Party and Ride

I can not get over what beautiful weather we have been having this November. Last night was our Ride Team End-of-the-Season Party at Rosewood Pointe in Holland. It was such a nice evening we sat around a campfire outside and even played horseshoes on the beach. Last year we were shoveling snow at the same party. The big announcement at the party was that the West Michigan Team raised over $200,000 this year for diabetes research. That gives us over one million dollars in our five years of riding.
Speaking of riding Mary and I took a little trip on the White Pine Trail this afternoon. Our JDRF teammate Linda Thompson-Poeder joined us. We rode 20 miles, taking the trail from our house up to Russell Road and back. We would have gone farther, but we ran out of daylight. That is the major difficulty in getting mileage in this time of year. Even if it's warm the sun sets by 5:30.

Best day in a month

What a fantastic day. Over 70 degrees and sunny. In November! So we had to ride. Mary and I got on our seldom used road bikes and ripped off 17 miles this afternoon. We rode the infamous Pettis/Egypt Valley/Cannonsburg loop. Lots of hills. It's a variety of rollers mixed with extended climbs. I'm not really sure why we wanted to punish ourselves, but it felt really good. I mean seriously, we should have done an easy ride on the White Pine Trail. Although I'm sure the WPT was over-run with walkers, strollers and roller bladers today. So it was great fun to be out on a beautiful day working our way through the hills. We did see a few other riders doing the same thing. Smiles all around.

Leaves be damned

It was such a nice day yesterday and we've spent so much time lately raking leaves that we said "to heck with it" and went for a bike ride instead. Mary, Ian and I got out our trail bikes for some Sunday afternoon fun. First we rode to the home of one of Ian's friends and dropped him off. That friend's neighborhood is on top of the Childsdale hill. Our neighborhood is at the bottom, so we started with a nice little climb. Then we took the express downhill and hopped over to Rouge River Park and did the nature trail loop. It was a little muddy with quite a bit of standing water, thanks to all the rain we've had recently. But it was great fun. The Rouge River was also running high and fast because of the rain. It would have been a fun day to be out kayaking as well.
11 1/2 months until Death Valley 2010!