Most recent Garmin logged bike ride

Home made cookies and bicycling

There's something about baking that brings back the same kind of memories as riding a bike. At least for me, it's memories from childhood, my first bike ride, the smell of home made cookies or brownies, all hearkening back to simple pleasures (and simpler days). For biking it's the wind in your face, and for baking it's the smells and the taste, that link us to those memories.


So what does this have to do with Pedal The Kettle? Well, one of the first Pedal The Kettle's (then known as The Spring City Annual Tour), was supplied almost entirely with homemade goodies. I wasn't there, but you can imagine that it was probably like the days when you were a kid going to a family reunion. Little if any of the food was store bought (or Fast Food), everything was homemade, from the Fried Chicken to the desserts. Since then, we ask each of our members to supply four(4) dozen cookies, which are distributed among each of the five(5) Rest Stops.

So our goal with Pedal The Kettle is to bring back some of those feelings and memories, from the past, to the riders (our guests) here in the present. It's what keeps Pedal The Kettle a little bit unique and special among so many other local rides.

Safe riding all

A Century ride per week?

The Wright Stuff Century ride was a ton of fun. A small group (three to be exact) from our bike club started and finished together. Initially it was cool and very foggy, so much so that we had to shed our glasses for about the first hour or so, due to the condensation. The temperature swing wasn't too drastic, starting out in the hi 50's to low 60's, but then after the Sun came out I think the peak temp. was in the low 80's. With the clouds and slight breeze, it made for an enjoyable ride, through some very picturesque sections of Dane and Iowa County.

My next Century ride will be a members only event (Sept. 12th), previewing our club fund raiser, Pedal The Kettle coming up on Sept, 20th. This year, we're following the trend of many of the bigger organized rides, with a "Grand Unified map and cue sheet" for all three routes. Here's a sample of the map that I've been working on.

Our All-in-One version of the map

If you're in the area and decide to participate, stop by and say hi, I'll be manning Rest Stop #2 (for the 66/100 mile routes) at Rome Pond Park, just before the 66 and 100 mile routes split.

Safe riding all

Preview of PTK

Even though there was an Air Quality Alert, the conditions weren't that bad yesterday (Sat.) morning. There were four of us starting out from North High School to preview the the routes of the Spring City Spinners bicycle tour: Pedal The Kettle. Jackie did the 33 mile route, I did the 66 mile route and Doug and George did the 100 mile route.

The roads we use are fairly low traffic and over the summer, several segments of our route have been repaved.

All the reservations for parks/shelters have been taken care of, so the preview rides are mostly to make sure there are no obstacles (like major construction) that would require changes to the route(s). The only one we found was the intersection at Valley Rd (Cty B) and Hwy 67, just outside of Oconomowoc. But we're hoping that that will be done in time (Sept. 20th) for PTK.

Rest Stop List:

• Cushing Park - 1st RS on the 66/100 mile routes
• Rome Pond Park - 2nd RS on the 66/100 mile routes
• Whitewater - 3rd RS for the 100 mile route
• Palmyra - 4th RS for the 100 mile route
• Ottawa Park - Only Rest for 33 mile route, last RS for 66/100 mile route

While taking advantage of the Cushing Park Rest Stop, I snapped this picture, bee'ing careful not to agitated the bee.


Safe Riding all

Busy cycling weekend

On Saturday the bike club had one of its last scheduled rides of the season, our annual Chili Dump ride, to celebrate the success of the Pedal The Kettle fund raiser. We had several ride options, I picked the 30 mile route, out to Holy Hill and back. It was a perfect day, with very little wind and temp's in the high 70's. We shared the back roads north of Pewaukee with many other cyclists and motorcyclists as well. After the ride there was plenty of great food and conversation to go around.

Getting ready to ride

After seeing so many motorcycles on the road yesterday, my son and I decided to visit the new Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee, WI. It was very impressive, not for just the shear number of bikes on display (which is huge in and of itself) but also the amount of information and history that's provided. We only had the morning for our visit, but could have easily spent the whole day looking around. Here's a couple of the many pictures that we took.

Exterior of the Main Museum Building

1903 Model #1 (under glass)

Safe riding all, no matter what type of bike you ride!

Barns of the Pedal The Kettle

In previous posts I've mentioned that, as a kid, I spent a lot of time on my Grandparents farm. So the first time that I road the Pedal The Kettle route, I saw several farms that reminded me of those childhood days visiting the working farm. Today I decided to ride part of the PTK route and take some pictures of the barns on some of those farms. Here are of few of those pictures.







There are many more barns on the route, some in better shape than other, but it's a very scenic ride.
Hope to see you at this years Pedal The Kettle - Sept. 21st, 2008 - Waukesha, WI
As a member of the club I won't be riding that day, I'll be helping out at one of the rest stops (probably the Rome stop just before the 60 and 100 mile routes split).

Safe riding all

Year to date bike mileage at +4000 miles

This is an all time high for me, last year I did approximately 2000 miles, but this year I really blew that out. Part of it is that I'm getting more focused on a regular training schedule, so some of the miles are indoors, on the trainer. But I can only take so much of that, even with my recorded rides playing and the tunes cranking. The other part was that I got more involved with the bike club that I belong to (Spring City Spinners) and attended more Century rides this year than I ever had in the past. I rode at least 2 x 10o mile rides and 3 metric century rides this past summer. So all of that, plus weekly and weekend rides brought the grand total above 4000.

This week I fell a little behind my weekly average, due to my bike being in the shop, but it's back now and ready for the next month of RyJax (AKA Spinning & Yoga - it was called Spoga, but I think someone else registered that name).

I just joined an new affiliate program for a product called RoadID. I think the product is a great idea is and I have one on order. You can check them out yourself by clicking on the RoadID widget under my Profile on the right. A percentage of each RoadID you purchase is donated to charity (the website has an option to let you pick from several different choices).

Safe riding all (weather permitting)

Pedal the Kettle results

The clubs annual fund raiser, Pedal The Kettle, did pretty well this year with ~300 rides. It doesn't sound like a lot, but we do the whole things ourselves with little if any outside sponsorship or assistance. We offered three routes; 33, 66 and 100 miles. Here's how that split our among the 300 or so riders. This year was the first time that we had offered online registration and about half of the pre-registration occurred online via active.com. The other half was through snail mail, and all tolled, both amounted to a little over half of the total registration. The data helps us with planning for next year and how to distribute the food to the various rest stops along the routes.

100 Milers - 26%
66 Milers - 39%
33 Milers - 35%

Weekend Century Ride

There were 18 members of our club (Spring City Spinners) participating in Bay View Bicycle Clubs "Classic", this pasted Saturday. The day started out in the mid 70's, but it was clear, so the Sun was beating down throughout the day. Several of us did the 100 mile route, starting out of Oconomowoc, WI at ~7:15AM and working our way southwest through Waukesha, Jefferson and Walworth counties. The rest stops were well stocked with fresh fruit, cookies, brownies, and other high carb snacks, plus plenty of water and Gatorade. Our only complaint was that as the day wore on, the fruit (and water at the last rest stop) had been left in the sun. Nothing worse than being at mile 83 of 100 and having hot fruit and hot water for refreshment.

BikeBlogs and Bicycle Design blogs

I ran across a couple of interesting sites while looking for two different things. First I wanted to find a site that aggregated bicycle related blogs, I found it, at BikeBlogs.com but the last posting was in 6/2006. I did some research (basic WHOIS lookup) and found a contact, the short answer from the site owner was that the site wasn't worth the time it took to maintain, so don't looks for any updates, unless things change.

The other site was related to a search for radical bicycles and the site I found is Bicycle Design. This site has some very interesting postings related to bike designs, give it a look if you're interesting in that type of thing.

I'm prep'ing for a century ride tomorrow morning. We want to get started as early as we can to try a beat the mid-day heat. Several members of our club, Spring City Spinners are riding to support our coalition partner club BVBC.

Safe riding all.

Finally the glasses are complete

From previous posting you know that I had purchased the Julbo Speed/Race sunglasses and the problems that I had getting my prescription filled into the Rx clip. Well the stars must have finally aligned correctly, because yesterday the clip came back from the lab. It was intact and had the proper prescription. Also, the Eye Group SC did right by the price, due to all the problems, and basically gave me the Rx for the clip. So, tonight barring hail or high water (and I've seen both on Tuesday night rides) I'll get a chance to try them out.

Now I'll have to change my Blogger Photo to show the new shades.

Safe riding all

Website upgrade

I've taken on the part time duty of maintaining the website for our bicycle club and so far things have been working out pretty well, although it can be a time-pit if you let it suck you in. I've learned a few things along the way, like replacing the Java based menus with css (helped the initial home page load much faster for our user base). I also recently struggled with getting a PHP accelerator working (to speed up our events calendar). The hosting company that we use didn't "directly" support IonCube, but I was able to work around that and the performance boost has been pretty dramatic.

I've also been getting quite a bit of riding in, this passed weekend I logged 50+ miles, Tuesday ~32 miles and tonight probably another 30 miles (got to take advantage of the good weather when we get it).

Safe riding all.

Breakfast Ride using steadicam mount

Here's a short Clip that I shot using my bike Steadicam mount.

Success with the steadicam mount

Last night I finally completed the modifications to my bike mounted steadicam arm. Each iso-elastic section has it's own hydraulic shock absorber, to dampen the vibration I was encountering. It involved a few strange combinations of parts, like grease zerk fittings and screen door parts. Pictures and the completed instructables project will follow in a day or two.

The weather is looking good for the Spinners Tuesday night ride tonight.

Safe riding all.

First scheduled ride of the season

Our club had it's first scheduled bike ride of the season yesterday. The weather wasn't ideal, but other than a few scattered rain drops, the temperatures stays in the low 60's and the winds didn't start to pickup until after we finished, so it was a great evening. I got in a 26 mile ride, out near Ottawa Lake, but we turned off on Waterville Road to head back to Waukesha. All that riding on the trainer over the winter has helped my endurance, so this was a good first ride of the season.

Updating the Spinners website

Without a total redesign I've made the first change by incorporating CSS into the main menu, replacing the somewhat slow loading java applet menu code. You can compare the two, at least until I'm satisfied that there's no bugs in the new menu code.

Original: Spinners site with Java menu

New: Spinner site with CSS menu

I got the code for the CSS menus from http://e-lusion.com/design/menu/ which had several good examples of basic block menus. This worked well for my needs, as I didn't want to radically change the look/feel of the site. This allowed me to easily adapt the CSS menu into the existing website.

The next thing that I'm going to look into is the use of the ionCube loader to speed up the Spinners Event/Ride Calendar (PHP based), but this is going to require a change on the host server, which is shared. So this is going to be more difficult, since loading the ionCube loader is not under my control.

Back in the saddle

I've been doing a lot of indoor riding this year. But last week we had some unseasonably warm weather and I was able to get outside for a couple of rides, it was great.

I also took on a new "part-time" job as the webmaster for out bike clubs website. It's always interesting to take over the administration of someone else's systems (I was a UNIX admin is a previous life) or a website. I'm not really a web designer, but I know how to access the system, update files, etc, so that should be enough for now. I really want to look into why the calendar pages load so slowly, but that will come after I get some of the informational pages updated.

For instance this years Pedal the Kettle is coming up in September and that page needs to be updated, so that those want to attend, can plan well advance of they event, and get it on their ride calendars. It's a great event, lots of home made cookies at the rest stops, the route follows roads in the Kettle Moraine area that surrounds Waukesha County. The PTK is a supported bicycle tour that has 30, 60 and 100 mile options. Full details will be available at http://www.springcityspinners.com in the next few weeks, as the club firms up all the arrangements.

There may be some slight variations in the layout of the course (depending on road construction), but you can see last years route and the elevation profile (of the 100 mile option) at http://www.routeslip.com/routes/7575

Safe riding all.

Last Scheduled Club Ride

Winter is approaching fast, the last few days have been rainy and windy and as such less than idea for bike riding. This weekend marks the end of our clubs scheduled rides for the year. We're ending it with a members only potluck Chili lunch after a 30 mile ride (weather permitting).

On the Picoo-Z front, the carbon fiber shaft and ball bearing mod worked well, almost no vibration now. But it still had the counter clockwise rotation problem, however I think I have a fix for that as well (more on that as I get it tweaked).

Sci-Fi Friday III (postponed)

Sci Fi Friday: postponed for a week while I do some research and expand the story.

Saturday Ride: Sweet Hilly, Flat hilly Ride sounds interesting, if the weather co-operates, this will be a new route for me. I don't have the cue sheets yet so it isn't entered into routeSlip yet. I'm getting used to having the info ahead of time and having the elevation profile, so I know what to expect.

Weekend Ride ~40 miles

Some of our club members braved the rain on Saturday and rode in the Crooked Path Ride, I opt'ed to stay dry and do some chores around the house that day. But on Sunday a few of us (3 to be exact) tried a new route charted out by one of our newer members, using the routeslip site. It was a great ride, and except for some wind the weather was fine. I did have a little mis-cue when trying to setup my camera for a post ride picture.

I'm in the frame, but not facing the right way.

Afterwards we ate at a great little restraunt called "Cornerstone" in Genesee Depot, WI.