Charles Jalgunas, formerly the service manager at Trail Head, now has his own shop in Belmont called “Passion Trail Bikes.” (In fact, his shop’s website is hosted right next door to this one, and is also Rails-powered.)
Charles believes that you should never use a hose to clean your bike, ever. Here are his suggestions for cleaning a muddy bike.
My grandfather passed away right before Christmas, so Val and I went along to New Mexico for the funeral to support my dad.
This was the longest trip we've taken Minnie on, and among the least planned. We decided to do the trip about 2pm or so on Friday, and left by 7. Of course, we forgot a few things, but nothing too terrible.
The original plan for Christmas had been to take Minnie up to my parents house where my dad, who is very handy with wood and stuff, was to help mount the LCD TV in place of the old CRT and big wood cabinet. I'd already torn down the cabinet and old TV, leaving a clean wall (except for the mounting screw holes and a little cabling) in its place. When the new plan surfaced, I quietly cursed that the trip would be TV-less. We ended up watching a couple of movies on the PowerBook, which wasn't too bad.
I drove until about 2:30 in the morning, and my dad (who had gone to bed early), got up and started driving at 7 AM, so we only stopped for a little bit. We pulled in to the Albuquerque KOA about 9 PM or so.
The KOA, at $47 a night was way more expensive than we're used to paying for a spot, and not really as nice as most KOAs are. But, it was right in town at a convenient spot and it had free wi-fi (which Val and I needed, since we planned to work remotely early in the week), so we ponied up for it anyway.
The weather was surprising—while the Bay Area was getting dumped on, New Mexico had blue skies and was sunny, getting into the high 50s and the occasional 60° during the day. It's normally bitter cold and often snowy there this time of year, so this was a nice surprise. We didn't even hit any snow in Flagstaff while en route, which is very unusual.
It did get pretty cold in the evenings—probably the coldest temps Minnie's been in. Minnie's got central heating, which worked well to keep us warm. The windows in the front radiate a lot of cold air into the cabin and the thermostat is in the back, so the front is colder than the back. Not perfect, but not bad enough to really cause concern. Once we knew this, we close a couple of heater vents in the back and turned the heater up a bit, which seemed to help balance things a bit better.
We covered about 2,500 miles on the trip in total, crossing 10,000 total miles on the way back. While we definitely set out to use the RV a lot when we bought it, I'd not have guessed we'd crank out 10,000 miles in the first six months. Eight nights in a row is also the longest continuous time we've spent in the Minnie. Overall, it was comfortable and convenient, and nice to have ready to go on such short notice.
You might have noticed that the site was down a little bit today. I did a quick update to Rails 1.0.0 as well as changed the deployment strategy to use Switchtower, which I’ll describe later. All-in-all, it’s pretty sweet. Anyway, let me know if you see any bumps using the site.
Ruby on Rails, the web framework I used to create this site, among others, has reached version 1.0. This is a big milestone in what has turned out to be a movement instead of just another web framework. If you haven’t looked at Rails before (and are programming-inclined), now’s a good time.
(AKA Sedona Thanksgiving 2005)
Val and I headed out to Sedona, Arizona for a 9-day trip with a group of mountain biking friends. It's a repeat of last year's trip, but longer, and this time we have the Minnie.
We took our time getting out there, initially leaving later than anticipated, and we arrived in Sedona late Saturday afternoon. The drive itself was smooth and uneventful.
Sedona is absolutely one of the best places on Earth I've gotten to ride, and is really, really beautiful. Among the things to be thankful for this trip were:
We rode four 5-hour days, and one 3.5-hour day. None of it was easy going and, while exhausting, I can't wait to get to do it again. The rides were epic every single day, and the other people were very high-quality riders that knew the area extremely well. I'd leave with a CamelBak full of food and water (and I've got a big CamelBak), and it would come back each day dry and almost devoid of food. I was completely spent at the end of each ride (and a couple of rides, I was spent before the end ;)).
A lot of the riders were shooting with digital cameras, so I didn't take mine on the rides. One of the guys (who is still out there) is collecting them all, and is going to give me a copy, which I'll share when I get it. I did shoot helmet-cam video on 2 days, and I'll put up some samples soon.
All-in-all, it was a great way to spend Thanksgiving. I'm lucky to have Val, who was a good sport on a trip full of hard core biking and mountain bikers (and the associated tech and trail talk).
TiVo added a new feature to standalone TiVos called Overlap Protection. It basically helps with coordinating conflicts when stations stop their shows at 8:31 to screw TiVo users. Nice touch.
Aperture is Apple’s new photo editing software. Now that I’ve seen a demo, I’m liking it. It’s very workflow-focused, and has many tools that photographers have needed for some time. Non-destructive editing, a very fast loupe tool available while selecting images, and really integrated RAW support look to be the front runners. Make sure to watch the demos.
For those of you interested in tooling around with Ruby, check out this interesting article on using Eclipse as a development environment for Ruby.
I’ve been writing Ruby in a plain text editor, but there are certainly times when I miss IDEA’s refactoring support and autocompletion hints. I’m not a big Eclipse fan in Java (its native environment), but if it can add those things to Ruby development, I’ll give it a go.
The Pragmatic Programmers (the guys who wrote the fairly famous book of almost the same name) are releasing a book on AJAX techniques. While it’s only two-thirds finished, they’ve released it as a beta book, which essentially means that you can pay for the bundle of the PDF and printed version of the book now, and get the PDF of it now, with updates throughout the process.
I’ve found these books in general to be of the highest quality (I’ve read a few, including Agile Programming with Rails; The Pragmatic Programmer; Pragmatic Unit Testing and Programming Ruby, among others, and never been disappointed. I did the beta book program with Agile Programming with Rails, and was very pleased with the whole process.
I’ve skimmed this book through and read the first two chapters, and it looks to continue their tradition of high-quality text about a cutting-edge subject with little formal documentation elsewhere. Highly recommended.
Val and I took the Minnie out for its biggest road trip yet: Las Vegas. We had to be out there last Saturday for a wedding (one of Val’s college friends), so we took Friday off and made a long weekend of it.
We left Thursday night after work, and made it as far as Tehachapi, where we pulled off for some sleep. This was the first time we’ve used the RV to just pull off in some random location, and it was pretty cool getting to keep driving until tired and not have to worry about where we were going to stay. We continued on to Henderson, NV, where we had an appointment at Camping World to get an oil change. While there, we decided we were tired of not having working house batteries, so we bought new ones and had them installed too. After that, on to Vegas.
It was hot, hot, hot in Vegas. It hit 107º on Sat., but Minnie did a good job of keeping it cool inside. The A/C never stopped running during the day, but it managed to keep it down to 75º inside. I think that 107º is about the outside temp we’d want to push.
The RV park is a KOA that is part of Circus Circus. They’ve got tons and tons of spots with full hook ups. I always think of the RV as a big vehicle, but we were among the small ones at this place. Still, the people were friendly, and there’s an attached store that has decent prices. There’s a pool, too, but it was too damned hot to go out there. ;)
We did some shopping at Fashion Show and then I hit the Mirage for some poker action. I did fairly well, making $165 for the night. Sat. was the wedding, which was pretty good (as weddings go). The Catholic church was on the strip, and was a pretty funky ’60s building that was a trip. Food was good, served at an Italian place in the Fashion Show. After the wedding was more Mirage action and another $100 up. Not bad—paid for a good portion of the trip.
The drive back was a killer, gas- and time-wise. Sunday is always a bad time to leave Vegas, and this was no exception. It was stop-and-go up steep ass hills for an hour on I-15. That stretch caused our worse mileage for a stretch of road to date: 7.8 MPG (the overall trip was higher). We knew that we’d be using the rig next weekend for another trip, this time with no hookups, so we filled up the tanks before leaving, which made us heavier, to boot. At least the Minnie proved easy to drive in harsh conditions—it was hot, steep and cramped on the freeway, but we were big enough that people gave us space, and having cold drinks and a bathroom attached is nice.
I haven’t done all the math, but I figure that for a weekend and two people, it would have been a little cheaper to drive another vehicle and stay in a cheap motel. More people or another day would have tipped the scales in favor of the RV. The convienience of having our stuff all in one place and ready to go was certainly nice, though.
Overall, it was a pretty great Vegas trip.
Alex, Valerie and I spent the weekend mountain biking in Downieville. None of us had ever ridden at Downieville, despite it being famous for having some of the best riding in Northern California. Downieville is in Gold Country, north of Auburn on Highway 49. It's a very small, quaint town that really just consists of a main street with a few local businesses, and a surrounding set of housing for the locals.
We met the group who invited us doing trail work at Water Dog in Belmont. This trip happens every year, and this was apparently one of the biggest, with 28 riders attending. The group books an entire hotel in Downieville and also books a local shuttle company to take all the riders to the trail head. Since Val and I have the RV, we opted to stay at an RV park in Sierra City, about 12 miles from Downieville.
We left after work on Thursday night to get a jump on the Friday ride. We got to Sierra Skies RV park about midnight, but couldn't find an open spot. We'd made reservations well in advance, and were pretty tired, so we just left the Minnie parked where it was in front of the office and crashed for the night. The next morning we found that there was a space for us, but we just couldn't see it in the dark. It didn't matter much, since we just needed a safe place to park until morning. We loaded up and drove to Downieville for the first ride. Unfortunately for Alex, he figured out that he left his biking shoes at home, and had no way to ride. The local bike shops mostly concentrated on shuttles, and didn't have much in the way of equipment. He and Val (who wasn't planning to ride on Friday anyway) took the RV back to (I think) Grass Valley, where there was a bike shop that sold the right shoes. I got on the shuttle.
The first ride was a shuttle to Chimney Rock, and despite it being a shuttled ride, there was a ton of climbing. We climbed for about 3 hours up this really soft, steep switchbacking trail to the very top of the hill. It was hot and dusty, and I don't think anyone was really prepared for the conditions. Even regulars said the ride was much more difficult than normal because of the loose dirt, which made it almost impossible to climb the whole thing on the bike (no one in the group climbed the whole thing). I hadn't expected this at all, having heard that Downieville was almost all downhill riding. Not a great start to the trip, but I made it to the top on the strength of about 4 GU packets. I was just starting to cramp up at the top, so the rest for lunch was a welcome breather. I hung out there with trip organizer Berry Stevens, waiting for the rest of the group. After we got word that all were safe and accounted for, we pointed downhill.
The downhill was marvelous. It was soft and loose, as well as very technical. I'd changed my tire setup a couple of weeks before the trip, and it turned out that my new front tire wasn't very suited to the loose conditions. It didn't cause a fall, but I was looking forward to trying a different tire (I had one in the RV). I followed Berry the whole way down miles and miles of really great singletrack and Sierra forest. The scenery was gorgeous: blue skies, running rivers and creeks and majestic green trees. Berry hit one technical section a bit wrong and went over the bars right in front of me, barely missing cracking his face on a rock. He was OK, and we pressed on down the mountain. We finished on the First Divide trail, one of three Divide trails that make up some of the best riding in the area.
The first day had us board the shuttles at 9:45am, and we left at 10, probably on the bikes by 10:45. We didn't finish until about 4pm, so it was a long, hard day of riding. I joined Alex and Val at the local bar, where they were having drinks on a deck overlooking the river that runs right through the center of Downieville. We later grilled steaks for dinner with friends Dave and Becky (we'd spent a week in Sedona with them last Thanksgiving). We spent the evening hanging out with the group, drinking margaritas and eventually playing poker (where it ended up Alex and I heads up, and him winning the night with a lucky streak of cards ;)). By the end, Alex had paid for half of his new shoes, but we were both blasted from the margaritas, so Val drove us back to Sierra Skies and a good night's sleep.
I was a little nervous about Saturday's ride. It had been described as the "epic" ride of the three days, and I didn't think I had a more epic ride than Friday's in me. Regardless, I was going to give it a shot, as was Alex. Val hooked up with a group of riders that was going on a different, less downhill-oriented ride. She ended up elated with her ride, and even called it the best ride she'd ever done, but I'll let her describe it on her own, rather than paraphrase her.
We shuttled up to Packer's Saddle, a common starting point to the rides in the area. There was a decent initial climb to start, but the traction was much better, so it was all riding instead of pushing. Alex, feeling good on fresh legs, decided to hammer the first climbs, but I stayed back, pacing myself on my sore-from-Friday legs. The rides in the area are at 7000-10000 feet. Since I tend to be hit pretty hard by high elevation, and I wanted to make sure I had plenty in the tank to complete the ride. Alex started feeling the effects after awhile, and we joined back up. Once at the top, we got some of the best scenery of the weekend, and lunch. The first descent was called Baby Doll Heads, named after the rocks strewn all across the trail, causing the fairly steep downhill to be pretty technical. After bombing down the trail, we followed Pauley Creek (many times actually riding in the creek). There was another sustained climb, but the trail on the other side, Big Boulder, made it all worth it. This was a tight, technical singletrack with high speeds through enormous trees and around hairpin switchbacks. Great, great stuff. It seemed to go on forever, but it did end with many smiling faces regrouping at the next junction.
I realized at the regroup that Alex wasn't behind me anymore, and heard that he'd flatted up the trail, but was OK. The junction brought a choice: the Second Divide trail (longer and more climbing, very technical and fun) or Third Divide (shorter and faster, with swoopy singletrack). I was feeling good and mentally decided to go with the group climbing up Second Divide, but had to wait for Alex. He showed up, talking of going over the bars, but able to land on his feet, and having a flat tire that took awhile to fix. He reluctantly agreed to join another group that was heading for Second Divide.
Second Divide was an amazing trail. It was great, rolling singletrack with many short, very steep technical climbs. There were a couple of sections with a high penalty for failure--there were stories of people barely missing falling 200 feet off the side of the trail in a few spots. Neither of us had any trouble, and the trail was one of the best (if not the best) of the weekend. We connected from Second Divide to First Divide. On the last steep and rocky descent on First Divide, my front tire blew out. Out of control, I managed to clear the rocks and find a softish place to crash. No injuries, and happy that I didn't do real damage to myself or my bike. I changed the flat, and we finished the ride into town.
We were invited to dinner in Sierra City, near our RV park, at a place called Herrington's. We drove back to the park, showered and relaxed in the RV, and rode our bikes to the restaurant. Dinner was good, if uneventful. The short, but uphill, ride on the dark road made Val nervous. While climbing, we heard a rustling noise on the side of the road, and I saw a black blur jump onto the highway behind us. Val heard it, and when I said something was chasing us, we sprinted. At the top of the hill, where there was a light, we slowed to find Alex, who'd been trailing behind us. He showed up OK, saying that it was a bear that had jumped down, ran across the road, made a noise at him, and ran on down the other side of the road. Mental note: don't ride there at night.
Sunday was the last ride. It was promised to be a short one, so that people could get on the road for home at a decent hour. We started again at 9am, and shuttled to Packer's Saddle. The ride was down Butcher Ranch, which was just fabulous. We also connected again with Pauley Creek and this time, rode down Third Divide. Alex and I spent most of the ride near the back of the pack after he got two simultaneous flat tires on a rocky descent. This made us nervous since Alex had 3 flats already, and he'd used all our spare tubes. We ended up passing a few in our group, and eventually hooking up with a group of riders for the First Divide trail back to town. We were done about noon, and the ride had been great fun. We said our goodbyes, and headed out.
This had been the first official mountain bike trip in the RV, and it was comfortable. Having the rig at the bottom of the ride with air conditioning, a cold shower and a cold drink was worth its weight in gold. We didn't end up keeping good track of how many gallons of gas we used, but I think our gas mileage had to be low. The whole area was windy mountain terrain, and we drove it a lot up there, especially since Alex had to go almost all the way back to Highway 80 for his new shoes.
Despite the occasional problem, it ended up a great trip, and something I'd love to do with our riding group once they get back into the regular bike rides--probably not until next year.
My bike’s in the shop getting dolled up for the Downieville trip. Since I still wanted to ride this morning (and couldn’t let Alex get another flake out of me), I rode our extra bike this morning. The bike is a 17" Schwinn Moab hardtail, which is an inch or two small for me. It’s got an old Judy on it, with maybe 2.5" of front suspension. That’s not out-of-line with the pretty smooth trails at Waterdog, but it’s quite different from the 5" full suspension trail bike I’m used to.
All-in-all, I still had a good ride. The biggest pain in riding this bike wasn’t that it’s too small, but that it doesn’t have clipless pedals. I usually have clipless pedals, so I’m used to a very strong connection to the bike. With no retention whatsoever, it bucked me off the pedals almost anytime I hit resistance, which oddly enough happened more on climbs than descents. I got better at handling that toward the end of the ride, but I think I’ll try to find the pedals from my old bike to put on this one (of course keeping the flat ones for when we loan the bike to newbies who don’t ride clipless pedals yet).
On Val’s weekly ride with Becky, she heard that Charles (the head wrench at Trail Head) was leaving to start his own place. Turns out that he bought the Broken Spoke in San Carlos. This is the place I originally had my order with for the Blur, back before I decided to order my 5-Spot.
Charles is a great mechanic, and one of the reasons that Trail Head has such a fine reputation. And now that he’s going to have a shop much closer than Trail Head, I can’t imagine I’ll be going down there after my bike gets tuned up next week. Can’t say I’ll miss driving all the way down there!
Val says that they’ll be selling Specialized and Maverick, two of the same lines that Trail Head carries, which is different than Broken Spoke’s previous lines.
I was told that this site was moving slowly yesterday, and I don’t know why that was. In any case, I updated to the latest version of the Ruby on Rails framework this thing is built on. (I hadn’t updated for the last couple of Rails releases.) Feels snappy to me, but let me know if you notice anything that’s broken.
Val and I spent her birthday/our Fourth of July weekend RV-camping at the Fallen Leaf Lake Campground near South Lake Tahoe. We arrived late Friday night, after having snagged a last-minute reservation earlier in the week.
We had left fairly late on Fri., and Val got pretty tired en route. She went back and got in bed about an hour-and-a-half before we got to our destination. She slept through the whole windy, steep ascent to Tahoe via Highway 50 and never got car sick (she’s prone to it), so the Minnie seemed to pass that test.
I’d installed the new Sportworks hitch-mounted bike rack for the trip, since we were planning on doing a ride or two while there. The rack worked great, although having anything on the hitch makes accessing the Minnie’s garage a bit of a pain. In any case, we went for a ride to the very pretty Angora Lakes. It’s a mostly gravel and fireroad bike ride, but it’s a steady climb the whole way. From the campground, it’s an 11-mile round-trip. The beautiful upper lake features a small beach and waterfall, as well as a place to dive into the lake from a bluff. We ate lunch at the upper lake, but limited our water exposure to wading, as the lake was ass-freezing cold.
Much to Val’s dismay, I wanted to head into town on Sat. night for a little poker action. Despite initial hesitation, she eventually agreed. Caesar’s Palace is a fairly RV-friendly place, with a backlot for RVs and trucks. We parked there, although I ended up playing at Harvey’s—the other places have closed their card rooms. I ended up tripling up at the 3/6 table, handily paying for the whole trip. :D
Sunday was a bit more relaxing. We hiked to Fallen Leaf Lake, only a short distance from the campsite. It features a small beach, suitable for lunching. The lake was a little choppy, but still had a few boats out on it. We built a fire Sun. evening and had peanut butter and jelly sandwiched and s’mores. A little TV, and we turned in.
The weather was outstanding for the whole weekend—blue skies, green mountains with white caps and deep blue lakes. The traffic coming back was only bad right in Tracy—otherwise we moved at the limit.
From an RV point-of-view, we had only one snag: since the campground didn’t have RV hookups, we spent the whole 3-day weekend on generator and battery power. Our house batteries don’t hold a charge, likely due to not having been charged while on the sales lot. We’re going to get them replaced when we go in for our detailing, but it was still a bit of a pain to have to fire up the generator for just about anything, when we should have been able to survive almost the whole weekend on batteries alone.
The drive to Tahoe is one that is pretty demanding on the RV—the climb to 7,500 feet is a steep one. Despite this (and the fact that we ran the generator a lot), we still managed just under 10 miles to the gallon. I’d expected that climb and the generator use to take us down to 7–8. Overall, we traveled about 450 miles and the gas cost about $110, making this the longest trip we’ve taken (both in distance and number of days). The Minnie performed very well. This was the best RV trip we’ve taken yet.
Oh, and here’s a shout out to the birthday girl—she always gets overshadowed by the holiday. :)