2006 Wilderness Road Ride

Friday night we went to a spaghetti dinner for the Wilderness Road Ride/Mountains of Misery. We went there early to work for the New River Valley Trails group at an information booth concerning the proposed trails. At the same time, we were there to pick up our own registration materials for the ride on Saturday. That night, the invited speaker was Bob Roll (Bobke). He's a former rider on the old 7-11 team and went on to ride for Motorola as well. He retired from the road and then raced mountain bikes for awhile and is now a commentator on OLN's cycling coverage. I got his autograph on his latest book and we were all very entertained by his stories.
Megan and I got up this morning (Saturday) about 6:15, grabbed some breakfast, got changed, and headed to RU's Dedmon Center for the start. We left the start area about 7:15 and headed out on the 57 mile ride. Since we'd ridden there, and had to ride back home, we were going to end up doing more than a metric century (100 km). It ended up we did over 950m of climbing (that's about 3100 feet). As you can see in the photo, it at least started out overcast and cool. Unfortunately it was also humid from the 1"+ of rain we've had in the past two days, including a lot of rain all day Friday. The ride heads out of Radford up the new bike path and then heads out of town towards the interstate. Rather than take people up Tyler (the main road to the interstate), they put you on Greenbriar Road - a steep, moderately long climb up to a residential area and a back way to the interstate. I think it climbs about 140 meters total in something less than 2 km. Yep, that's about 8% grade or so.
Here's a pic of Megan catching a guy on the climb. We're nearly at the top, but there's still a bit of climbing left before you reach the top. It at least does level out a bit. Here's another picture of Megan showing her effort level a few seconds after this picture. This is not an easy climb by any stretch. After the top, this road rolls up and down for another kilometer or so, then you take a left out towards the interstate. That road reconnects to Tyler and we're on that very briefly while we connect to Mud Pike. Mud Pike is a road Megan and I have ridden very often and it's a nice road. Last year though, Megan's bike computer exploded (no we don't know why) on this road. Very weird. We didn't have any troubles this year and here you can see Megan cruising down Mud Pike.
Notice the sun's come out and it's starting to warm up quite a bit. Mud Pike is about 10 km long or so and then we drop down into Christiansburg, site of the first rest stop. Unfortunately to get to said rest stop, you must first go through a residential neighborhood. Like Radford, it's very hilly. Like a residential neighborhood, there's lots of stop signs. That means coming down a hill, coming to a complete stop, then climbing back up another hill. If you could just roll through it wouldn't be a big deal, but starting from a dead stop always just kills you. We eventually reached the rest stop and had a bit of food and drink.
See how happy she is now? At this point, we're maybe a third of the way through. We leave from here, take a long descent (about 6 km long) and head out on a very quiet road to Riner. At the Riner rest stop, which we have no pictures from, you run into all of the people who are on any of the rides (29 miles, 57 miles, and 78 miles). The only riders who don't go to this rest stop are those on the 14 mile ride. We spent a little time there and then headed out again towards Snowville. These roads are mostly familiar to us as we ride on them, but as we neared Snowville we got on a road that we've only been on in the car. Boy, that road hurt. It was pretty bad up to the rest area at the Snowville Fire Dept. It gets much uglier after that. The road is very rolling and the hills are steep. Okay, so we're out of shape, but it was painful. We spent quite a bit of time at the rest stop trying to get as much food and drink into us as we could. It was starting to get hot and very sunny. Here's a pic of each of us at the Snowville rest stop.














We're at more than the halfway point and we're finally starting to really hurt after we leave this rest area. Shortly after the rest area (and actually right before it too) there is a short, but very steep climb. There are people walking their bikes. Thankfully, we know that soon we'll be back on familiar roads and that most of the nasty climbing is over. Eventually we cross over Claytor Lake on a bridge, and then we're back on the transcontinental bike route (highway 76 around here). We then head up to Newbern. There's a great rest stop here (again, no pictures as we're both darn near exhausted now - I'm dehydrated too). The cookies at this rest stop are homemade and fantastic!!!! I personally ate 3 oatmeal raisin cookies and 1 chocolate chip. They were so good and I'm certain it's not just because I was starving and exhausted! I also ate a bunch of small PBJ sandwiches. Megan sucked on some ice to cool her off. At this point we've done more than 80 km and we know we're heading home. There's only one problem. Neither of us looked at the cue sheet. After we cross the bridge into Radford, instead of heading straight to the Dedmon Center, we have to head up this super steep hill near the high school. Why? So that we can ride all of Radford's bike path. That added about 3 km to our trip and since we're already exhausted, heading up this hill was not our first choice. The route took us just a few blocks from our house so we were going to lose all that altitude we just gained to get to the Dedmon Center (to check back in) and then have to re-climb that same amount just to get back home! We did it though. Dorks! We finished up at the Dedmon Center, eating a bit more food and drinking some more before heading home. It was a good ride, but very tiring. Neither of us can recommend a 100 km+ ride on about 3 days of training. Neither our legs, or our butts, are very happy with us right now. We did have a lot of fun and will have a lot of great memories about the ride, especially those cookies!

Trip to Cancun

We got back from the Mayan Riviera on Saturday. It was a great, relaxing trip. We had planned to go in November and to spend a lot of time siteseeing, but plans change. Wilma made sure we didn't go in November, and since we're returning next month to a place closer to the ruins with Megan's family, we decided to forgo the off-resort excursions and instead spend time playing water volleyball, eating nachos, and working on our tans.

The trip coincided with our 3rd year anniversary and Megan's birthday, not to mention Brett's tenure notification, so we had much to celebrate. The resort had great restaurants for dinners and we met some really nice people from all over, so we had ample opportunity t0 eat, drink, and socialize for all occasions (and non-occassions). Brett got to eat seafood almost every night and Megan was able to avoid it (be sure to check out the food pics, everything tasted as good as it looks!). They also had great raspberry mousse and tiramasu most nights and creamy ice cream by the pool in the afternoon, so again, we had everything we needed to be happy.

We took some pictures of sunrise a few mornings. The big cloud on the horizon in most of them is actually smoke. All of the fallen trees from Wilma are now drying out enough that wildfires are becoming an issue in the area. It certainly gave our room air conditioner a nice "tent camping by the fire" smell. :) The area behind the resort (that our room faced) was a swamp. The signs say that there are crocs in the water, but we never saw them. I think they might've been victims of Wilma. The swamp did attract many water birds of various flavors. I tried to get some egrets, but had to use the digital zoom. There are also some other birds that were less afraid to land nearby someone with a camera. Megan's no Jerry, but they're here if you want to see.

We did a little bit of shopping while we were there, but are mostly saving our efforts for Playa del Carmen next trip (so much so that Megan didn't even buy a Mexico spoon!). We are trying to collect cool ethnic pieces from our travels, and this time we found a neat reproduction Mayan mask and snatched that up. The jewelry seems to be very reasonable, even in the price-tagged shops we went in. In PdC, the shops are all on a haggling basis, so I imagine a skilled person might be able to get REALLY great prices.

We went out to one of the reefs by kayak one day and that was amazing. We had been warned that the reef itself had suffered much Wilma-inflicted damage, so we didn't expect much. While the coral was certainly not that exciting (a few orange and yellows here and there), the aquatic life seemed to be rebounding faster. For a while, a family of rays swam alongside us, flipping upside down so we could see their white bellies. We also saw lots of blue tang, easy to spot since they're REALLY neon blue/purple. We can't wait to go back and do some snorkeling or a glass bottom boat tour.

We've posted some pics for any who'd like to see. Mostly they're of us headed to dinner, dancing, or of the beach.

New wall around arbor

This is a quick post before we head out to Charlotte. Just wanted to put up a picture of our new wall around our arbor. This was, almost entirely, designed to make mowing easier and to keep grass from growing into the bed. It also matches the arbor nicely. Now that we've done this one, we're probably going to add similar walls around the roses (where the green cinder block wall used to be) for similar reasons.

Now, off to Cancun. I'm sorry I didn't get some of our new flower and garden pics up, but we'll do that when we return!

Tenure and Promotion!

Just a quick note - I got tenure and promoted to assistant professor, effective May 6th! Now let them try to get rid of me! :-)

On other notes, Megan and I have about finished another project outside (putting a little wall up around the arbor area) and will post pictures of it when it's done, which will hopefully be this weekend. Now that finals are over, my grades are in, and I think it's going to stop raining for a bit, maybe we'll get it finished before we leave for Cancun.

We also have some pictures to post of the flowers. Our garden is growing well so far and we'll have boatloads of lettuce, potatoes, onions, and very soon berries (blackberry, raspberry, and strawberry)! We're going to try to get the bulk of the garden in before we leave for Cancun.

Now, gotta run - time to go sit through another graduation!