Myrna CG Mibus - Idyllwild

Owen and I have done some  bike packing of the "credit card travel" variety  where we slept in hotels instead of camping. We like credit card travel but want to branch out and actually go bike packing for "real" where we carry tents and sleeping bags and all. But, since our camping experience are mostly limited to camping with our families when we were children, and our most recent tent camping experience was, let's just say, rather stressful, we know we have plenty to learn. We have many questions about bike packing from "What's a bivvy sack?" to "How do we carry all of our equipment on our bikes?" So we were super excited to learn that  Milltown Cycles  was offering a bike packing "how-to" event for beginners. The event sounded perfect for us so I signed Owen and I up right away. I also decided to bring our kids, Rose and Ryan, because they've been wanting to go camping for some time and actually have more recent campi...

On Saturday, I completed a goal I've had for quite some time - I completed a century ride on my Salsa Vaya! 100 miles - Done! I'm proud of what I did - I'm getting kinda teary-eyed thinking about that moment when I realized I rode my bike for 100 miles! You see, a century ride is something that I never though I could do when I started bicycling six years ago. It's not something I thought I could do earlier this summer, even. But rides like the Box of Frogs , Riotgrravel and my bike packing trip have made me feel stronger both physically and mentally. As the summer progressed, my century ride thinking morphed from " Hey, I think I can do a century " to " When I do a century I'll ride my Vaya " (it's my most comfortable bike) to " I'm going to do a century this fall ." I rode my bike to train but I think the most important thing I did to get ready for this century ride is this - I told myself I could do it and started to...

About a month ago when Owen and I were on our bike packing trip , I decided I'd like to do a century ride. I've long wanted to do a century ride but have been somewhat intimidated by, well, riding 100 miles all at once. On top of that, a lot of the organized century rides are pretty challenging. But Owen came up with a century ride idea that sounded good to me so I'm going to give it a go! Owen came up with a hundred mile route that is all on bike trails, most of them crushed limestone. I'll ride my comfortable Salsa Vaya and Owen will ride his Salsa Mukluk. Owen has done a half a dozen century rides before (he completed one yesterday as part of his ten ride personal road biking challenge ) but he's never ridden a century on a fat bike. So we'll both be doing something new - I'll do my first century and Owen will do his first fat bike century. The route will be fairly easy to ride and I plan to stop a lot along the way to rest and drink coffee (I do that...

Our bike packing trip is complete and now, three weeks later, I'm finally getting around to writing up what is probably my last blog post about the trip. The first thing to address is the big question - do we want to go bike packing again?  The answer? Yes! We definitely want to do more bike packing and include camping into future adventures. Bucket list routes include (but are not limited to) the Katy Trail in Missouri and the Elroy Sparta Trail in Wisconsin. Secondly, a big Thank you is in order to the good people of Milltown Cycles, aka Milltown Premium Adventure Goods for equipping us with our bikes, our seat bags and for fielding lots and lots of questions about bike packing. Now here's our bike packing wrap-up report with info on equipment, weather, coffee and other stats! Not interested in bike packing? Well, this might be kinda dry stuff so you might want to skip down to the bottom to the Coffee section of this post and call it a day. Bikes : Owen rode ...

It's coming on two weeks since Owen and I went on our bike packing trip so I figured I'd better get back to writing about day 3 as I promised to do in my last post . We started Day 3 in Luck, Wisconsin with super weather once again. Owen and I keep thinking we'll get going early but it was about 9:00 a.m. by the time we had breakfast, packed up and were on the trail again. We headed south on the Gandy Dancer Trail for St. Croix Falls, an easy 15 mile ride and found our way through some city trails to downtown St. Croix Falls. Owen wanted to see the falls, so we took some pictures then found a little coffee shop, Coffee Time, and had lunch. They were busy and we had to wait awhile for our order, but the two women working there were so sweet and the food quite good so it was well worth the wait. St. Croix Falls We wanted to stop at Cyclova , a bike shop a couple of doors down from Coffee Time, but were bummed to discover that they were closed on Tuesdays. We looked i...

We have wrapped up our four day bike adventure and, to reward ourselves, have settled in at a B&B for the evening. Since Sunday we have biked about 170 miles. The bikes worked great. Our bodies worked great. I'm a bit sore (methinks I need to lower the nose of my saddle a bit) and really can feel that my legs have been working. Other than that, though, I felt like my body was more machine than anything and once I got pedaling, I just kept on going.  I'll write more about yesterday's ride later (in short, 54 miles from Luck to St. Croix Falls back through Luck and overnight in Siren) but here's a brief recap of today... Today we slept in and got riding at 11 a.m.  Gorgeous day! Had a wonderful 30 mile ride from Siren to Shell Lake where we had lunch at The Pottery Shed (one of my favorite places). Rode to our van which was parked at our son's camp in Shell Lake, packed up the bikes and are now showered and settled in for the evening.  I'm going to eat now! He...

Back in April, I signed up for the 60 mile Box of Frogs bike ride (there was also a 100 mile route). I knew the ride would be a huge challenge as I have only been on one 60 mile ride ever before (and that was back in 2012) and the longest ride I've done so far this year was 35 miles (actually made up of two rides with an hour break after 20 miles). Uh, now that I look at those stats I realize that it was a bit more than crazy for me to sign up for the Box of Frogs . What was I thinking? Well, I guess I wasn't really thinking. I just saw the bike ride on Facebook and was intrigued by the fact that the ride was multi-surface (tar, paved bike trails, river bottoms trails, gravel and dirt) and was set up so that the riders all end at about the same time. I like that end at the same time idea and I just felt like I had to sign up for the ride. 60 miles seemed reasonable to me at that moment in time. "I can do this!" I thought. So, without thinking much about wheth...

A few weeks ago I was blogging about how scared I was riding on gravel and how I didn't think I would be able to finish the gravel race - RiotGRRRaveL - that I signed up to ride. I went through Gravel Fears ... and Gravel Tears but then managed to get my bike adjusted better so that I was more comfortable . A day before the RiotGRRRaveL ride, I was still pretty nervous about riding the 30 some miles but planned to go ahead and give it a go. My goals for the ride were pretty basic: finish the ride average 10 mph have fun Well, guess what? I finished the R iotGRRRaveL gravel bike race on Saturday and accomplished my goals and then some! Here's my RiotGRRRaveL Race Rundown: First off , I finished the race!  That is an accomplishment in itself because a couple of weeks ago I was about to give up on riding gravel. My longest gravel ride ever was only 16 miles long and my longest ride of the year so far was a road ride of 27 miles. I know 30 gravel miles is nothing to ...

Back in February I read a post on the Salsa Cycles Facebook page : "Minnesota area women - if you are thinking about taking on a gravel event, but perhaps intimidated by the typically 100-mile distance, this might be something you are interested in. RiotGRRRaveL - a 30 - 35-mile women & family friendly gravel ride near Hastings, Minnesota on June 21st. Hit the link to learn more... " That post spoke to me. I've been interested in gravel rides and races but have been VERY intimidated by the 100 mile distances. As a fairly slow rider who likes to talk a lot and stop for coffee on my rides, I've also been pretty intimidated at the thought of riding a gravel race with a bunch of competitive men (the vast majority of bike racers, gravel and otherwise, are men). Immediately intrigued, I clicked on the link to learn more - and within moments I signed myself up to ride RiotGrrravel .  The fact that I signed up for a gravel ride, let alone a race, is pretty crazy.  I ...

I've heard so much about riding the Minnesota River Bottoms bike trail and have wanted to ride it ever since I got my Beargrease. We've been talking about making this happen for a while but, finally, on Saturday Owen and I made it happen! We loaded up our bikes and drove to the Lyndale Avenue access point and parking lot to explore the river bottoms for a bit. Even though we weren't sure where to go and certainly are out of shape for a long ride, we figured we could ride at least a few miles of the 11 mile trail and check things out. Owen riding his Mukluk on the River Bottoms trail The temps on Saturday were above freezing, about 37°F,  and the sun was shining. We arrived at the parking lot shortly before noon and unloaded our fatties. There were about 20 cars in the lot and we saw a couple of fat bikers right off. We unloaded our bikes and got ready to go out and find some fun! Even though we had planned to ride east on the trail, I figured I would play it safe and...

I went out and bought a gravel bike a week and a half ago - a really cool Salsa Vaya 2 - and now I have it in my head that I can do a 50 or even a 100 mile gravel race/ride. Seems reasonable, I tell myself. All I have to do is get out and ride gravel, tackle lots and lots of gravel hills and build up my endurance and milage bit by bit. Zippy So today I planned to go on a gravel ride of some length, maybe 10 miles. Turned out that lawn mowing,  helping my 11 year old son drive the lawn tractor, gardening, and sending my almost 14 year old daughter off on a week-long youth mission trip filled up most of my day. By 8:30 I realized it was a short ride or no ride so I decided to go. I didn't even change out of my gardening clothes. I just put on my helmet, gloves and bicycling shoes, grabbed a water bottle and headed out on Zippy (that's my Vaya's name) for a short spin. I thought I would just go down the flattish gravel by my house and call it a day but I decided I w...