Bike and Beer.

The whole family was together for the weekend which is pretty rare these days with everyone spread throughout the country. It was really nice spending time with my Mom and Dad, Sister and Brothers. Five of us ran the Run for the Diamonds in Berwick, PA on Thursday. (I'm gonna run it next year I promise) They had a record turnout for their 99th edition of the race. It's a real tradition. I got a couple rides in, drank some beer, ate a ton of food and now I'm glad to be back home to recover from it all.

Yesterday's Ride: I got on the road about 1pm in the afternoon and did a loop I used to ride a lot when I was living back home. It's nice because it's not overly hilly for the area, but still includes about 2100 feet of climbing. A few of them are pretty long which was a welcome change from the short steep climbs I do down here in Maryland. 2hours: 25 minutes and 45 miles in total. Overall a great kick-off for my 2009 Season.

Losing the Turkey.

I was able to sneak out for awhile today and ride with my brother. It felt good to be out on the road after eating pretty much non-stop for the last two days. We did an easy to slightly fast 25 mile loop taking us to the base of Red Rock, down to Benton, over to Huntington Mills before finishing back on Red Hill Road. My brother hung in there really well today and we had a good 8 mile run in the 24-26 average mph range before heading back into the hills.  He's got a motor on the flat sections but still needs some work on the hills.  Tomorrow if the weather holds out I want to do a long easy solo ride into the mountains. I might take his Ridley and write a review.

Blog Find: Closet Cooking.

Looking for something interesting to cook tonight? Check out Closet Cooking. His recipes and photography are really nice.

It Never Stops.

Bobby Jindal was campaigning (I mean speaking) in Iowa over the weekend. Election season is always in season it seems. hmmmm. I wonder if they have a pic of him riding a bike yet?


It worked for this guy.


...this guy stopped smoking at least long enough for this photo.


...but it didn't work so well for this guy, even though he's got the coolest bike, in Eddy Orange no less. (Big Chainring!) I guess we'll find out. What kind of bike do you think Bobby should ride?

Christmas is Back!

As I watched TV this evening I noticed something. Christmas is cool again! I'm sure many of you have noticed over the last dozen or so years how Christmas and Santa have taken a beating with the politically correct retailer crowd. Ya sure, easy when people are racking up their credit cards and blowing home equity year'round with big screen tv's, new gadgets and bling bling. Well this year with the economy bad and spending down, look who's back!! Well if I was Santa I'd tell these retailers to umm take this, see picture above.

Don't worry Santa, some of us always found Christmas cool, and the reason has very little to do with retail sales.

101K Has a Nice Sound To It.

It's been awhile since my last ride so today I woke up raring to go. Yesterday my two daughters, wife and I did a little road trip north and east of home and ended up crossing over into York County, Pennsylvania. Mae was getting hungry so I started to look for a place to eat. We spotted this kinda cool looking building in Brogue, PA with a Restaurant Sign on it. About a mile past I thought maybe we should turn around and give it a try. When we got to the front door there was sign saying "Today is Our Last Day." So we went in to find what looked very similar to a Cracker Barrel Restaurant. Turns out the restaurant section had closed last month and they were liquidating everything in the general store area. 50+% off everything. We got some good deals including a few bottles of maple syrup, which I love but it's usually way too expensive for the good stuff. My wife asked when the store was closing. The nice lady at the cash register said 3pm, it was now 2:45pm. Funny how things happen. We just happened to catch the end of a little era there in that store/restaurant.

Back to today's ride: I made some pancakes for breakfast and used some of that roasted walnut maple syrup we picked up yesterday(Yummy!) figuring that would be a good fuel for a longer ride. Above is the route I took, roughly 3-1/2 hours of fairly easy riding. Great roads, nice weather, and plenty of time to think about everything and nothing in particular. Around 63 miles total, but doesn't "over 100K" sound so much better?

Photography 101.

You'd think they would at least ask the cute couple in lycra to move aside before snapping her picture. Sheesh!

Paris Sport Bicycles.

When I was a kid in the late 1970's, under 10 years old, there was this little brick bike shop not too far from home in town that sold these great looking bikes called Paris Sport. One of them was orange (Eddy Rode Orange!) and had that tell-tale Reynolds 531 sticker on the seat tube. I was hooked. Of course I had no idea what I was gazing upon other than it looked incredibly well built and really fast.

The owner of the shop was super thin and really grumpy with old pictures and newspaper clippings of himself winning some road races. They hung on the wall next to the cash register. As I snooped around this fascinating place all alone I remember hearing an old lady, probably his mom, yelling from upstairs, "We Have Customers!" He would come stomping downstairs and ask with disdain in his voice what I was looking for. I went back a few times and those same bikes never left the walls, never sold. In fact, if you wanted to buy them the guy wouldn't sell. I tried to buy the orange one when I was older but he wasn't interested. I don't think he ever sold much of anything. He had a lot of stuff stocked in a back room though because once I did manage to snag a new tire for that Honda QA-50 of mine. Nobody in town had those! Much later, when I was probably close to 20, I noticed the shop had burned down and there were a bunch of melted/rusty brown frames laying in the alley next to the burned out shop. That was a sad day.

Here's a couple links to the history of this fine brand of bikes. Some of them were actually made in New Jersey. Who knew?!

Sheldon Brown - On Paris Sport. What a crazy and interesting story!
Dave Moulton - A Framebuilder for Paris Sport at one time.
Paris Sport - A little history lesson

Gent Six Day: Left Nut of the Week!

This week my left nut is going to the Gent Six Day in Belgium. I can almost imagine the sights and sounds and maybe some Belgian beer to go right along with it. Some day I'm gonna witness this in person.

Time for Something New.

As you may or may not have noticed, I've been playing around with my blogger template. I have a couple random image generators running for the banner and for those bicycling posters over there on the right. The cool part is that all I have to do to change banners now is add new ones or delete old ones from a directory on my server. It'll automatically update the page, randomly cycling through each image stored in that directory. PHP scripts are pretty cool. I've got about 10 different banners that will rotate through, (Click on it and a new one will reload) and about 150 different bicycle posters. That should keep me interested in coming back to my blog once in awhile. New blog look, new cycling season around the corner. Now it's time to start planning for it all and enjoy the holiday season ahead. Things are definitely looking up. Now if I can just get my hands on some of that bailout money Washington is spreading around,...