Thorn Cycles Forum
Community => Non-Thorn Related => Topic started by: RonS on January 03, 2026, 07:34:37 PM
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And the first ride of 2026 is……….
A nice 42km along the Alouette River and Pitt River dikes, which are a mere 8km from the house. The weather yesterday was a pleasant 6° and mostly sunny, so I called my riding buddy, who had been off the bike for the last month due to minor leg surgery, and told him to get up here so we could go for a nice ride on flat ground. Good thing we went yesterday, because as I write this, it is 5° and pouring rain.
Here are a couple pics of Nozomi enjoying the first ride of the year, itching for a tour.
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Fabulous scenery Ron. I do like that Arkel frame bag; it doesn’t seem to interfere with water bottles/cages.
Ian
From a relatively balmy N. Portugal.
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Wow, look at those skies!
I came here from your photos of the unmotored waterside paths (and seemingly empty motor roads) of your Japanese tour, Ron, already wondering if those of us who live in Ireland and Canada (and Japan, if there are any Japanese lurkers) appreciate enough being able to cycle so often near water...
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Great stuff, Ron!
Andre, wondering if those of us who live in Ireland and Canada (and Japan, if there are any Japanese lurkers) appreciate enough being able to cycle so often near water...
This Canajan certainly appreciates cycling near Ottawa's water (three rivers and a canal in the neighbourhood), but, ummm -- as I speak, they're frozen over.
The canal is now open for skating along its usual 14-km stretch. Two winters ago, there was no skating, for the first time anyone could remember; last winter, about a week.
That said, there's still Weird Stuff Goin' Down: This past w.e., we were down to -25 at night, sans windchill. Forecast for this coming Friday is a high of 4ºC, with 60% chance of rain. :(
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Weird Stuff Goin' Down
About a week before I made the attached painting, we'd watched the Mating of the Herrings, kippers still at sea, at a large bay further north on the coast. They absolutely filled the bay, and churned it up as predators joined the party and the male fish fought for possession of the females. A week later this is Dunworley Bay, a tiny, tight little bay, a few miles down the coast, nearer darkness than dusk, glowing something unearthly. A Council health inspector who was with us thought that the detritus from the melee up the coast had by some trick of the currents in the Irish Channel been washed into this tiny bay and trapped there, and rotted away merrily. The large dark grey shape near the bottom is a dead predator on the predators of the herrings, or perhaps even another layer up, too big to be seen alive in this confined bay. The grey shape nearer the middle of the image heading for the exit was probably a large sand shark, a scavenger who'll eat anything and is the curse of anglers. Further out the weather was so bad that I couldn't quite tell where the sea started and the disturbed clouds began; it's the first spatial definition you lose when the weather here turns nasty. Closer in, whatever the slimy corruption was lit up the small bay and the cliff like a movie set. The ladies hanging on to my Goretex mountain jacket were telling me to hurry up with my painting because we still had a couple of hours on the road to get home and they feared the wind would blow us over the edge into the eerie muck below. (Not at all unlikely. An Australian friend who came to visit us, despite my warning not to come after the end of September, got delayed by his work for Médecins Sans Frontières and turned up nearer the end of October. He got blown over the edge at the Cliffs of Moher, on the other side of Ireland on the Wild Atlantic Way where we normally took guests after showing them The Burren, an Irish version of a desert -- yeah, truly --, and was saved from a messy death on the rocks a couple of hundred feet below because he was wearing my cashmere overcoat tightly buttoned up, so that when I grabbed the collar and his shoulder it didn't split and he didn't fall out of it, though he had bruises on his shoulder front and back where my fingers had dug in and on his neck where my knuckles had pressed in precisely to hold him in by friction; the coat wasn't damaged. The next year someone put up a rail there, perhaps the gift shop -- you can't sell trinkets to tourists who've fallen over the edge.)
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Weird times indeed, Andre, and a grand story told with a visual account en tricolore!
Good thing your Aussie mate survived for you to tell the tale. [What is it about cliffs without restraints? In my years in Zambia, I heard far too many tragic accounts of people and the gorges around Victoria Falls... :( ]
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First ride of 2026 :)
Today, five-plus months since my last ride along the Ottawa River, I made my first ride of 2026. (Errands for groceries on my city bike don’t really count.) This was a brief mid-day aller-retour, just 45 minutes north to the river, west along the bikepath to Deschênes Lookout, then assemble in reverse order But, it was a chance to see what’s going on with the big river, and to check a couple of adjustments made over the winter months.
We’ve had an Olde Tyme Winter, with above-average snowfall (about 260 cms), and lots of cold days and nights. (The Rideau Canal, our 14-km skating rink through the middle of town, was open for 56 days – two seasons ago, it was closed for lack of good ice.) But today, we had mixed sun and cloud, and the late-morning temp was 10º. So I carried Freddie up from my basement workshop, covered myself with mild-weather gear, and set off for the river. There was a brisk westerly a-blowing, the 60-kph gusts a foretaste of a serious spring snowstorm further north. 8th gear was the best I could do on my outbound leg, but I sailed along in 11th and 12th on the return journey.
The snow cover is almost all gone, but the soil and vegetation now appearing are all brown and yellow, with the evergreens—firs and cedars—offering the only greenery. The colours are muted, sky, water and earth. But there were signs of the spring to come: a couple of plump Canada geese in the water (they must have wintered in Ottawa – the migrants are usually a bit scrawny); and then, when I reached home, the unmistakable and magical sound overhead of a wing of geese honking as they headed towards the river.
Freddie was relaxed, comfortable and unfussed as ever, and drew a glance or two from pedestrians when I paused for photos beside the river. (#s 1 & 2 below.) A small stream joins the big river beside the lookout, the small inlet bordered by bare trees and still harbouring a few ice floes. (#s 3 & 4 below.)
Reaching home, I made a couple of micro-adjustments to improve the tweaks made during the winter: easing the rear of the saddle down a couple of mm, and tilting the nose up a similar amount; and rotating the bars upward a couple of mm, so that the flats are now fractionally “uphill”. A test ride told me that the micro-adjustments did the necessary. It's always remarkable how such those small changes improve a rider's comfort -- in this case, of my bottom, and my wrists, hands, and forearms.
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John wrote: "60-kph gusts".
The water looks pretty choppy in your photograph. Difficult to imagine the net temp being over 8 degrees. Hope you weren't wearing shorts. That would be too brave.
Love the ice floes.
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Thanks, Andre. Glad you liked the ice floes -- lotsa folks here think that their persistence is just a bit too much.
Hope you weren't wearing shorts
No chance -- we're not there yet. Yesterday's late-afternoon temps were around 18º, but that was followed by a dramatic drop, complete with rain mixed with snow. 🙁
I find myself saying, "This too shall pass..."
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Great stuff, John. I foresee double digit temperatures in your future!
The water on the Ottawa River looks more turbulent than the waters near the Swartz Bay ferry terminal, where, standing at the bow of the car deck, one has a commanding view of 3,286m Mt Baker, some 120km distant.
The weather here cooperated for my cycling pal and I to do an overnight jaunt to Ruckle Provincial Park, 60km and two ferry rides from home. My pal was testing his new camping equipment in preparation for our upcoming tour. Good thing we did. He needs more prep :)
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Hi folks.
I'm back on 2 wheels after 10+ months off with cancer and chemo.
First off, many thanks for all kind words posted here and off forum.
They made such a difference and my recovery easier.
Second, please excuse the mundane picture*. It was taken a mile from home when I renewed a geocash I own.
My Raven was serviced last week and now running perfectly.
Once again, it's good to be back in the fold.
Matt
* Pictures to follow when I'm back home to reduce them in size.
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Good to hear you are healed and back on the saddle again, Matt; so pleased your ordeal is past!
Happy trails!
Best, Dan.
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Matt! Good on yer, mate!!
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Great to see you back on your bike, Matt!
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Wonderful news, Matt! Happy for you!
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Ron's photo
https://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=15559.0;attach=21666;image
is hugely amusing, the bicycle campers and the cruise liner passing. My bet is the two cyclists camping aren't saying, 'Oh woe is us! We'd rather be on the cruise liner lining our arteries with killer fat.' But among the cruise liner's passengers there will be several who will say, 'I'd love to be camping there with those two fellows.' The grass is always greener...
Ron's other photo, of the mountain in the distance,
https://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=15559.0;attach=21668;image
caused me to look down at the wristwatch that I'm coincidentally wearing today, which has an illustration of Mount Fuji in the far background, the tiny white triangle the hour hand points at, and the 24 hour bezel index too. In a masterstroke, Katsushika Hokusai echoed the shape of the iconic mountain in the foam the great wave would overtake in a second. The ukiyo-e painting by Hokusai which inspired me to adapt it for the dial of the watch which has a Japanese movement, is called The Great Wave Off Kanagawa Prefecture, and even in his own time was considered so significant that it was used as the first in his 37 Views of Mount Fuji; today it is the most famous Japanese painting.
Okay, for those who're asking, Where's the cycling link? there is actually one, thought it happened over six decades ago. You can't see it very well, because the watch and the strap are so reflective that neither photographs well without setting up studio lights and spending days fiddling with them, but the strap is sharkskin. My roomie failed to teach me to surf (his 'lightweight' Hawaiian teak board jumped up and knocked me out and I nearly drowned), so his next venture was to teach me scuba diving. We made drysuits on custom cardboard cutouts with rubberized paint, then set out by bicycle from Stellenbosch for Hermanus (I'm not even going to look up the distance; it's probably the furthest I ever cycled) where the Agulhus Stream hits the Indian Ocean head-on. We dived for lobster and I was just going back for a last one when this idiot shark stormed me. I wasn't going to out-swim it, so I tread water and when it was within inches of me stuck my speargun upright between its gaping jaws, and removed my hand right smartly. The shark committed suicide by biting down on whatever was in its mouth and stuck the spearpoint through its brain. I lost a streak of rubber from the drysuit and the skin behind it as the shark thrashed about. It turned out sharks have teeth all over their bodies, literally. The lines on a sharkskin belt or strap are where the tanner cut off the teeth with a very sharp knife. Finally I got hold of its tail and dragged it out onto the beach, where it expired. 'You crazy bastard,' my roomie said, 'all you had to do was reach the shallow water and it wouldn't have followed you.' We skinned the shark (with the army knife my great uncle Barney used to cut the throats of German sentries when he was in the LRDG), gave the flesh to some colored people who appeared, and promised them money besides to look after the skin while we cycled back to Stellenbosch, me dripping blood all the way, to get my car. I didn't want to go to the student doctor, who was a blustering lush, and as for the doctors in the medical school, I took the view that they were teaching because they weren't good enough for private practice. Anyhow, besides trusting only my family doctor, I wanted to get the skin back home -- even if I had to drive all night --where I persuaded the ostrich tannery to do their magic on my sharkskin as they had the previous year on an ostrich skin for me, and eventually I gave the sharkskin to a leather artist in Germany and he got to make whatever he made for me for someone else who wouldn't baulk at paying twice the going rate, so that I got a pair of shoes that lasted forty years (made in consultation with the little old bootmaker in Lisbon who made my soft goatskin Chelsea boots), and endless watch straps, and a wallet, and a handbag for a girlfriend, all of it free of charge. That shark died in the cause of good taste. Years later, in Australia, I discovered that the deep-fried battered 'hake' which was sold at the fish'n'chips shops was in fact shark, and was sorry I hadn't eaten any of the shark that tried to lunch on me so that I could say it tried to lunch on me but instead I lunched on it.
The crazy things we did when we were young...
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Thats good news Matt. I'm sure your Raven rang its own bell with delight!
Hope there's some good weather soon as you can get back in the saddle and reclaim the highways and byways nearby.
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Ron's photo
https://thorncyclesforum.co.uk/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=15559.0;attach=21666;image
is hugely amusing, the bicycle campers and the cruise liner passing. My bet is the two cyclists camping aren't saying, 'Oh woe is us! We'd rather be on the cruise liner lining our arteries with killer fat.' But among the cruise liner's passengers there will be several who will say, 'I'd love to be camping there with those two fellows.' The grass is always greener...
It may look like a cruise ship, but it's the MV Spirit of Vancouver Island, the largest vessel in the BC Ferries fleet, the largest vehicle ferry fleet in the world, making one of its 4 round trips per day between Tsawwassen, near Vancouver, and Swartz Bay, near Victoria on Vancouver Island. Despite its capacity of 350 to 470 vehicles (depends on how many 63,000kg trucks are in the mix) and 2100 passengers, it makes the turnaround at each end (unloading and reloading) in a mere 25min. The voyage between ports is only 1hr35min, so there’s not much opportunity for an artery clogging feast. :)
My cycling friend definitely needs more practice before our tour, so I’ll probably be riding that ship or her identical sister on Thursday, looking at the campground as we pass by.
In a masterstroke, Katsushika Hokusai echoed the shape of the iconic mountain in the foam the great wave would overtake in a second. The ukiyo-e painting by Hokusai which inspired me to adapt it for the dial of the watch which has a Japanese movement, is called The Great Wave Off Kanagawa Prefecture, and even in his own time was considered so significant that it was used as the first in his 37 Views of Mount Fuji; today it is the most famous Japanese painting.
I feel fortunate to have seen several of his original 36 views of Mt Fuji woodblock prints at the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum during my first visit to Japan.
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I feel fortunate to have seen several of his original 36 views of Mt Fuji woodblock prints at the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum during my first visit to Japan.
Lucky you!