Sunday August 13, 2006 we had a rather large turnout for today’s ride.  Riding with me this day was; Pete, Bob, Steve and a new club member Chuck.  This is a total of five people on this one ride which lately is quite large, the rides have tapered down to basically me and Pete and then every once in a while Steve or Bob and very occasionally Tom or someone else.  Chuck is a friend of Pete and Steve and I believe he plays hockey with them.  Pete invited Chuck to ride with us this day.  Chuck drove over to Pete’s with his bike and that is where we started out.  Welcome to the club Chuck, you are officially member number 26.   

Bob hadn’t ridden with us for a while so he wanted to be sure we weren’t going to do too long a ride.  I told Bob we were only planning to ride to the Hamlin Pub for lunch and then back, which is typically about a 16 mile round trip ride.  Well, once we started you would never have guessed that Bob wanted to keep the ride short, he got out front and not only set a good pace but he also took us all over the place.  We rode places on this day that I had never been before with a fair amount of easy off road trail riding in new areas.  It was really fun, but unexpected.  Bob knows the area well and I always enjoy when Bob deviates from our regular routes.  It is fun to break it up and go in new areas.  

We went past Steve’s house on the way to Dutton to head down the hill to the Paint Creek Trail (PCT).  We took the trail almost into town.  Bob had us get off and we rode through the Dinosaur Hill area.  This is a relatively short section which we have ridden before, but not for quite a while.  There is a short bridge we rode  to past over the river.  

We continued on toward the downtown area.  We rode behind the post office and over toward Bloomer.  We went into Bloomer and rode a few of the trails to the other side where we got out on John R.  We covered a pretty good section of Bloomer and the trails were in fairly good shape.  I think we all managed through this section without incident.  Chuck had a nice mountain bike and he didn’t have any trouble keeping up with us either on the street or on the trails.  It looked like Chuck was enjoying the varied route Bob was taking us on this day. 

Off John R just south of Avon we went down a dirt road which fed us into Borden Park where the kids play soccer and baseball.  We crossed the road and rode over the grass into Borden.  We rode past the baseball diamonds and the restrooms in the center of the park.  Next we went past the soccer fields which were empty and looked nice and green ready for the upcoming fall season.  We went to the back of the fields to a corner that appears to be a dead end.  There is another short trail in this corner that takes you out into a subdivision.  I have jogged this area before with Bob while Jonathan and Mark were reffing, but I don’t think I have ever ridden it on my bicycle.  We ended up on Auburn road and rode through the Hampton complex on our way back north to the Pub.   

This was definitely a lot of extra riding in areas I hadn’t planned to do this day.  I was glad we did this extra riding it is always more fun to do a little extra than just ride straight to the Pub.  I think we did an extra 6 or 7 miles of riding before we finally stopped for lunch.   

Since Steve was along with his trusty camera we got a fair amount of pictures from this ride.  I have set up a separate page to post the pictures from Steve.  See this link for the pictures. 

We had a nice lunch at the Pub.  I can’t remember what was on TV or what we talked about at lunch, I just remember we had a good time.  The ride home was along one of our regular routes. It was just a nice average ride home.  

Following are the statistics from the ride, 23.8 miles total, 32.5 max mph, 2 hours and 4 minutes time on bikes and 11.5 average mph. 
David Lindquist