New homepage pix explan
March 31, 2009
To see the referenced pix, keep hitting the "refresh" key (circular arrow) at the top of your screen, and the main photo will change. There are about 26 photos in the random rotation, and maybe 10 of them are from taken on an S24O (sub-24-hour overnight---a quickie ride-n-camp trip) nearby. Following is a brief story of it....
From HQ it was a casual 50-minute ride (mostly residential and bike path) to the trail head, where everything gets woodsy and creekish. Then ten minutes of flat riding, leading to 25 minutes of pushing the bike up a hill, then riding through dense woods, followed by more pushing and then we're for the most part above the trees and in the land of green domes and wildflowers (fiddlenecks are the yellow ones, and they're dominant). We were at the top 2 hours after leaving HQ, and rode around on the trails there before picking a campsite.
Rider is a friend. His bike is a Bleriot 55cm with one Col de la Vie tire, and one Schwalbe Middie. He had a Top Rack on back, where he strapped (using four John's Irish Straps) his one-person tent and sleeping bag and pad.
Up front he has a Mark's rack with a medium Wald basket with food, clothing. He's been on a dozen or more of these, and this is his normal rig. Sometimes he rides shop bikes or prototypes, but usually his own.
Ordinarily at this time of year we'd cook dinner (Trangia stove), but this time we ate sardines, strawberries (kept unsquished and in surprisingly good shape in a Trangia box), gouda and parmesan, and walnuts, almonds, macadamias, and apricot kernels. Trader Joe's sells apricot kernels cheap in a bag, and they're surprisingly non-bitter. If they were almonds they'd be lousy. They look like small orange-ish almonds.
I rode my 56cm Atlantis with Albatross bars, with a Big Boxy bag in back with food, tent, and clothes, extra water, book, and wash kit, and a Nitto Mini rack in front, onto which I strapped my sleeping bag and pad.
My Atlantis is the first prototype, from 1998, and has been on more than 50 of these trips. Can't beat it, but many of our bikes would be as good. I rode Schwalbe 26x50 Marathon XR tires and was glad for the volume and softness, because the cow hoofprints made some of the trails really bumpy. The Albatross bars are great for this kind of riding, although my buddy rides Noodles, no problem.
The photos were shot with a Voigtlander Bessa R 35mm rangefinder camera, with a 35mm lens. Friend shot some with a digital, and when I ran out of film, I used his digital camera, too. A Nikon Coopix somethingorother.
I'll replace this post in a few days, with something less me-me/we-we.
---Grant
