Sunday riding and day off riding

Rockhopper, Master of the Gravel Universe

Todays soon saturating Gravel.

Sunday, Pizza putting the hurt on.

Taking a break in Oregon, watching Harleys go by.

Recovery drink. Drink a couple really cold and fast.

So I wrote this brilliant post a few hours ago and I attempted to load a video. Once the darn thing loaded, it crashed and I lost all what I had written. I blame my ignorance and also having received my masters with a thesis written on typewriter. Too bad I don't have Alex and Mauri around to just do that sort of thing for me.
Second Attempt:
Pizza Dan and I met up at my house and did a long 80 miler Grave-tar ride. We were both on cross bikes and the weather was super sunny and the temps kept climbing until they reaced the lower 90's. As the ride progressed we were also blessed with a nice strong wind coming out of the southeast. Thank you Gustav.
We made the mistake to not carry anything with some electrolytes and to say the least we got dehydrated like crazy. Ricardo will for sure yell at me. He is my professional nutritionist and I , being the lame ass, always forget his advice. We did drink bottles of Gatorade at Oregon but that was not enough.
We also suffered from hot foot and we had to stop on Mowers rd. to take our shoes off and cool off the dogs. It was a mighty fine ride and the suffering made it sweeter. I am going to experiment with larger clicky pedals to see if it helps. I was running Spds while Pizza was on eggbeaters.
The cross bike is a great machine for my area since at one moment you can be on tar and the next on gravel. I ran Ritchey Speedmax while Pizza was on Vittoria Randonneur Tires. We got home tired, salty and really thirsty and at that time I remembered that in less than 1 1/2 hours I had to be at the restaurant to serve. I was really dissapointed.

Today was a completely different story. It was cold and rainy. Some leftover action from the hurricane. I rode with a wool undershirt, My great Showers Pass jacket and rode the Specialized rockhopper soon to be monster winter bike. The gravel was well saturated and it made for a great workout. I took Old State back and rode the shoulder for more non-tar action.
I arrived home satisfied with 20 miles of rain riding and vowed to do it all over again in preparation for Trans Iowa next year.
On other Trans Iowa news Guitar Ted has posted on his blog that Salsa Cycles is coming out with an adventure bike for long distance riding called the "Fargo" Check it at their website. I think a lot of Trans Iowa type races are popping up.
Pal Thomas is wanting to do The Ore to Shore in Upper Peninsula next year and if we get a spot and all goes right I will be up there. No pun intended.
I will have to say that this years road riding was a wash. I rode my Team Motorola Eddy Merckx once. I never rode the Legnano. Never rode the Mondonico. Rode the Heron maybe twice.
I rode the Gunnar Crosshairs a ton, rode the Salsa, Rode the 29er. So more dirt and less tar this year. Also my commuting to work was also down. I was more resposible, worked more hours and paid off a bunch of stuff to become FREE.
We still want to move to Decorah and that thought is becoming more and more of a reality. I truly just want to ride and live a basic life. So I hope that happens for us some day.
If anyone has some comments on the hot foot issue shoot me some info. I am going to try some Crank bros Mallets and see how they work.
Enjoy the soon coming fall.
Ari