Jan 24 ride to Lacey

Temperatures were in the low 30's but the air was still. I was a little nervous about the cold but felt my gear could handle it. I set out at 9:20 AM with a pannier full of geocaches to hide. Making good time I was quickly north of Centralia on 507 contemplating making a call to Centralia City Hall to ask them to sweep the shoulders to city limits. The bike lanes are hazardous due to the large accumulation of gravel from the snow and also the gravel haulers from the gravel pit at county limits.
I often think these thoughts while riding and then forget when I am not.
-- This blog is good for a reminder --
I just called the City Utilities (360) 330-7512 and asked. They said they would put in a work order for it.
-- Back to the Ride
Making the usual stop at Schaefer Park I observed someone painting out the gang graffitti. While having a goo packet, I thought there just might be room for one more geocache in the park. I quick check on the GPS and, yes one would just fit.
Continuing on 507 i crossed the Skookumchuck River and a few things in the road caught my eye.
There were coins all over. I got off the bike and started gathering them up. All told there was almost $13 of change in the road. That is a lot of road kill money!
As I child, I used to have dreams where I would find a penny and then just at the edge of sight was another. This would continue and escalate until I was picking up quarters and dollars all over. Then I would awake disappointed. This time reality imitated a dream and there I was picking up so much change, I had to dump a load to be able to pick up more. Last years road kill money total was $18.68. It is February 2 and I already have $14.53. There is a good chance that this year will win out over last.
After 20 minutes of money gathering, I was off again, I had not gone far when I saw some emu in a field and had to stop and look. I tried to get a picture but none turned out.
My riding was progressing quickly but the time was racking up, I made a couple more side trips to hide some more caches and found a bunch of stolen mail dumped on the roadside before rolling into Tenino. Here I planned to stop and have another gel packet, use the restroom and find a cache.
While throwing away the gel packet, I spied a on of those expensive art sketch books on top of the trash. Being a picker upper of such things, I leafed through it to see what art someone would discard. It turned out it was only half used and contained some high-shcoolers art work. I removed those and kept the unused half.
In going after the geocache, it turned out to be further off the path than I had time for, so I tabled it for another time and pushed on. The bike path included many stops to hide caches, look around and spot some watercress. I made a note of the watercress location for later harvest.
The ride ended at 1 PM. 40.23 miles in 3:11:25 ride time.

2008 Recap

I finished 2008 with a whimper. My goal of 5,000 miles was not met, I rode 4473.93 which I should still be proud of. I also learned that I need to be careful of burnout.
Mile goals for 2009:

• 3600 annual miles
• more miles on bike than car
• 5 round trip to Portland
• average speed does not matter

The biggest impediment to riding is finding the time to ride. During the week in Portland is the easiest time slot. There is nothing else going on and the only things in the way are work, daylight hours to some degree and weather to some degree.
My favorite ride however, are the long distance adventure rides. These are hard to schedule because the time I can do it would be on the weekends when I am at home and then they compete with family time.

A couple things on the Blogger tool. It is hard to find time to put posts on here as blogging also competes with family time. Work blocks access and I don't have a computer in Portland. Typing up posts on an iPhone is too much of a chore. Maybe someday the iPhone will support a Bluetooth keyboard. To make matters worse, sometimes Blogger will decide not to save anymore and my post will be lost. I need to work on using the email posting method to get them into the blog.

At this point I have only done the Chehalis to Lacey route from home and commuter miles in Portland for '09.

iPhone apps that make cycling adventures better

As you can tell, I love my iPhone and now that there are custom apps you can do all kinds of neat stuff. Besides having the ability to take calls and snap photos, the apps bring real power to this phone.
Here are some of my favorite ride supporting apps:













GPS Kit
This app collects GPS information and has 4 main components. 1. A dashboard that is customizable where you can see things like: Average Speed, Altitude, Bearing
2. Ability to record tracks so that you can publish a journey.
3. A waymark recording screen to save a location.
4. A map view.



















Geocaching
This is the official app from GroundSpeak. Makes it easy to look for caches nearby.



















GeoHash
This is an app to calculate your nearest Geohash locations and map them.



















WeatherBug
There is more accurate weather forecast info on Weather Underground but WeatherBug makes checking the rain and wind so easy.



















EverNote
This is a great app that allows you to record 'stuff' like pictures, text and voice notes. When making a note from the iPhone, it adds your location to the note.

October Geocycling

It has been an while... I will try harder to maintain a posting rate. With working out of town and having this site blocked by work and being busy while I am home and finding time to ride, it is not easy carving out time to write posts.

In the last couple months there has been a few things occurring:

• July was such a month of miles and personal bests that I started to burn out and loose motivation.
• August was busy with swimming and other activities that got in the way.
• I was able to upgrade my iPhone to a 3G in a cost positive way.
• Which led to Geocaching as a new hobby, since I now have a GPS on my phone.

The result is that I am riding fewer miles and going much slower but with many new distractions to the rides. I incorporate geocaching with riding and am also doing cycloharvesting. That is my name for riding along and finding fruit trees along the roadsides. This year there is a lot of fruit and it has a better flavor and quality than years past. With the iPhone, i can take waymarks of good trees and am building a Google myMap of these.
Suprisingly, or not, my enjoyment of riding has increased with these extra activities.

One ride this week reached the sublime. I did a 45 mile ride out Bunker Creek and Lincoln Creek on Monday and then Tuesday I thought that I would, 'take it easy' and just fill in local caches.
The route ended up being 33 miles and including a leg up to Connor Rd in Thurston County to get a cache at Mary A Cogdil's gravesite.
Some other finds along the way were an antique anti-aircraft searchlight and another antique glass insulator for my collection.

Bike web tools that I like

Doing a lot of bike riding and being of a geek nature, I like to turn details of riding into data.

There are several good websites that are of assistance to a rider, here of some of my favorites:

Bikely -- find and map routes

I have tried other route making tools but bikely is the one that I have stuck with. One of the main reasons is that it does not lock up when accessing from work. I like the features of mapmyride better but it seems to always lock up at work. With mapmyride it will create the turn by turn directions for you whereas you have to enter them by hand in Bikely. Another annoyance of Bikely is that I have to do a password recovery every time I need to get to my routes. It does not matter what computer or browser or password, when I go to login it says that my password is wrong. I have searched for others complaining about this problem but have not found anyone else with the problem.

MyCyclingLog -- log your rides and obsess on the numbers

I often laugh at myself that I probably ride 30% of my miles because I am trying to beat some personal record or goal. But hey, whatever gets you out and riding, right?

It also has a section to enter your bikes and track your maintainence. This is great for seeing how many miles you have on a set of pedals or whatever.

Google Maps -- Bikely uses Google maps but there are features that it does not like the terrain and street view. These are great tools to see what hills you are climbing or if lazy like me, find a less steep route. Street view, if available in the area that you are riding, can be used to show if a street has bike lanes, where there might be bike racks and such. Also, with a custom map, I can track which roads I have ridden to make it easier to find an unexplored one.

Twitter -- let people know where you disappeared to

Using Twitter I can post my route and at rest points update how far along I am. This way if I dont turn up home, my SO knows where to look for me. In case I get tired, pull a stupid and ride off the road into a ditch or something. Or answer the 'when you gonna be home?' question.

BicycleTutor -- Maintenance How-Tos in video format

This guy is great and has made a series of videos of hot to perform maintaince on your bike in an easy to follow manner.

Sheldon Brown -- Bike Info God

No list would be complete without a nod to the late Sheldon Brown. Here you can find answers to so many of your cycling questions.

Anyone else have a good web site that helps them?

Price of old data

Last night the weather was very mild for late July (65 degrees) and begged an after work ride. I also needed some miles to break 700 ridden in a month. Using a book from the library Best Bike Rides Around Portland, I picked a route that looked interesting

The route was modified to originate and end at my front door plus on route I decided to reverse the ride so that the nicest part would be saved for last.

The first half of my ride would go down the Springwater Corridor and then skirt Clackamas to the west down to High Rocks area of Gladstone. The book referred to a pedestrian bridge over the Clackamas River that looked excellent. The ride to get to the bridge was not as near as I anticipated. Mostly the shoulders were wide and the pavement good.

The problem arose when I got to the bridge and it was barricaded off for 'repairs'. So much for the nice half of the ride. I asked a woman walking past and she said the bridge had been closed for years.

That is what I get for not checking the info from a book written 17 years ago.

As I rode the Springwater Corridor trail on an aluminum frame bike I once again steamed about the terrible paving. Was this thing terrible from the beginning or did it decay to this terrible state over time? If it was bad from the start, how did it get approved? If it went to garbage over time, why was the contractor not sued to fix it? In my opinion there is some corruption or incompotence in the Portland City Hall regarding roads and paving.

Overall the ride was good and it put me 40 miles closer to my mileage goal.

Setting goals

Goals seem to be a great motivator for me. I am so goal driven that I create goals when there is no need to. Here are 3 related to cycling that I am working on.

1. Ride every rural through road in Western Lewis County. I have informally added all of Lewis County and Cowlitz and Thurston to that list since I am getting close to meeting my goal.
Below is a Google custom map that tracks this goal.


View Larger Map


2. Ride over 5,000 miles this year.
mycyclinglog.com has a goals section where you can set a goal and track the progress.
Here is mine so far.

2008 5K
5000.00 mi between Tue, Jan 1, 2008 and Wed, Dec 31, 2008
[All]
Progress: 64%
3204.73 mi at 12.80 mi/h
A distance of 1795.27 mi remains. At current average speed, 140.3 hours of ride time required. An average daily distance of 11.22 mi required. You should have completed a distance of 2827.87 mi by today.

3. Monthly mileage goals.
I set a goal every month for distance.
The distance goals often get me on the bike for no other reason than to rack up some more miles towards my goal. Heaven forbid, that I should every get behind on one.

The goals also spice up riding, they add an extra feeling of accomplishment. Now, if I could convince myself to set a weight loss goal....