A sparkling end The ride Last year, after nearly a month on the bike, my rear wheel blew up, and I couldn‘t get it replaced. This meant my tour ended very anti-climactically, pushing my bike home from the train station. Thankfully, this year I got the triumphant ending I wanted: (My friends are the best. This tour wasn‘t my first, and wasn‘t the

Woke up on the wrong side of the bed The ride I woke up this morning and felt blah. Not surprising, considering I had gone hard the day before, and had four hard rides in the past five days (over 23 hours of riding). It was like I woke up bonked. My body was giving me the middle finger. Understandable. Thankfully, having gone through this

Rolling hills are so much fun The ride Technically, this is day 5, as day 4 was a rest and a hike. Anyway. I spent the last day with one of my best buddies in Germany and his family. Was lovely. The hike was lovely, but it was also just nice to be in a family environment. I miss family dinners. Anyway, I rolled out in

More than I hoped for The ride Today was the day circled on the calendar, so to say, mostly because it had the most climbing. On that point, it delivered. But it exceeded expectations pretty much everywhere else. The flats Before doing any climbing (at all), I had a nice 50km or so warm up following the Rhone. The same direction as the day before,

Thank god for other riders The ride To be clear, I don‘t mean it was torture socially. I mean it was torture suffered socially. Conversation distracts from pain (unless you‘re my buddy, in which case when I try to talk going up long climbs, he tells me to shut the F up). Misery loves company. Etc. Anyway, today was brutal. It started with about 14km

In the land of Dante, I felt the inferno First, the ride I‘m a fair weather rider (a princess), I‘ll admit it. So I check weather forecasts religiously and usually base my departure times on weather windows. It looked like it‘d be a pleasant 24° (75F for you non-metric heathens) around 9am when I wanted to roll out, with the temp rising to about 28

Here we go again! First…welcome back. Or something like that. Been a while since I‘ve used this medium of communications. Apologies to those of you who‘ve forgotten I exist and who will rightly be confused when this pops up in your inboxes. So it goes. The last year has been, well, I don‘t have to tell you. Still, some folks are luckier than others, have