Sunday 10/3/2010
28.0 miles today slow and easy
47.0 miles this month
5224 miles this year
169 ride days LY vs. 167 ride days TY
2275 miles needed to hit 2010 goal (7500 miles)
I am @ 69.8% of my goal.
8 miles ahead of last year at this date
23.5 miles average ride this month
31.2 miles average ride this yr.
Today was a beautiful day to ride. My daughter and I canceled our ride on the Withlacoochee due to my issues with my road rash. Instead we opted for a shorter ride on the West Orange Trail which we had not ridden in several months. We slept late on Sat. morning and after a late breakfast headed for Apopka with the bikes on the back of the car. We parked at the Apopka Trail Head and headed south along Lake Apopka.
Our first stop was to take some photos at the CHAU BÁO–AN Buddhist Center. This is always an interesting place for me. One of these days I am going to see if they will let me go inside. At about the 8 or 9 mile mark as we were riding through a wooded area and could hear music off to our right but could not see anything. This peaked our curiosity so at the next intersection we turned off the trail and went in search of the activity. What we found was a large Hispanic/Mexican music club that was having an outdoor dance and concert event in a big field. There was already a very large group of 4 wheel drive pickup trucks parked in the field around what appeared to be a rather large barn. Guys were dressed in tight jeans cowboy boots and 10 gallon hats with their girl friends wearing western style cloths that were about 2/4 sizes smaller that they should have been going inside. Well with SloSpoke Tina and I dressed in bike pants and jerseys and wearing helmets it didn’t take long for us to figure out that we didn’t fit in at that location. Besides neither of us speak Spanish. Sure wish I had taken a picture of that.
At some point after that the daughter broke another spoke (that’s 4 in the last month) but we didn’t discover it until we arrived in Winter Garden. However the LBS in Winter Garden (Wheel Works) had already closed so no help there. The good news was the free music festival that was taking place on main street. The entire area was full of people and food and craft vendors with 2 stages set up about 4 blocks apart. The first stage that we came to was featuring a Japanese Taiko Drum Team. This was a group that ranged from very young in age to about 70 and the only instrument they used were drums. There music was fantastic. At the other end of the street a Scottish Bag Pipe band that was cranking out some good Scottish music. (Love those bag pipers)
We pushed the bikes around through the crowd to our favorite French pastry restaurant which was very busy, but the food was worth the wait. I had a club wrap and cole slaw and SloSpoke Tina had a Cesar Wrap and chips. These sandwiches were so big that we exchanged half of our sandwich wraps with each other. Should have taken a picture of that as well.
After our late lunch we headed home into a head wind which wasn’t too bad because we wanted to ride slow due to the broken spoke. On the way home I decided to rename SloSpoke Tina to Princess Broken Spoke and she promptly renamed me from SloSpoke Jim to Chief Crashing Bull. We stopped at the top of the Apopka bridge over US 441 for a picture of Princess Broken Spoke.
It was one of those days that no matter what went wrong or could go wrong it was a great day to ride. I hope you have enjoyed our little trip.