++++Rides of 2026++++Add yours here++++

[RonS]

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.

[in4]

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.

[Andre Jute]

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...

[John Saxby]

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. 

[Andre Jute]

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.)

[John Saxby]

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...  ]

[John Saxby]

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.