October rides: put a little color into it.

[Crankin]

For once I did the ride I set out to do to Bolton Farms, although we did make it a bit shorter and took an alternative a friend had told me about. I had been on the road, going the other way. It was quite lovely, and a downhill. It was cool when we started, about 49. I was dressed correctly, and because we had a headwind on the way there, and it was mostly cloudy, I did not get overheated. At one point, I took my head cover off, but then, we went down that hill and I was cold, but I knew we were almost at our stop. This ride has a lot of climbing. The first climb is a hill I often gauge my fitness on, but I've only climbed it 2-3 times this season. It felt pretty hard... as we turned on to this climb, first we passed woman struggling to get up a little rise before the turn. She was zig zagging so we had to call out. DH suggested a lower gear, but she was not responsive. Then, on the first part of the climb, we saw a guy walking. He had a nice bike and looked experienced, and was not broken down. When we go to the top, his wife was waiting. Then, as we were deciding if we were really going to do the intended ride, we stopped at our turn. The struggling woman rode by us, on the same road, also a difficult 8-10% climb. The husband and wife also passed us. We decided to go for it, and we passed the struggler, and the guy got off his bike again, to walk. We caught the woman, who told us he was doing chemo, and insisted on doing a 30 mile hilly ride. Perhaps not a good choice. We went ahead and got onto the new part of the ride; there were cars parked all along the road before the farm market where the festival was, so we pulled in the lot and then walked our bikes to the patio. Mostly vendors giving samples of junk food and people buying apples and cider donuts. There was a good band playing, so we went inside and bought a sandwich to share. We ate quickly, as we felt cold, and then quickly warmed up on the 4 mile climb into Harvard Centre. As we turned by the Harvard General Store, we saw our friend Jack, pulling in, with some riders he was leading. We stopped for a second to say hi, and then up the last major climb to a big downhill. At this point we repeated about a mile of the beginning of the ride, but we stopped to take pictures. Finally, after another teeny hill, we got back to what I call my favorite roads in our old town.
The ride ended up being 35.3 miles. My knee/leg was hurting and then my other knee started hurting. I was going to do a Meet Up ride on Wednesday, but it's 19 miles with 1,100 ft of hard climbs, so I don't think I should annoy my injury even more. If the ride was longer, I might, but I'm afraid to make it worse and to be dropped by new people, even though the stated average is in my range. I still might ride with my regular group.
Glad I went, glad I didn't do 50, and happy with the cooler weather. The colors are not anywhere near peak, seems a bit late this year.

[ny biker]

I picked up the new bike!

I put two bottle cages on along with the pedals while I was the bike shop parking lot. The only difficulty was opening the tube of Park Tools grease -- I didn't have scissors to cut the tip open. But I had told the folks working in the shop that I was going to attempt my first pedal installation and would be back if I ran into problems. So while I was putting on the bottle cages one of them came out to see how I was doing. He took the tube of grease inside and opened it for me.

I rode in circles around the parking lot a few times. I definitely need a fitting. The reach to the handlebars is ok but the reach to the hoods is too long. The hoods are huge! I think they can be adjusted, though.

Before I left I had them show me how to remove the wheels and got a spacer for the disc brakes for when I have to remove a wheel. They said a piece of cardboard would work too, as long as it is roughly as thick as the rotor. Good to know.

I maxed out on posting photos here a long time ago -- will have to figure out how to delete some so I can upload photos of the new bike.