First Ride of 2011

As we all said goodbye to 2010, or as I like to call it "The Year of the Cookies", we all symbolically push the reset buttons on our Garmins and start counting our miles again. For some of us, we're hopefully thinking about taking our newly acquired GPS's out of the package, reading the directions and thinking about doing a little test-riding.

Since the Polar Rhino Ride was looking to be more like a Monster Truck Show, complete with a large entry fee and all the mud you can eat, we planned to wait until the next day when temperatures were supposed to dip into bone chilling and life threatening numbers (come on, who would want to ride in 50 degree weather when you could ride in 20 degree weather? Duh!).

The spin out to the Biggest Hills in Michigan was like a non-stop slurpee brainfreeze with the wind and the snowflakes blasting us the whole way and exposing whatever flaw our winter riding gear had. Once we made the turn onto McKeatchie Road, the trees finally gave us a little protection from the elements and allowed us to suck what little hydration we could get out of our frozen waterbottles. With a little help from the Curiously Pleasant odor from the hippie van that passed by and the Snow God that Shaun crapped out at Indian Springs, we caught a tailwind home and survived to tell the tale!

26.62 miles down, 2,973.38 miles to go!

Happy New Year,

- Steve