Chilly and windy here in the Piedmont of South Carolina. Our fall colors are still beautiful, just beginning to fade a bit. Our small group rode 25 miles--we're so lucky to have crop fields, cow pastures and woods on our routes, which are also light on traffic. We also rode past fields of cotton, a crop that is making a comeback in this neck of the woods. These fields are white as though dusted well with snow. Just beautiful and well-worth bucking the wind to ride.

I'm riding my new bike, a Giant OCR A-1 W. Still in the "getting used to it" period and doggone if I didn't pick up something in the rear brake pad that scraped my rim a little bit. But the good news is that I can keep up with the group better than I could on my previous bicycle, which was a teeny-weenie Trek 1000 WSD. Yay!