James Pearl Thinks Blogging is Dead

October Pictures #7 - 192 Miles

I rented the below Trek Domane AL 2 for the week, Monday through Saturday. The cost for 6 days was $192, which is pretty cheap for a bike rental in 2023. Today I reeled off a 40 mile ride - 20 miles out then 20 miles back - on the Vanilla Ice Highway, to finish up my week at 192+ miles. Obviously, my goal for the week was to reach 192 so I could hit the dollar/mile marker. There is absolutely no significance to this goal. It just gave me something to target. The shop is closed on Sundays, which is why I had to return it today. This is just fine, because I do not want to ride another fucking inch at this point. Let me say that riding 192 road miles in this state is feat of mental strength that is hard to explain for anyone who hasn't ridden down here. Total elevation for those 192 miles? 593 feet. And the only reason it's so high is because I rode over 8 bridges through the course of the week. That said, it was a pretty fantastic week of bike training in some fabulous weather.

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October Pictures #8 - Airports

Airports are places that serve as nothing more than endpoints. An endpoint which is never great, never awful; it just is. An airport doesn't serve as a way to get anywhere, or do much of anything. Unlike an airplane, which gets you from A to B, or B to A, an airport is nothing more than an A, or a B. Currently, the airport in Sanford/Orlando is serving as our B. There's nothing especially amazing about this airport. But it's easy to get in & out of. While our current location serves as the start of our B to A journey, it also stands as the end of our Florida trip. Almost exactly 7 days ago we landed here, the start of a pretty good week. But now that's over, and we'll be heading to A in Allentown in an hour or so. Until then, we'll be parked in the row you see below.

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October Pictures #9 - War Pig

Meet my latest bike, War Pig. It's a Specialized Levo which Vreeland got Hilltop to donate to the MTBNJ JORBA chapter. I ride this when I do TM at Round Valley. Less than 24 hours before this picture was taken, I was sitting on a beach in Florida enjoying the sand. Today, I'm here. This bike is perfect for what it's being used for. I got to bed at 2:00 am last night, and to say I was low on energy today is an understatement. This beast got me and my 28 pound pack up & over with no trouble. I'm enjoying this little foray into making RV better. But I have to admit that part of me wondered today if I'm mostly wasting my time with this. For now I shall carry on with my War Pig, so long as the motivation continues.

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October Pictures #10 - Coffee Grinds

Today was possibly the most drama-filled day at work that I've had in the (nearly) 3.5 years I've been working here. On top of that, I've been dragging ass all day due to my decision to follow up an 8-day Florida trip with a full afternoon working at RV. And thus, I want to talk about none of that. Instead, I present to you coffee grinds. After talking to Kirt a few weeks ago and then seeing however many IG reels about it, I decided to keep the coffee grinds in a bowl next to the sink, but not in the normal compost container. After 8 days away, the coffee grinds got moldy. So, what might appear to be frosted chocolate cake is, in fact, moldy coffee grinds. Apparently they make your plants grow better. At the rate I accumulate coffee grinds, this place should look like the Amazon jungle before too long.

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October Pictures #11 - Solo Dad/Pizza

Today, I'm a solo dad. D is off to San Diego for a 1-day workshop with a large company that either makes vaccines or implants microchips into your bloodstream. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide which. For the next few days, I'll be driving the bus myself. In the last few weeks, this is the 2nd time she's gone off to galavant in the wide world of business travel. Usually it's me taking off with my mountain bike and riding all over New England. This time, she gets to enjoy a little hotel time. 5 years ago, it would be a lot harder for 1 parent to juggle 3 kids. But with a pair of 17s and a 13, this is easy. The 17s picked up the 13 from school and brought him to his soccer game, where he scored his 2nd goal of the season. Not bad considering he's normally a center back. And with effectively 4 culinary children in the house, I can swing by Acme and grab 2 frozen pizzas, pop them in the over, and presto, dinner is served!

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October Pictures #12 - Flowers

Recently, D has been buying flowers from the Acme down the road and displaying them on the kitchen table. This is the same Acme that sells pizza, and maybe ice cream, chocolate Lindt balls, and chocolate chips that are used to make chocolate chip cookies when there is a solo dad in the house. But we won't talk too much about that right now. These flowers are $5 a pop, which is a cheap way to add something nice to the kitchen table. When we came back from Florida, the latest batch had sort of given up the ghost and was letting gravity do its thing, as you can see below. While I like this still life image that awaited us, if this hadn't been cleaned up instantly the dog probably would have been shitting flower pedals for the next week. Anyway, along with ice cream and various chocolate products, solo dad may have splurged on a slightly nicer centerpiece to have for the next week, which D can enjoy when she gets home from the microchip vaccine workshop tomorrow.

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October Pictures #13 - Trail Maintenance

The below picture is the result of my time this morning at RV. While it looks like a lot of work, it took 22 minutes from start to finish. As time goes on, I want to make more of these so the place is a bit more interesting. In the time I've spent here in the last month, I've found plenty of deadfall that would make good log rides. This is a far more interesting use of my time. Following it up with a Black River espresso and lemon bar makes the trip totally worth it. In the afternoon, I joined Kirt & Paul to help rough-in (is this a word?) the reroute we're working on tomorrow. While TM may not be for everyone, I'm just loving my time spent outdoors right now. I highly encourage you all to enjoy it.

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October Pictures #14 - Trail Build

It's not every day that you get to build new trail. While this is not technically new as far as the map is concerned, it's a considerable reroute of some serious one-way, fall line trail on middle blue at CR. If you stick around long enough, eventually you'll find yourself involved in a day like today. Hopefully everyone that came out understands what a huge change & improvement they were part of. This is some solid work we put in, and I'm excited to see how it comes out. On Monday I posted that I sometimes wonder why I do this - today was not 1 of those days. This was great to work through, and having a bunch of people who are happy to throw some muscle in, combined with enough of us who know what they're doing, and I think something really great came out of today. Hopefully we all get to ride this soon, but not tomorrow, as it'll surely be far too wet.

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October Pictures #15 - Launch

This is from last week when we were still in Florida, Friday to be precise. I had 3 solid pictures I could have used that day but for obvious reasons, I went with the "us" one since it was our anniversary. Well, later in the day we drove up to the town of Cape Canaveral and watched the 2:00 launch of an Atlas rocket. We didn't go onto the compound. It was just a quick up, park, watch, and go. This Atlas rocket was the first ever launch for Amazon, who is looking to get into the space internet game. This specific rocket was the first test launch of the program, which we learned when D found a play-by-play of the launch. So basically, it was cool as hell. The picture doesn't really do it justice. But I'm sure you get the point. In any event, happy Sunday!

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October Pictures #16 - 'Merica - FUCK YEAH!

Behold the glorious American flag fluttering before an azure sky of freedom fries and government subsidized corn syrup drinks! It was a beautiful evening out, and as I walked into the Watchung Hills Regional High School to join Julia, then Kirt & Mrs Kirt, to watch the first round of the girl's volleyball playoffs, this is what greeted me and my mind immediately went to the title of this post. In any event, we've been going to some of these volleyball games recently - we being Julia and I. She has some friends on the team, and the youngest Kirt offspring is a major factor for them - they're always here. We've gone to maybe 4 games in the last few weeks. It's enjoyable when they're playing well. That wasn't really the case tonight, but they were better than Ridge, and they won both sets and advanced to the next round, which is Wednesday. So that's my day. It's Monday.

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October Pictures #17 - Sunrise

Toto, we're not in Jersey anymore...again. This is the 3rd of the pictures from our anniversary day. Every time we go to Florida, I try to wake up early and catch the sunrise at least once. More often than not, the early wake-up is worth it. As you can see from the image below, we got another day worthy of an early morning. As those of you who enjoy a sunrise or sunset know, clouds make all the difference. Without clouds, you often get a fairly vanilla sky. Sometimes, when the cloud cover is really heavy, you get a very brief slice of the sun as it sits between the horizon and the bottom edge of the cloud cover. This one wasn't a problem, as the colors were in full display on this morning.

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October Pictures #18 - Packing

All the crap in this image needed to go in the carry-on suitcase you see in the middle. In the end, I made it work save for my helmet. I'm going to clip it to my backpack and if they say anything, I'll just wear the damn thing. When we were coming back from, or going to, Minnesota, some dude walked off the plane with a bike helmet on. I can be that guy. Truth be told, packing all your stuff for a bike trip can be a drag. When you rent a bike, you get a helmet and sometimes a camelback. Since we're bringing our bikes with us, we need to bring everything. To this point, I've spent well over 3 hours packing this plus the 2 bikes. I expect the remainder of my packing will take me about 20 minutes. But that's for another day.

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Norm said:
I'm going to clip it to my backpack and if they say anything, I'll just wear the damn thing. When we were coming back from, or going to, Minnesota, some dude walked off the plane with a bike helmet on.
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Counts as your personal item, you'll be fine. I've done it with snowboard helmets every time I've flown.
 
Norm said:
October Pictures #18 - Packing

All the crap in this image needed to go in the carry-on suitcase you see in the middle. In the end, I made it work save for my helmet. I'm going to clip it to my backpack and if they say anything, I'll just wear the damn thing. When we were coming back from, or going to, Minnesota, some dude walked off the plane with a bike helmet on. I can be that guy. Truth be told, packing all your stuff for a bike trip can be a drag. When you rent a bike, you get a helmet and sometimes a camelback. Since we're bringing our bikes with us, we need to bring everything. To this point, I've spent well over 3 hours packing this plus the 2 bikes. I expect the remainder of my packing will take me about 20 minutes. But that's for another day.

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I find this funny as I have the exact opposite problem even flying with bikes. I end up using my helmet, all my clothes etc to fill space in my bike bag and provide cushioning I don't have a carry on. Just small personal item backpack.

But I have a different bike bag setup than you.
 
Santapez said:
I find this funny as I have the exact opposite problem even flying with bikes. I end up using my helmet, all my clothes etc to fill space in my bike bag and provide cushioning I don't have a carry on. Just small personal item backpack.

But I have a different bike bag setup than you.
Click to expand...

The bike bag needs to be 50 pounds in order to be free with United. That’s nearly impossible in itself. So here we are.
 
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