6 posts tagged “biking”
This day was our enduro-challenge vacation day (first of two as it turned out). We started out with plans for an innocent trail ride. We rented a couple mountain bikes and set off towards the "Rundle Trail". This trail--the most adventurous of the local trails according to guides and the bike shop--follows the Spray River down to Kananaskis. Kananaskis is notable for its clever use of the letters "n" and "a" and for its awesome Nordic Center. The Nordic Center has all kinds of crazy jumps for skiers (in the winter), roller skiers (in the summer), bikes (not us). It also has cougars and bears (we spotted several of the jumps but none of the cougars or bears).
To make a long ride into a short story, we went about 18km down to the Nordic Center, another 2km into Canmore (the next town, possibly mis-spelled) and then 18km back to Banf along the highway. It was intense.
On the way back, we spotted some fellow adventures. On the road were some pack-laden tour cyclists. And on the water fall way up on the cliffs, we spotted some crazy hikers/scramblers. We had a shared moment when they spotted us looking at them through the binoculars and we waved at each other. Cool.
The rest of the day we spent in true vacation mode: at the pool and the hot-tub! One of Angela's co-workers has two super-adorable blonde-haired twins who love jumping into and being thrown around the pool. No fear at 3 1/2 years. Great entertainment.
And then to bed.
\i'm \typing this from the \fairmont chateau in \banff, \canada. \the keyboards on these canadian laptops have the \ key where the shift key ought to be leading to all-lower-case blogging. \sorry.
\on our first day here we went on a redonkulous (or simply \'redonk\') 6 mile hike. \for those of your that are \canadian, that's a heck of a lot of kilometers to go on foot. Some highlights (found the shift key) were:
* The rotten egg springs and accompanying algae. In the mountains is a sulfur spring that was believed to heal all sorts of ailments. According to the display plaque, the spring was used to treat gout, syphillis, and gun shot wounds. Varying degrees of success, I assume.
* Aside from the smell, there were some neat wild-life in the spring waters. Tiny fish, an aquatic worm/cattepillar creature and--most redonkulous of all--a tiny brown snake that ate bugs! We watched it hunt while the mosquitos ate us.
* Another highlight was we sweet-talked our way into seeing the underground cave area of the park... for free. Saving us a whopping 3.90 CN each. I think that's something like a week's salary with the exchange rate what it is. Once inside, we realized that caves are not for tall people! And sulfur-spring caves are not for those with a sensitive olfactory pallette.
* The other cool part of the for-pay part of this park was that we had an opportunity to see the most endangered species in all of Banff... the Banff Spring Snail. Truly a sight to behold. The women working the till at the park gate has a tough job selling that.
Moving into Day 2, we had two prominent public speakers give presentations. The first one was awesome!
* Clayton Christensen. He's the Innovators Dillema/Solution guy. Great presenter. My take-aways...
- Forget knowing your customer. Know the problem they want to solve. In his words, "the job they are hiring your product to do". He had a great story about how people "hire Cold Stone milkshakes to ease the boredom on their commute to work".
- The guys who are leading an industry get overthrown by companies that they watch come at them and ignore. Zeneith (vaccuum tube TV's) got overthrown by Sony because Sony used the transistor to first make hearing aids (a non-existent market) then portable TV's and then finally real TV's. And they p0wned the vaccuum guys who tried to go straight to using transistors in real TV's before they were ready. Same kind of story with integrated steel mills (really big) versus mini-mills (electric, smaller, cheaper).
- To survive, the successfull company should either acquire innovators or give independent business units the power to overthrow their parent company (IBM started building PC's at the expense of their higher margin mini-computer market and it was the right call)
* Second presenter was Charlie Wilson... he's the guy who got us to fund the Taliban against the Soviets. He's bat-shit crazy. He *might* have been right about the decision he made then, but his advice to the audience was to "know you're right and not give up"... a little scary.
* Then we went on a 32+ km bike ride down the Rundle Trail (hard and awesome) and then back from Clanmore to Banff on the highway (easier but we were tired). No bears :-( But awesome ride
Dinner time!
Yesterday we rented bikes from "Joe's Bike Rentals". We went as far north on the island as it's possible to go without a boat. North of where we're staying there is a lot of construction going on. Almost everything is under construction up that way. There are a few already-completed resorts, but there are a lot more on the way. Many are condo developments (on the South side of the island locals try to get you to attend free lunches and time-share pitches).
The ride: we went North along the beach (in hard-packed sand) up until "The Split". The sea cuts all the way through the caye at one point and bridge connects the two sides. The bridge is a semi-recent development. On the North side of the bridge nothing is paved. We went over some pretty bumpy and puddle-y roads on our way to "Journey's End" resort. Journey's End resort is a little bit before the road ends (I'm using "road" generously here). I'll upload the picture later, but the path we were on descended into a swamp and just went under water. So we turned around and headed South...
On the way back South I took a picture of a couple of the completed houses on the beach. These things were beautiful. Like a scaled-down Pac Heights home, but on the beach. All the more opulent when compared to the "ritzy" neighborhood of Belize city which we saw the next day.
The locals, for the most part, live on the South side of the island. We ventured off of the (two) paved roads and into the "suburbs" of San Pedro. The houses there are mostly on stilts (sometimes just a couple cinder blocks high) and they're universally small. Our ride would've been noticeably different on a bike with shocks. We went through puddles that blocked the whole road, around (and through) big ruts and depressions and ultimately came to the path that leads to the water tower.
We didn't know it at the time, but the town crocodiles (there are five or six) live over by the water tower. The locals feed them every day around 4:30pm and bring tourists out to see them eat dead chickens. We missed the show, but got to ride through a bunch more mud!
When we finally got back, it had been about 2 1/2 hours of straight riding and we were covered in mud splatters from the paths and roads of the island. All smiles. Thanks, Joe!
Addendum: Angela wanted the record to state that we road over a fallen palm tree.
I've got ten minutes before leaving for Transformers to catch my readers up on life over here. Hi, Mom.
- Angela and I got scuba certified! Monterey was cold and very, very green. Both days we dove were sunny which meant we were diving in a plankton soup. We frequently got separated from each other and the instructor (the class was just us, the instructor and one other) because of the poor visibility. Still, we did it! We saw a few star fish, some anemones, little flounder fish and very small decorator crabs.
- Work is going great. I'm re-inventing Microsoft Project in Perl. I'm doing it on my own time so I don't feel obliged to defend such a silly exercise. It's kind of fun, though. As long as everyone does exactly what's in this generated HTML file every moment of every day from now, things will be great!
- We spent the last three days in Incline Village with Aaron and Susan. Mountain biking, working and hiking. Aaron is a crazy mountain biker. Angela is getting there--I'm very proud :-) We did a couple sections of the rim trail that were pretty technical (comparable to what you'd find at Anadel)... she did great!
- Going to be in VA for Thanksgiving with Dad and sister
Need to go get good seats for the movie!
Angela and I went on a birthday bike-ride for a buddy of mine last Sunday. Awesome fun. Thanks, Ed, for the great shots.
Here we are at the beginning, all smiles and optimism:
Then we did some actual riding. Here's Angela coming to the top:
And here we are at the top:
I was only going to go across the GG bridge and back, but on the other end I saw a guy on the same bike (Bianchi Pista fixed gear with the stock gear ratio). We got to talking and next thing you know we rode all around Marin (the reverse Paradise loop). Marin has a lot of hills to be climbing with only one gear (a big one) and no free-wheel. Great workout!
