Sunday August 21, 2005 Pete and I did a mid-morning bike ride.  Since the last few rides have headed south we decided to go north this day.  I met Pete over at his house around 9:30 am and we took the PCT north to Lake Orion.  We thought about starting earlier, but the restaurants in the Lake Orion area don’t open until 11:30 or 12:00 on Sundays.   

The weather this day was much better than the day before when we got totally drenched in a midsummer rain storm.  I would classify this day’s weather as perfect, maybe a little on the humid side, but no rain and nice temperature. 

The trail was in good shape, firm and already dried out from the rain the day before.  We road around Lake Orion for a few minutes before settling on Burger King for lunch.  Even though we delayed our start time we were still too early for most the restaurants.  Burger King was open and we figured it was better than nothing.  I had a grilled chicken sandwich and I think Pete ordered some kind of a whopper.  After a quick lunch we were back on our bikes heading home.   

Instead of taking the trail back we decided to ride south along the shoulder of Lapeer road for quite a ways.  We ended up cutting over to Dutton Road for the final ride to my neighbor hood.  Dutton is at a high point at its most westerly starting spot.  This is not the Dutton hill I have written about many times.  What we call Dutton hill is the dirt road area located just east of Pete’s subdivision.  The area of Dutton I am talking about now is paved and it starts just west of Squirrel.  I will call this the Dutton incline so as not to confuse it with the Dutton hill.   

Once we were heading down the Dutton incline we just started coasting, no need to pedal we were quickly gaining speed without pedaling at all.  We both crouched down low to make ourselves more streamlined to reduce wind drag.  We were really picking up speed.  Pete was out front and he was just barely pulling away from me, must have been due to his natural higher potential energy at the top of the incline paying off.  We zipped right passed Squirrel Road without slowing down.  Squirrel Road has a stop sign and Dutton doesn’t, so legally we had the right away, but I never like going through an intersection too fast because I just don’t trust people behind the wheel.  Luckily no one was on Squirrel so we were not in any danger.  We ended up setting new club records for speed.  Pete got up to an even 40.0 mph and I got up to 38.5 mph.  Both of these speeds surpassed the former club speed records, and this was just coasting, without pedaling.  Pete and I are planning to go back and see how fast we can go if we actually pedal going down this incline.  We think we should be able to reach 50 mph.  Before we do this next record attempt we plan to put a spotter at the Squirrel road intersection to warn us if any cars are coming. 

Again, this turned out to be a great ride, we got home just a little after noon.  Following are the statistics from this ride, 19.9 miles, 10.9 average speed and 1 hour and 48 minutes time on bikes.   
David Lindquist