While I was far away from my bikes in July and August, I did fall for the temptation to get a hold of a classic loaner bike and ride a unique century a few weeks ago. It consisted of roughly 35 miles on 3 different islands in the San Juan group of Washington state, with a ferry ride between each. Good attendance and many strong riders made for a fun and fast day, although the total cool-down of the ferry rides was challenging. Maybe I should have thrown a stationary trainer in the sag-wagon!!

In June I rode a 200 miler of a completely different sort which bears mentioning although there was nothing C&V about it: A new breed of MTB races have started to appear in recent times. An organizer researches a route and creates a GPS file, then uploads it on the internet with a starting time/date. No registration needed, no fees, no permits, no support - and most importantly no glory!! Mine was called the Dixie 200 and saw a whopping 6 riders at the starting line. It was full-on adventure of the best kind, by far the cycling highlight of the year so far. For pics see here (sorry about all the URLs in this post..)

Jan - wow, man, that Dixie 200 is quite a trek! The pictures are great but the terrain profile blows me away. Well done!

Jim

It's been six weeks minus one day since I broke my collarbone in a fall. I'm back up and riding and just in by the skin of my teeth to stay in August for a century. So today I rode from my house westward up the valley to the Grapevine, that mountain pass north of Los Angeles. From where I live it's a pretty easy ride, except for the wind and heat, but there's nothing to be done about that. It's not pretty country so I won't post many pictures. Here's Castac Lake, which is within about a mile of my turn-around point.


I rode my "new to me" 1981 Sequoia. It felt great and rode with no problems. Here it is at the monument I used as a turn-around point at 50 miles. The ride back got really hot and I ended up blistering my foot before I stopped to douse them with all the water I had left in my Camelback. I arrived home with zero water left.


September should be no problem getting a 100 mile day - but I can't wait for October, when I ride the Furnace Creek 508 as a two-man team. I am riding in the "classic bike" division.

I haven't been reading this thread for a while. Great pictures and stories.

September done.
I rode 104.6 miles of the Hawk Mtn 200k with the PA Randonneurs.
My freewheel gave out with about 20 miles to go. There was a lot of great scenery, and possibly the hardest rain I've been in on my bicycle in the past year.

With Bluebird skies (like today) this ride would be a 10 out of 10.

The first picture is the rider briefing.
The second picture is the final resting place of my bicycle with the dual freewheel: spins forward AND backward freely!

Edit: BTW, the route map is here https://users.rcn.com/trosenbauer/Haw...200k_C_map.pdf

Tim - looks like a great group of Randos! Sorry about your FW.

OK - I got my September ride in yesterday. 95 miles in 95 to 101 degrees. Rode the blue 81 Sequoia again. This one went up into the San Gabriel mountains to Devi's Punchbowl, then back across the valley for a loop out through the Leona Valley. Pretty much the whole day was spent on the San Andreas Fault Line.

Here's the top of the climb at Devil's Punchbowl. All I could think of at this point was that Jan would probably ride through the punchbowl and out the other side and down the south fork trail....

Anyway, fun ride and a beautiful day. Wish you were here! (says so on the postcard)

Jim

September... check!

Got out of the house at 7:00 AM yesterday on my 1954 Alvin Drysdale sports tourer, with five speed Simplex (Tour de France model) derailleur. The Veeder cyclometer on the front wheel read 850.0 when I left. Remember, I don't usually ride bikes with derailleurs....

Rode a bit east and a lot south, through the rolling farmland. Who you callin' turkey, turkey?

Into the Pinelands, with lakes

and quiet roads

and combinations of the two

and even another cyclist or two.


At one point I decided to take a photo, facing forward, framed the same way each time, at one mile intervals. I kept this up for about 30 miles, from deep in the pines until I was out in the farmland again.



If there is a popular outcry I will upload a series of them to Picasa or something, so you can take a virtual ride yourself, but I'm not going to subject y'all to these photos here. Trust me, they look pretty much the same, one after the other, though you can tell that the size and type of trees changes gradually; thicker here, thinner there, more pine or more oak. Pretty. Monotonous. I started looking for other things to photograph....


When I got home, my mileage ticker read 949.6 miles, so I kept on going. Turned around 0.2 miles later, and when I finally got off the bike, it said I had gone an even 100.0 (uncalibrated) miles.

I mapped it out on BikeRouteToaster, and it said 106 miles. Sounds about right. Nice ride!

______
Edit: oh, and I forgot the best part: 983 feet of climbing, total. And those were some wicked climbs, lemme tellya....

I will carry the C&V banner this weekend when I compete in the Furnace Creek 508 ultra endurance event. We ride 508 miles through the Southern California desert with Death Valley being the middle third of the journey. I am riding as half of a two-man team, Team Great Eagle, so we each ride approximately 250 miles, alternating segments like a relay race. We are riding in the over-60 (average age) catagory. Besides the miles we each have about 16,000 ft of climbing to tackle and whatever nature can throw at us.

I will be riding my 1975 Eisentraut in an official "classic bike" division. The rules of the division include: lugged-steel frame, no more that 6-speed cluster, toe clips and straps, friction shifting, no TT bar extensions on handlebars. The intent is to use pre-1983 technology.

There is an official webcast for the event here: https://www.the508.com/2012web/index.html

We also have facebook and twitter team pages https://www.facebook.com/FurnaceCreek508TeamGreatEagle and https://twitter.com/TeamGreatEagle

I will be riding approximately 150 miles on the Saturday portion of the event so I hope to count that for my Century a Month Challenge.

Jim

That's sweet! Good luck.

Please forgive my tardiness; I've been hammock-bound with the flu.
For August:
rhm 2
Timmy T 2
jan nikolasjen 1
leaping-gnome 1

What the? Did I miss September entirely? I remember commenting to my wife that I've never know a month to pass so quickly.
For September:
Looks like TimmyT, rhm, and leaping-gnome.

I haven't seen this thread up in a while, so here's how the year went so far. Forgive me if I have posted some of these already.
April - Powhatan(Va) Historic Bike Tour(100 miler)
May- https://www.stormingofthunderridge.com/ This was one great event! If you have the chance this is one to do.
Memorial day weekend- Rode around the Northern Neck of Virginia on Saturday. Logged 107 miles that day.
June- Richmond(Va) to Williamsburg. Rode the Jamestown Ferry across the James then back to Richmond. Total of 104.95 miles.
July- Had to get one in so I rode around Richmond and some of the surrounding counties until I hit the 100 mark.
August- Nothing at all. Too hot and vacation month.
September- Northern Neck Riverride https://www.riverride.org/ The route was only 99.1 but I had a mechanical and had to ride back to a rest stop, make a repair then head out again. I also missed a turn sprinting from a dog! Total was 101.9. Saw one other C & V bike there, an 81' Mercian. For any Mid-Atlantic riders out there, This is a nice, laid back ride. Flat for the most part, great scenery/routes and small rural towns with southern hospitality! It usually rains on the drive down Friday night, but the ride is always dry. Check it out if you are within distance.
I would have done the Richmond Gran Fondo today but the wife had to work so I was stuck with the kids.

So I completed the Furnace Creek 508 over Oct 6th throught the 8th, finishing in 43 hours 24 minutes. It was beautiful weather and our team performed very well. I was very pleased with my bike, the 75 Eisentraut. I used sew-up tires!! I had one slow leak that started on the summit of the last climb so I almost made it without a tire change. Used Challenge Strada 24 tires. Since we had a team chase vehicle with us at all times I felt confident to ride with the sew-ups. I had two spare wheel sets in the van. My headset loosened slightly on all the rough road surfaces. Other than that the bike performed flawlessly, as it has for me since I bought it in 1976.

Here's some pictures:



Here's me (left) and Gene at the finish


Good times!

Jim

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ _
Gentlemen! I had to scroll through eight pages of threads before I got to this one! We have to up our game!
____________________________________________________________________________________________________ _

But to the point:

October Century completed! And man, what a day for it.

I got out of the house at 6:45 AM, just as the sky was lightening. Glad to have a good headlight, though. Saw several deer standing around in fields and even right by the side of the road. My ride took me south-east past the town of Allentown, PA; all familiar so far. But this time I took a new route, taking me farther east than usual. Big sky country! And note, not a cloud in the sky.

and then south, past an old cemetery on Emlay's Hill:

and soon found a classic NJ sand road. I have in the past tried to avoid these, but I am gaining an appreciation. This looks awful but was actually a hard enough surface that I could roll along at a good speed:

until I realized where I was. I was directly south of the 'African Safari' section of Great Adventure amusement park.

I managed to sneak up to the fence and take a couple photos


before a pickup truck painted in zebra stripes appeared out of nowhere. The driver told me, very politely, that I was on private property and should stay on the road. I apologized for my transgression and went on my way.

A little while later I stopped for coffee and donuts:


And turned south for a while, eventually getting into the pinelands proper. Again, the sand roads... not as bad as I thought!

though there are puddles:


(to be continued)

Unfortunately, those lovely sand roads are separated by less lovely sand roads, and to avoid the latter I was on some pretty busy ones:




Here's one of the smaller sand roads... this is definitely the road not taken:

But there are some beautiful roads with almost no traffic that are, against all expectation, nicely paved. Good names, too! Here's one end of Mount Misery Road:

And here's the middle section:
At the northern end, the going gets pretty tough for a while:

And before too long I'm back in the open farmland.

See how the weather started to deteriorate? There were now clouds in the sky. Oy!
Gratuitous art shot:

Oh, and check out this. It's for sale! Pretty cool, huh? but it's not as old as my bike.


Got home at 5:30 PM.

According to my Veeder cyclometer, I had gone 116.5 miles. When I started, it read 1100 miles (I zeroed out the top part). I like these old mileage tickers, though it's often hard to tell what size wheel they're calibrated for. Period correct, man!
I also used a Mavic cyclocomputer to calibrate the Veeder, and the Mavic gave me 121 miles. But then I plotted it out on Ridewithgps, it was 116.7. I think you can find the route here.

Looks like leaping_gnome and rhm. A slow month.
I'm not going to go back and check through my posts to see who got twelve, btw.

November, done!

Another nice day for it. 117 miles, starting at 5:45 and getting home at 6:45, yeah, that's 13 hours total. Not all of it spent riding. Again, went down into the pinelands and slogged through some sand roads, which can be really nice:



But the puddles are equally impressive:



I don't have many photos. My camera was on the fritz. Perhaps TimmyT, who joined me for this ride, has some better photos to share.

In October, I got a three metric centuries in within a week of each other. I haven't sorted through those photos yet, so it might take me a couple of weeks to get those updated.

As for the ride with rhm yesterday, here are some photos.

Early in the day, we had fog from the snow that was ablating in the warming sun. I had to pull my glasses down a couple of times because they had fogged over.


We took a turn down the "bushmeat" sand road that runs behind the animal park. Here is a cud-chewing Watusi:


A little later, we passed St. Vladimir's Russian Orthodox Church. Onion-domed churches are not very common on the East Coast. This is beautiful in the morning light.


Eventually, we wound up on some of the sand roads as we attempted to make it to the pygmy forest. This was tough going. I had to deflate my tires by about 20 psi to keep up with rhm. Here he is going around one of the many large puddles on the route.


Here's the exit to the pine forest. This guy followed me all day!


All in all, 117 miles traveled. I picked up a metal bit in the tire, and we switched the tube as night fell, but by the time I made it back home the wire had worked its way back into the other tube. I will have to find that later.

For November I tried a little different ride with a little over 10 miles of rugged dirt road in the middle. This route climbed up and along the ridge line of the mountains behind Santa Barbara. The climbing in the first 50 miles was almost 9,000 ft but it was flat after returning to the coast. The total distance was only 83 miles but I hope it will count. I had planned on a side-trip to meet someone in S.B. but that was cancelled at the last minute so my mileage suffered. Oh well, what can I say?









Jim

How 'bout we credit you the extra 17 I rode? Then between the two of us we got 200 total.



Seriously, that looks like a great ride. I wish we had hills like that around here.

Yesterday, Dec 1st, we rode a 200k brevet around the Ventura and Santa Barbara area. Unlike last week, yesterday was rainy throughout the day although really not cold.
So here we are in the morning drizzle...

Group shot from Casitas Lake

My 1970 Gitane Super Corsa performed beautifully

Here's Jerry and Alan topping one of the many climbs along E Mountain Dr.


Well, that sums up my year of C&V Century a Month! Everyone have a happy holiday season...

December, done!

It was a weird one. I had to leave well before dawn (as is usual) but the lights on three of my bikes were not working. This is what you get for having too many bikes to maintain.

So I got on my commuter bike (old Falcon with a Sturmey Archer S5 hub) and rode a familiar loop, mostly in the dark (which is fine) and rain (not in the forecast, and did not make me happy), stopping for a cup of coffee at the halfway point. Got home at 9:30 having done 38 miles.

Got out a different bike, that I had not ridden much before, and did exactly the same loop. I wanted to get to know the bike. And I did. Among the interesting things I learned was that French BB fixed cups are not really that fixed. Very annoying, to have to screw the thing in with my fingertips every mile! Got home at 1:10 having done another 38 miles.

Got out a different bike, on which I had just changed the wheels and the stem, and did a slightly different loop. THis one was 24 miles. The bike performed okay, not great. Got home a little before four.

I took some photos... but this is New Jersey. They are boring photos. So never mind the photos Total 38 + 38 + 28 = 104 which will have to do!

So unless someone persuades me to do another one before New Year's Day, that sums up my year of C&V centuries. Happy Holidays, guys!

Leaping_gnome and rhm for December

Fail. This was the last test for the new to me '92 Paramount. It performed marvelously! No sore shoulder, from that old clavicle separation. My legs didn't stiffen up after 1 1/2 hours for lunch break, nor did they cramp up an hour after the ride, nor do they hurt today. I am, however, quite tired today, though not famished as I normally am. In fact, I'm eating less than normal today. Maybe because I'm just too tired.
Inside of 20 miles left, I was cruising a nice, smooth road, an hour before sunset, the wind having recently returned to my back. I ran over, a stone, which quickly flattened my back tire. Destroyed it(tube), as I was to find out later. Got out the trusty replacement tube and couldn't believe my eyes. Schrader valve! I put three patches on the old tube, all of them on the seam, and it was still losing air at a rapid rate. So I threw in the towel and called for rescue--for the first time in over ten years.
The Paramount, however, has proven itself beyond my hopes, and I plan to put lots of miles on it in the coming years.

Dang it, Seeds, that sucks! What are you doing with a shraeder valve tube anyway? Who am I to scoff, I have them on more than one bike....

I got out for a half century or so. Didn't hit the road until well after lunch, and the days are short here anyway, so I had no intention of getting a full century in. But it was good to be out in the weather. Longest ride since my December century, and I'm really sore now.

Okay, then: first person to finish a century in 2013, please go ahead and start the new thread! Good luck everyone, and a happy new year!

I had to re-read the whole thread to remember how many centuries I did this year. Looks like I did seven rides over 100 (okay, 95) miles and completely slacked after August.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to do one per month in 2013 either, but I'm going to shoot for at least 12 this year.