorted before the nights draw in.



« Last Edit: August 29, 2017, 09:21:27 am by geocycle »
 

Matt2matt2002

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Re: RIDES 2017 — add yours here
« Reply #194 on: August 29, 2017, 07:39:49 pm »
Out and about the local lanes of Aberdeenshire this morning.
My eye caught this USA Mail box sitting on a wall outside a cottage.
An unusual sight for me. Not sure if it's genuine or a copy.
Any thoughts folks?
Never drink and drive. You may hit a bump  and spill your drink