The weather has been reasonable here for the last few days.
Sunday:
Although it was quite chilly when I left the house (-11C), the forecast was to warm up substantially so I bundled up and headed out.
The ride was going to be a mixture of trails on the park, as well as paths and streets outside. My route was clockwise from my start in Huntington Hills, and took me on a route that was a reverse of one of my normal routes, where I was riding a lot of trails downhill where I usually am climbing. I will admit, going downhill on 12-19 percent grades is more fun than climbing them, although one does get a feeling of satisfaction when climbing too.
At this point point here, I've climbed up to the plateau and am just riding some trails in the middle of the park, while heading towards the southwest corner.
At the point where I took these next photos, I'm past the steep section but this trail was a blast - got some good flow going thanks to the suitable tires for the conditions.
In a kilometer, it drops about 60m so you can let it go a bit.
From the bottom of that trail I went back to the east where there's an overpass that accesses a good pathway system. I went a bit west and rode some side streets in an area I'd never ridden in before, and went searching for a route to another pedestrian/bike overpass that would allow me easy access to the rest of my general route plan. By this time it was warming up and I had to stop and remove the balaclava and open some zippers as I was starting to overheat.
Here's some pics of from the overpass that joins the communities of Dalhousie and Edgemont, and goes over the major road called John Laurie Blvd.
I followed a lot of one of my normal routes on MUPs through the ravines and eventually stopped by an old work colleague's and used their facilities before heading home.
All in all, a really enjoyable ride, which ended with a quality beverage (to be documented at the bottom of this post)
Monday's Ride (yesterday)
Much warmer weather, and I dressed down a bit for it. By the end of the ride, I wished I had taken my pack with my green jacket as it cooled down pretty quickly about 2/3rds into teh ride. Not super cool, but it gave me incentive to ride vigorously, so not really a bad thing.
I didn't take pictures, as most of the ride was on urban pathways and roads. When I'm riding and am in a rhythm, I'm often not interested in stopping to take photos unless it's something interesting. To be fair, I don't think urban paths and side roads all that interesting most of the time.
The brief bit of time on the park single track paths - I found that the weather had softened the S/W facing paths too soft to ride, or at least to have an enjoyable ride anyways.
.
So my ride took me west to within a few KMs of the western edge of the city. Unfortunately 3 KMs of pathway I had intended to use was all fenced off and dug up for some reason, so it was on teh streets. At that point I decided that it was going to simply be a return home via the fastest route as, like I mentioned, it was getting cold.
At point X above, my phone died. I was listening to an audiobook, "I'll Keep You Safe" by Peter May and it stopped. Checked the phone - dead as doornails...
The blue line above, is an approximation of the actual route, rather than that perfectly straight red line as applied by Strava once it was charging.
When I got home, I really enjoyed standing on the heated tiles of my master bath for a few minutes before the hot shower, which was especially enjoyable.
Finally, the ride on Sunday and the one on Monday had some new post-ride beverages to enjoy.
My wife had ordered some specialty beers from England as a late Christmas gift. We'd been watching a TV show ("Escape to the Country" I think) that featured this Victorian Brewery called "Hook Norton Brewery" and I'd commented that "those sounded good", so she ordered some for me and some Cider for herself.
They did NOT disappoint. I had the one on the right on Sunday, and the one on the left on Monday (it's the one in the glass).
Both were quite good, but I was really, really happy with the one on the right - the "Off The Hook".
Next time we are in the UK, whenever we can do that again, we intend to visit and tour
the place.
We have very good friends who live about 30 miles away in Milton Keynes, so it should be a great day out.
I'm pleased that I've already surpassed 400 Kms in 2021 already, and I've passed 2k KMs on my Fathom.
With each lesson learned about clothing and routes, I am pretty confident to keep this going as long as it doesn't go totally Arctic on us here. But as Sunday started at -11C and ended at +4C 3 hours later, we Albertans are used to saying "if you don't like the weather - wait a few minutes...".
Cheers!
"Need For Speed", aye?
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Looks like more snow is on the way for Calgary. Has the city finished digging itself out from the last storm?
