On Friday I found out a guy I work with rides, so we set up plans to ride today.
We end up going to a state park that he's familiar with, although I am not, and go through a trail that even he's never been before. A bit of exploring for a nice day like today.
We ride for a while, find this cool cliff so ride around it to get to the top so we can see all the crap that's been thrown in it. Falling in there would be instant death simply because of the trash and random stuff that's been thrown in it.
So we continue riding into the distance, going through a path reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz's forest, until we come to a dump. We have no idea what town we're in now, but it smells real bad and my friend heard teh highway, so we go towards that thinking we'll have a general idea of where we were.
The entire path there was really technical because of all the rocks around, a type of terrain I'm not used to. We finally reach the highway and know exactly where we were, but within a minute of jumping back on teh path his right pedal body comes off. So he's riding with one pedal and one spindle. This exploring ride turned into a lets-get-home-fast ride.
Continue down the path some more, find the service road/pipeline near the highway, so we follow that. I started bombing down one of the really rocky downhill sections that's apparantly a dirtbike path while scaring hte bejeezus out of myself, and when I get to the bottom and catch up with my friend (who coasted quite well with his spindle), we hear a hiss. Yup, my back tire went flat in about 20 seconds.
So we walked about a half mile more on that service road, at one point having to take off our shoes to cross a dirty run-off stream. The current was certainly a lot faster than it looked! I also tried using my friend's advice and aiming the bike downstream so I have something to lean on, but it ended up getting pulled with the current and I almost fell a few times.
After all of this, however, we eventually found a road and my friend knew where we were, so we walked our bikes probably 1.5-2 miles back to the car.
We end up going to a state park that he's familiar with, although I am not, and go through a trail that even he's never been before. A bit of exploring for a nice day like today.
We ride for a while, find this cool cliff so ride around it to get to the top so we can see all the crap that's been thrown in it. Falling in there would be instant death simply because of the trash and random stuff that's been thrown in it.
So we continue riding into the distance, going through a path reminiscent of the Wizard of Oz's forest, until we come to a dump. We have no idea what town we're in now, but it smells real bad and my friend heard teh highway, so we go towards that thinking we'll have a general idea of where we were.
The entire path there was really technical because of all the rocks around, a type of terrain I'm not used to. We finally reach the highway and know exactly where we were, but within a minute of jumping back on teh path his right pedal body comes off. So he's riding with one pedal and one spindle. This exploring ride turned into a lets-get-home-fast ride.
Continue down the path some more, find the service road/pipeline near the highway, so we follow that. I started bombing down one of the really rocky downhill sections that's apparantly a dirtbike path while scaring hte bejeezus out of myself, and when I get to the bottom and catch up with my friend (who coasted quite well with his spindle), we hear a hiss. Yup, my back tire went flat in about 20 seconds.
So we walked about a half mile more on that service road, at one point having to take off our shoes to cross a dirty run-off stream. The current was certainly a lot faster than it looked! I also tried using my friend's advice and aiming the bike downstream so I have something to lean on, but it ended up getting pulled with the current and I almost fell a few times.
After all of this, however, we eventually found a road and my friend knew where we were, so we walked our bikes probably 1.5-2 miles back to the car.
