Operation Get The Bike! Day One

March 10, 2018 § 2 Comments

To say that “When we awoke the next morning” is a little misleading about traveling to the other side of the world where the local timezone is exactly 12 hours ahead of the timezone you left. If I said I went to bed and awoke early would be a lie, because I never really fell asleep that first night. The same went for Susan, and when 6am finally rolled around, and the breakfast buffet opened up, we were eager, and hungry to get started. Our girls had a week of Vietnam in them, so they weren’t about to stir for some time.

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A Platonic Relationship – A Penn State Story Part II

February 20, 2018 § 1 Comment

To recap, through both procrastination, and stalking, I secured temporary living quarters for the Fall Term 1982, with a young woman, Susan, in a space where the only privacy that could be achieved was in the bathroom.

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Most Favored

February 11, 2018 § Leave a comment

After reading Seth’s post that included an old favorite ride, it got me to thinking about favorites in my own life. When you are a kid, you are advised to not pick favorites. Don’t pick your mother over your father, this grandparent over any other, etc. Feelings may get hurt. That gets carried on in life to when you have more than one kid. You don’t want to appear to be favoring one over the other. When you have more than 1 brother-in-law, is it fair to have a favorite? As a youth adviser, trying to build leadership skills in the next generation, playing favorites is counter productive.

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Fritz

November 18, 2017 § Leave a comment

Day 3 – Way back in my young adulthood I got this idea to ride my bicycle across the country, which I did during the Summer of 1981. I started in San Diego, and rode North where after some weeks and some time in San Francisco, we (My roommate Frank joined me) headed North for some Highway 1 scenery. On our second day out we met a cyclist named Jim, who was riding across the country as well, however there was a difference, and that difference was that his equipment was not really the kind of cross country equipment you should be riding across, but one look at him, and you knew he was riding what he could. That was near the end of the day, and when we found a State managed biker campground we pulled in, and to our pleasure we had company. That was where I first met Fritz Knochenauer.

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Realization Dawns Too Late

November 17, 2017 § Leave a comment

Day 2. As I said in Catching The Monday SFCC Train, I had plans to get together and ride with an old acquaintance on Tuesday, so I didn’t make any real attempt to figure out where the Tuesday SFCC ride actually started. The web page for SFCC says simply

TUESDAY – FAT CAKE HEADLANDS // 0615 GGB PLAZA

and when I google GGB Plaza, expecting to get some kind of public square somewhere in the city, google drops a point right smack in the center of the Golden Gate Bridge, which I then reasoned, was wrong.

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Catching The Monday SFCC Train

November 16, 2017 § 1 Comment

I knew I was going to San Fran Cisco, and I knew I wanted to ride my bike. Where to start? I could describe my first forays into exploration, however I should just cut to the chase. I finally googled “San Francisco Cycling Club”, and the top hit was SFCC, or San Francisco Cycling Club. What better name exists for a 100% hit, I know not.

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Going Solo – Just The Bike & Me

October 27, 2017 § Leave a comment

Two years ago I started this write-up about a solo ride I did in the Harriman/Bear Mountain areas of NY state. It sat as a draft now for these two years, and I decided to finish it. Much of the story was still pretty fresh in my mind. As they say among cyclists, “The worst day on the bike is still better than the best day at work”, and so I took a Friday off work and had some me time.

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Fall Cycling Epic

October 8, 2017 § 4 Comments

On Monday August 14th at 9:27PM I received a text from Cliff.

IMG_2119.png

The Text that Started the Ball rolling.

It started with “let’s go to Princeton”, but it ended with “I’m thinking about a ferry to Bear Mountain Saturday October 7th with beer at The Tiki Bar afterwards”. It doesn’t take much more than that to get my planning habits working. As Cliff knows, a travel idea, once planted puts me in a single minded train of thought that won’t be satisfied until I have the route logistics all planned and drawn out. Before midnight I had used the “Create a Route” feature of Strava and mapped a route from the 11th St Ferry terminal in lower Manhattan, up the West side bike path, over the GW and then up the West side of the Hudson to Bear Mountain, and returning along mostly the same route. Of course I parsed Cliff’s original suggestion into what it meant. Let’s meet early at the Ferry Terminal in Highlands with our bikes, and then do a an epic ride to Bear Mountain and back, where we can catch an afternoon ferry back, and then we can party at The Tiki Bar in Sea Bright.

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Magical Princeton

September 3, 2017 § 1 Comment

The Princeton ride has been a magical ride for many years. My earliest rides were with the Colts Neck crowd, and that made Princeton a round-trip of roughly 60ish miles. You could do that in a little over 3 hours and make a bagel stop downtown, all then followed by a hard hammer pace home.

It was awhile after I started riding with what IS now the Pronto Crew, that one day Larry, Mark and I decided to go to Princeton. It was an early Fall day, and the conditions weren’t the best, but we were the only ones who showed up to ride. I don’t think there was a plan to go, but seeing how it was just the three of us, after we each confirmed that we didn’t have any time limits, Princeton became the target location.

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State College Instead of Mallorca?

May 29, 2017 § 2 Comments

It’s not the Mediterranean; There aren’t gorgeous ocean views, or even gorgeous ocean villas! However, in my mind at least, some of the best riding I have ever done was in and around State College, Pa during my tenure at Penn State.

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