Another ride day – Woohoo! Again, short easy ride … NOoooo! Wanted to go for 6, ended up getting in almost 11! AND over 1,000 feet of climbing! I hurt, but in a good way. Good part is, I feel myself getting stronger every day. Tomorrow is the BIG ride, so we’ll see how that goes. But that’s tomorrow, and it’s not here yet!

Got a late start and went to see some bridges over a gorge (I guess I could say I got gorged!), so we decided to head out for lunch, and we hit up the Silver Moon Brewery, where I tried (just a taste) their Dark Side Stout – very good, I might add – but I had their Snake Bite Porter and some pulled-pork nachos for lunch – pretty good stuff! This is their door from the alley:

For the ride, we went back to  Phil’s Trailhead, up Kent’s, a very nice, gradual uphill of about four and a bit miles, though it did have one steeper part, but it wasn’t THAT bad. Made it up fine, then came down Voodoo (for you, Richard White!):

which was kind of rocky, and the bike crashed once on it. I say the bike, because, while it DID draw a wee bit of blood, I never hit the ground, so life is good! Kept on riding and got to GrandStand, which was even MORE rocky, and my bike crashed AGAIN. Thankfully, once again I remained upright, though I did almost come out of my left shoe when my foot got caught between some rocks on the dismount. After that, I got a bit more careful – third one is the charm, and I’m not sure what that would have meant, so I avoided it. GS led to Expressway (only for about a tenth of a mile, if that) and then the downhill on Phil’s to the trailhead.

FUN RIDE. I do think that this is the best mountain biking we’ve done anywhere, because the trails are plentiful, interesting, and very doable. There are some very hard trails here, we hear, but we’ll leave those for the more adventurous folks out there.