Progress?

We rode across a new bridge today. Cyclists would generally appreciate the fact that this bridge was wider and was higher so we didn't have to climb as far to make it back up the hill, but this one was disappointing.

The town of Rex is on the Quad County route that we rode this morning. One of the picturesque highlights of this route is a one-lane bridge that passes next to an abandoned mill.




The mill was built in the 1820s and had been used off and on until the 1930s. In 2007 when these photos were taken, the sluice is nearly completely gone and the site is overgrown, but you can see what the site looked like 25 years ago.



The new bridge diverted us around both the old bridge and the mill. We missed the highlight of the ride!

Next time we ride this route, we'll skip the new bridge, take the slow route, and climb the extra few feet so we can recall a piece of watermill history. At least the cars won't be in our way anymore.

Clicking the images will bring up a full-size image. Helps you climb into the scene.

Ride Summary

Round Trip Distance: 51.5 miles from Virginia-Highland
Number of Cyclists on the ride: 17 initially with 14 finishing with us.
Route: Quad County (courtesy of L5P Flyers) with modifications on the return to avoid Bouldercrest but catch a bit of fun on Weelaunee (between River Road and Flakes Mill).
Weather: Warm, but not as warm as we expected.

The Route Less Traveled

 

For those learning how to get around on a bike, choosing an appropriate route means thinking outside the box. The box with four wheels, that is.

Even for those who have been riding for years, great pleasure comes from finding the little known routes, paths, and the occasional suspension foot bridge. This bridge is barely wide enough to walk a bicycle across and I like it that way.

This bikely route crosses this foot bridge approximately 3.5 miles into the route.

St. Patrick's Day Burrito

 

Haven't you heard about Irish Burritos? First, some background, even though it is almost entirely irrelevant.

This morning I joined the 6AM group that rides out of the Agnes Scott Arches. This group rides year-round with the goal of getting weekly miles before the start of the day. Getting out at 6AM usually gets a jump on the traffic, but for some reason, this morning everyone was out. There were a fair number of bike commuters, more cars than I expected, and hundreds of "boot camp" participants. OK, maybe only 200, but that's enough to pluralize 'hundred'. I'll chalk it up to the first day without rain out of the past four.

I might be hooked after the first ride. There's something awful nice about starting the day with a bike ride before the sun comes up. The company was good, and the route was pleasant, but finishing up a ride by 7:30AM makes me feel like I've gotten a jump on the day. I'm feeling good before the daily routine begins.

Riding before dawn is something we do on the Bike Ride Across Georgia too. Since BRAG is a bicycle vacation, the 6AM Arches ride feels like a vacation too.

I'll be back for another 6AM ride.

So, riding first thing in the morning makes me hungry all day long. The burrito with lettuce and avocado is green enough to qualify for a St. Patrick's Day burrito.

Other ingredients:
- Cream Cheese
- Gulden's Mustard
- Rice warmed up with Balsamic Vinegar salad dressing
- Fried Egg chopped up
- Romaine lettuce shredded
- Avocado
- Cottage Cheese

Ride Summary

Distance: 24.3
Ride Group: 6AM Agnes Scott Arches
Number of Cyclists seen: Lost count, but more than 10. Not bad since it was 5:35 AM when I got on the bike.
Weather: Moist from all the rain, but not wet. Shorts, jersey and a shell weather.

Silk Sheets

Sorry, no picture, but imagine a field of 30-40 cows all staring at the camera. Got a good mental picture yet? Good, hang onto it. OK, now for the story.

A few weeks ago, I tried out a route that Barry had assembled for getting over to Silk Sheets from the MARTA train. I had met another dozen or so riders at "the church" where most Silk Sheet riders parked their cars after driving from downtown. Being self-conscious about taking a car to ride a bike, we had been working out how to get to those wonderful cycling roads without driving.

Today was the result of all our planning. By taking public transportation, we rode Silk Sheets without getting in a car to get there.

I had thought the name Silk Sheets might have come from the silk plantations that had flourished in Georgia many years ago, but the name refers to how smooth the hills are in those parts. There are some hills, but for the most part, the miles are a mix of flat and rolling. Combine this with low traffic and well-maintained roads and you can see why cyclists give the area a name like Silk Sheets.

Since our riding group never does things the same way as anyone else -- including ourselves -- we mapped out our own route and predictably a) got lost and b) ended up on a gravel road. But not in that order.

The gravel road was at most a two-mile stretch and was in good shape for a gravel road. Even with the 18mm tires, we were able to keep nearly the same pace. We could guess however, that although we had been seeing other cyclists all day, not many of those cyclists have taken the gravel road.

About two-thirds of the way down this road, we came across a pasture where we commanded the full attention of every cow in sight. I can only guess that either these cows had never seen a bicycle and were overcome with curiosity or the man who feeds the cows comes up on a bicycle.

Ride Summary

Round Trip Distance: 67.2
Number of Cyclists seen: LOTS. It looks like everyone was out taking advantage of the warm weather. Thirteen of us rode as a group.
Route: Silk Sheets via MARTA and the College Park Station. Avoided one gravel road, but found ourselves on another one.
Weather: Upper 60s, low wind, not a cloud to be seen.

Beautiful Day at the Rock

Smooth pavement, great weather, sun bouncing off the lake, all smiles.

We affectionately call Stone Mountain "The Rock", and although from many vantage points, it looks like a big rock, there are also a lot of trees. There's also a lake surrounding much of the rock and the roads either pass between the lake and the rock (inner loop) or around both the lake and the rock (outer loop). We usually ride both loops.

The roads were recently re-surfaced and that always makes for a nice ride. We were out here a couple of weeks ago and I wished I had brought a camera. Today I did.

Silver Lake

We're always trying out new routes on Sunday mornings and this was one of our better days. We spent time just outside the west by northwest side of the perimeter highway near the river and found some pleasant riding. We then headed northeast through Buckhead and the Governor's Mansion to Silver Lake and then Brookhaven.

Silver Lake is a road to get your turned around so you don't know which way you're heading. We like going there when it's windy because the trees shelter you. Today, however, it provides that sun dappled road that I like.

The photos are blurry because we're moving at about 18 MPH through these sharp turns. Lots of fun and considerably more interesting when you're trying to take pictures at the same time. On some of these, it looks like I'm almost off the road. I may have been close to falling off!

Here's a map of the "fingers" you follow around the southern side of the lake:

 

Not possible if this had been planned

 

My odometer for today's Sunday Ride came up short of 60 miles by 52.8 feet -- less than the length of my driveway.

This is interesting because it was only 24 hours earlier that I had posted to the group "rarely do we exceed 60 miles".

Man versus Forces of Nature

My years at Georgia Tech taught me both sides of controlling Mother Nature. On one hand, there are the physical laws. When these laws are understood and respected, they allow us to build bridges, manufacture iPods, and make bicycles go faster. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that don't follow physical laws and it is folly to try to control them.

This morning, a few of the guys I usually ride with on Sunday decided to take a long ride stringing together parts of a couple of other routes. We wanted to ride 75 miles which is substantially longer than our usual ride. We started at 6:30 to beat the heat.

At about mile 35 on Peters Road, the law of gravity (in conjunction with a killer hill) produced a high-quality thigh burn. I usually would have dropped to my granny, but I thought it would be good to rip out some of the weak muscle fiber and later replace it with some stronger muscle fiber. (The ripping part appears to have gone just fine; we'll see about the regrowth.)

Along mile 60 or so, the law of hydration was kicking in. Even though we had been cooled down at least twice by rain, I was soaking my handlebar tape with sweat. This is when those ripped muscles started cramping. Fortunately, I understood this law and stopped to get a quart of liquid.

Thanks to an understanding of the physical laws, this mastery of nature was going well.

Around mile 52 or so, there is a bit of cyclo-cross on this route. To build a multi-lane highway, an older road was dead-ended. Our route cut through some trees to rejoin the dead-end from the multi-lane road. There is a brief stretch of about 15-20 meters that with road bikes is only passable on foot.

We'd come by before and found this dead-end was a dumping ground for ripped out cabinet's, broken toilet bowls, rusted refrigerators, tires -- just anything. On this trip however, the garbage had all been cleaned up and a barricade had been erected further up the road to prevent people from using this as a dump.

The road was clean. The barricade was effective. Almost. As we approached the barricade, we found a fresh new pile of garbage. The natural law of human behavior was not well understood.

Color-coded Elevation of Routes in Google Earth

One of the reasons I was considering a GPS was to get a better picture of the elevation I was gaining on my rides around town. I've learned that most GPS aren't accurate enough to be useful so I looked for alternatives.

Since all my riding is on-road, I can easily create a track of my route using bikely.com, but the elevation information had some problems. Sometimes it wasn't available at all and when it was available, it wasn't always accurate. In any case, I couldn't export the elevation information to make corrections or perform calculations.

I recently learned about an online tool called GPS Visualizer. This has a set of tools that allow working with the tracks created in bikely.com. The result is Google Earth file that shows color-coded elevations along the route set against a 3D view of the earth's surface in reasonably good detail. The file JacksNicakjack.kmz covers the route we rode this past Sunday. Red is the lowest elevation and purple the highest. The ridge along Pebblebrook stands out nicely even without lowering the eye-level so you can see the hills.

I'll post other routes and the steps for creating these files in a later post.

Up the Creek without a Pedal

The name of this century ride grabs your attention. Riding these roads will bring you back.

I had ridden a portion of this route (Pocket Road) during the 2006 BRAG, and was happy to be revisiting these roads.

Pat, Jack, Charles, Larry, David and I stayed together most of the route. We were joined at various times by others who kept -- and often raised -- our pace. Even though we were riding alongside low mountain ridges the whole day, we only had one climb that really got us breathing hard. The flatness and the number of strong riders gave us a fast pace: we averaged 20.0 MPH over the 100 miles, and were getting faster as the day wore on.

When we finished and were checking our bike computers, Pat had guesstimated that we had finished the ride in a little over 5 hours. My computer recorded 5:00:02 -- two seconds over 5 hours.

Got to play with the Nuvi 200 GPS some. It is able to record tracks if you use version 3.40 of the firmware. There were two drawbacks to the device: 1) it only has a 4 hour battery life and 2) the touchscreen is easy to accidentally turn off your recording. The first limitation is more serious than the second if you're careful where the unit is placed.

I've mapped the century route in bikely.com.

Unintentional Metric Century

Sat, Mar 15, 2008 - 62.70 mi [Cycling]
62.70 mi in 03:44:27 hours at 16.76 mi/h on Trek 1200. [Cycling] We had planned a 47-mile ride, but when we reached mile 32 and were just pointed back home, we realized we made a mistake. The route we were following didn't start/stop at the same place we were starting/stopping.


So, we ended up with a metric century.

We got a nice break from the storms that have been coming through. There was a nice one last night and then another this morning. Another crop of tornadoes are supposed to come through NW of here. We rode SE.

Two flats required four tubes. I brought a dud and Dave's had a hole. Fortunately, Barry brought two tubes.

The route took us through Arabia Mountain and Panola Mountain parks. The PATH trail runs for about 10 miles through what feels like remote countryside. And then Alexander's Lake Road was a nice way to ease back into traffic. Will enter this route into Bikely.com.
Posted from My Cycling Log

Sun, Nov 4, 2007 - 47.20 mi [Cycling]

Sun, Nov 4, 2007 - 47.20 mi [Cycling]
47.20 mi in 02:46:29 hours at 17.01 mi/h on Trek 1200. [Cycling] Stiff wind out of the west. Made good time overall, but whacked my legs pretty good on the Stone Mountain outer loop. We were climbing the last stretch at 25 MPH. Head wind back home didn't let us slack off.
Posted from My Cycling Log

This is my first check of posting from My Cycling Log to this blog. I do think it's good ;-).

Stone Mountain - South Approach

Share your bike routes @ Bikely.com

Aurora Cycling's July 1 ride - Krog Street Tunnel

Around Atlanta, the Krog Street Tunnel is well-known to cyclists and graffiti artists. For graffiti artists, there are strict rules about whether your work can stay or not. If it's good, it can stay. If it isn't better than what there before, you get painted over.

For cyclists, it's one of the best routes south from Inman Park and Virginia-Highland. The Aurora Cycling group took this route today on the way back home. The above video shows the group approaching, entering and then riding through the tunnel. Somebody goes "whoop" every time we ride through this tunnel.

Earlier that day we were down by the airport along Grant Road. In the video below, you can hear a plane coming in for a landing. We're on an uphill and still smiling big.


At a rest stop, we found a couple of stray cats. Although they won a lot of sympathy votes with their cuteness, neither of them rode home with any of us. This is the more skittish of the two peeking out from under a car.

Attempts at Filming while Riding

Here are a few movies I captured while riding with the Aurora Cycling group this morning. My photo-serving software doesn't understand movies, so I'm putting together this index. Links bring up AVI files.

• At first, I sat at the back of the line along Mt. Paran road and tried to get a feel for how many riders we had today. I think there are 18 ahead of me and I'm at the end.
  
• Speed bumps and wind noise mar this clip, but once I trim it down and dub some better sound, this will be a nice little clip with Tom and Mark.
  
• This clip starts with a runner and ends with a turn onto Stella Dr from Dudley Lane.
  
• One street where we see lots of people outdoors is Woodward Way west of Northside along Peachtree Creek.
  

In the one still I captured, we're chatting at Aurora Coffee before the start of the ride.



Route: We did a combination of the Six Flags/Log Cabin route and the Hollywood/Buckhead route. We followed the Six Flags route up to West Paces Ferry and Ridgewood and then followed Mt. Paran from the Buckhead route.

It was nice to get some hill work after a flat BRAG.

Taking Your Place

On Sunday's during the summer, our family would drive over to the family house in Bluffton, SC. Sometimes, instead of going straight to the house, we would drive past the turn-off and go down to the boat ramp just to check the tide and see what was there. It was interesting to see what had changed, and reassuring to see what was still the same. The house on the corner would maybe get a new porch swing, but the oyster shell wall would still have the secret hole you could hide stuff in.

After spending some time in a place, the familiarity would lead to a sense of belonging. I had found my place at the boat ramp and its secret hiding place.

Often, after making those connections, I would wonder, would I ever be here again? For each place, each visit could have been the last visit, and I sometimes lingered in that place, wondering if it would be the last visit.

On my daily ride into the office, I sometimes vary my route just so I can visit some of those places, see what has changed, and see what is still the same. And then, I'll get off the bike, and linger.

Crossing the Cascades

Dave and I were about to begin our third day of a month-long trek across the mountains from Seattle over to Wisconsin. The night before, we didn't get as much supper as we would have liked and at breakfast we tried to make up for the calorie deficit.

A gentleman noticed how much we were eating, assumed the bikes out front belonged to us, and asked how far we were going. We told him Wisconsin and his eyes grew as big as our stomachs. After some chatting about the route we wanted to take, he suggested a road that wasn't on our map. It would save us about 20 miles that day so we agreed to take his advice.

After about an hour of climbing, we started to realize this gentleman had never thought about elevation when he drove that shortcut. It was a nice road, recently paved and devoid of traffic, but we just kept going up and up and up. We had left camp at 1200 feet and didn't think we had any hills above 2000 feet, but it felt like we'd already done well over 800 feet of climbing.

The road was remote enough that we could hear the occasional logging truck for several minutes before it would pass us and then for several minutes after it passed. We would listen to the pitch of the engine to see if they would shift gears to signal they had reached the top of the hill. We never heard them shift.

After a few hours and most of the water, we came across a rest stop where we could refill water bottles and eat some snacks. Our mood was getting rather sour because it had been uphill, often steep, all the way.

Fortunately, shortly after we started back up the slope, we found a sign that told us we were passing through Wolf Gap. We were above 4700 feet.

It was downhill into the next town. As we joined up with the main highway, a retirement age gentleman calls to us from his Winnebago, "You guys biking?"

"No! We're sitting on lounge chairs in Florida."

We had been tent camping, but that night we treated ourselves to a hotel room.

Windy Ride

You know it is windy when you have to pedal down the hill. You also know it's windy when you don't have to pedal up the hill.

Sunday we did our Buckhead loop and only averaged 13.5 MPH going into the wind over the first part of the loop. Once we got the wind behind us though, we made up for lost time and finished with a respectable 15MPH average. Coming up Howell Mill with the wind at my back, I posted my best speed. Unfortunately, I also posted some of my worse times when we were headed into the wind.

Sometimes the wind shifted without me noticing. I would be feeling rather good about myself until I noticed leaves on the road passing me.

Cartersville Ride

Today a group of us drove up from Atlanta to ride out of the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in Cartersville. The North Atlanta Riding Club (NARC) maintains marked routes starting at the brewery parking lot and running 12, 27, 45, 65, and 105 miles.

I had heard this area is blessed with some of the best biking roads in Georgia and after riding today, I'll have to agree. The weather -- 55-60 degrees and sunny in December -- was part of the great experience, but so were the rolling hills, numerous farms, ponds, mountain views, and wooded glades. The exuberance of riding pulled us along at one of the fastest paces I've ridden. I'm going to feel good for days.