Memorial Day Weekend rides

[TrekDianna]

This weekend we did our first overnight "tour" from home. We left Saturday morning and meandered towards Redmond, and stayed overnight at the Marriott in the Town Center. That's my kind of roughing it. I wasn't too heavily loaded, but I am having gearing issues on my Jamis, so the grade coming back home was a bit of a grind.

Still it was a nice test ride for the longer tour we want to do in Idaho next month. It was about a 50 mile round trip. Nice and relaxed pace.

There is some nice scenery out there too. Were you over near Smith Rock?

[Giulianna23]

I did a total of 87 miles (7miles of mountain biking) for the whole long weekend (Friday through Monday) All group rides. Can't wait for my favorite group ride today after work ,32mi of hilly terrain. Yes!

[missjean]

It sounds like everybody had a good weekend.
I went up to Maine, where it rained hard on Sat & most of Sun, but Mon was beautiful. We got a short, muddy ride in on Sun afternoon and a longer, muddy ride in on Mon morning.

We stuck to ATV trails - friend going though one of the many mud puddles

Me.

It was a dirty ride, but fun. :-)

[azfiddle]

My husband and I were camping on Mt. Lemmon, about 7500, above Tucson. We rode from our campsite to the ski lift area, about 14 miles round trip. The main ridge gets a little over 8000 feet, drops back down and then climbs up again to the ski lift. The last mile or so is definitely steeper (and above 8000 feet) so I saw the speed drop to about 4 miles an hour at one point. It's possible to go another mile or so the summit, over 9000 feet but that's just too much of a challenge for me.

The next day, after packing up our campsite, my husband took the car and i rode the bike down the mountain. That went fine, an hour of descending takes a lot of concentration, with all the weekend traffic coming up, but it went fine. However, I must have used up all my concentration because on the last leg of the ride home, I had an unpleasant and unexpected encounter with an object in the road, leading my first ever bike crash. I let my attention waver ever so briefly. I'm basically okay, just suffering a pretty banged up knee, but I'll put up a separate account.

I was recovered enough to be able to take a gentle spin Monday to a sales event at the Kia car dealership that sponsors my women's bike group, where we did some promotional photos with the "Hamstar" mascot, and a bright red Kia Soul. (Our team is called Team Soul, after the car). I guess Saturday they had a much bigger crowd and they didn't really need us to help out on Monday, so we just did photos, hung around and chatted and went home.