This weekend's ride was a lot of fun. The scenery through the forest was great. Wish it was a bit warmer, but it wasn't all that bad once you got going. My legs are still a little sore from all the hills, but it's nowhere near as bad as I thought I'd be. Only hill I struggled a bit up was the last steep one before you got the the I-45 frontage road. I was in my lowest gear, standing out of the saddle, and it was taking effort to get up it.

We did have an eventful start and ending to the ride though. I've been driving the carpool with my friend for all the rides so far, so he drove this week to even it out. We took his wife's car because the bike racks fits better on it than his little convertible. We park and start to set all our gear up. I go to air up my tires. Rear tire pumps fine. I go to unscrew the plastic cap from my front valve (yes, I use those even though I know I don't need them) and it immediately starts hissing at me. I think maybe the presta valve is unscrewed underneath somehow so I go to take the plastic cap off. Probably a 1/4 turn into that I hear a loud pop and my tire goes instantly flat. I look at the valve, and the entire inner guts of the valve are missing; the valve stem was completely hollow. We changed the tube quickly, but for every one of the fast descents on the ride I kept hearing that loud pop in the back of my head. Not good.

Then we get to the car after the ride, and it won't unlock. We have to use the manual key hidden in the keyfob to get in. Guess what? Dead battery. Luckily the nice people in the pickup truck next to us had jumper cables, and we got it running fairly quickly. We realized later than in his car you have to push the ignition button twice to turn everything off but in her's you only need to push it once. He must have double-tapped it getting out of the car before the ride which turned it off and then turned back on the accessory mode. Damn keyless ignition systems!!!!