Stony Creek Bike Ride

Today’s Bike Ride at Stony Creek

Today I was off work, so I had a rather relaxing, but work-filled day. It started out with a now-typical weekend breakfast of yogurt, granola, coffee, and a banana. Then I showered, and decided to work on cleaning up my bike. A little while later my bike was freshly washed with a nicely oiled chain and clean brake rotors. After oiling the chain on Danielle’s bike^† I decided that I needed to go for a bit of a bike ride.

Since the weather was relatively nice (it felt like 40, even though the various online systems indicated it was only 35 or so), I headed up to Stony Creek Metropark. I took my car (with the bike rack) on the highway to get there, and while the rack was nicely stable, my car did seem to drag a bit. It’s clearly not as aerodynamic with a few bikes sticking up off of the back of it.

While at the park this time I ended up riding along the road. It’s a bit smoother and tends to have less water on it, and being a park the drivers are familiar with watching out for those on bikes in the road. I ended up doing two laps along the main road, with a jaunt down to the Nature Center between the two.

This was the longest ride I’d ever done, with the GPS clocking it in as 16.6 miles, and the bike computer at 17.05. Normally I wouldn’t think that is very much, but as anyone who has been to Stony knows, it’s nothing but rolling hills there. I think there is only maybe half a mile of flat pavement amongst all of that; where the main road crosses one of the dams. It was definitely a good bit of exercise.

After coming hope I ended up showering again, sitting around for a bit, then ordering a pizza and enjoying the majority of it with a Trader Joe’s 750mL beer and some TiVo’d entertainment (King Of The Hill, Colbert Report, Daily Show, and How It’s Made).

Here is the KMZ of today’s ride, and here it is in Google Maps, if you prefer to look that way. Again, this was logged with my old Garmin eTrex Legend. This time it was converted with GPSBabel for Windows, because the drivers for my USB RS-232 port are complete crap on OS X. They repeatedly hang, can’t be unloaded via kextunload, and just cause problems. Therefore, next time I place an order with Mouser I will be ordering a good FTDI development serial cable.

^† I never, ever want to oil the chain on a coaster brake bike again without either a workstand or a second person to help. That was not easy.