Edgar's Second Training Ride

Edgar, Amber, and I are training for the Grand Tour 200 mile ride starting in Port Hueneme, CA at the end of June. We've got our registrations and hotel reservations done. Now we just need to make sure we are ready for the ride.

The first time I ever rode this event, you had to mail your application and check to them. You got an email back a week later saying that your registration was successfull. They haven't really progressed much in terms of technology. They could benefit from seeing how Michelle Brougher handles registration for her events. It can all be done online, including the waiver.

The route has changed a lot, though. Whereas the event has started in Malibu for over fifty years, the route for the past few years has started in Port Hueneme. It starts with a 41 mile look then returns to the hotel. This is a good opportunity to ditch the cold weather gear you needed at 5am but won't need again. Then it heads out on a 150 mile loop. Last year's "Double" was only 191 miles. I'm sure Edgar won't mind. They're still tweaking the route so I don't know exactly how long it will be this year. 

My old friend Mel is the registration coordinator this year. He says we will get an email later with the cue sheet attached but they are not providing a gps link so I assume everyone will be preparing their own. What could go wrong?

Edgar's last training ride was 80 miles so I was aiming for 120 this time. We ended up with 116.5 because that's where the gas station was. I was hoping to get this done in less than 10 hours. We completed it in 9:20 which is just about perfect. We had a moving average of 15.7 mph so you can tell we spent a lot of time off the bike.

The first stop was at the Bistro St. Germaine in Seal Beach. Edgar had a grilled chicken sandwich, I had a croque monsieur and Amber had goat cheese in honey with a baguette and a tapenade. Yeah, it's that good. We spend about 45 minutes there which is obviously to long, but endurance riding is as much about the mental as the physical and this took care of the mental.

We rode inland towards South El Monte to the Mobil gas station on Peck Rd. We weren't that hungry so we had to force ourselves to eat something. We left just before 2pm so we were on schedule.

Headed back to the coast we had the usual weird and unpredictable combination of head, tail, and side winds, but it looked as if we were going to have a tail wind all the way from Long Beach to the start of the ride.

Back at Bolsa Chica Beach we stopped at the Bolsa Chica Cafe which must have the best value food anywhere. I had a cheese quesadilla, chips, sour cream, pico de gallo, and salsa for about $10. Remember, this is at the beach and has live music.

Best value

Even though they were busy we were in and out of here in about 30 minutes. Still too long, but better. We did have a tail wind all the way back to the cars which brought our average up from 15.1 to 15.7 mph. It's not often you can raise your moving average at the end of a ride.

When we got back I asked Edgar the most important question. How are you feeling? He said he was feeling pretty good. His hand was sore (because he fractured a finger two weeks ago) and his back hurt a bit. I think he should get a professional bike fit. He may need to adjust his saddle or stem. It will be worth it.

Next month we need to ride about 150 miles. That will be the last training ride.

The Grand Tour is getting closer

Me wearing an old Grand Tour jersey

Amber, Edgar, and I have been training for the Grand Tour in June. They just opened registration and the route has changed a lot. Mostly for the better, I think.

https://ridewithgps.com/routes/27799496

The ride now starts in Port Hueneme at the Holiday Inn Express which is way more convenient and safer that driving 20 minutes from the end of the ride in Malibu to our Comfort Inn at Calabasas. It's a double loop, the first being 41 miles and the second being 150 miles. Yes, I know it doesn't add up to 200 miles 😢 and it's also slightly flatter.

This will be Edgar's first double century. He has a new Lynskey titanium gravel bike which will be ideal for him. It has 40mm tires with light tread so he will be super comfortable. I don't know what brand tires they are, but they puncture too much. Need to upgrade to Schwalbe.

It will be Amber's first major ride since giving birth earlier this year. She's naturally very fit so she will not have any issues. She will be riding her titanium Lynskey with 32mm Schwalbe tires.

I'm getting old and even though I rode a 300km brevet a couple of months ago, I'm slightly nervous about this ride. I will be riding my trusty Serotta titanium road bike with 28mm Gatorskins.

My wife will be baby sitting for the event. Because it starts at a hotel, Amber and Edgar can drop Camilla (their baby) off with my wife before the ride and hang out for a while afterwards. They live about a 40 minute drive away so they don't need a hotel room. It all works out really well*.

* Ask me again after the ride 😁

I've been watching a GCN video about tire pressure on YouTube. That's why I'm kind of fixating on tires right now. I've always known that wider tires are more comfortable but now it seems they can be more efficient too.

The SRAM online tire pressure calculator says I should be running 72 and 76 psi front and back. It has taken me ten years to reduce my tire pressure from 115 to 100 and I'm still too high. I'm not going to change the pressures for the 200km training ride this weekend, but I might try it on a shorter ride later.

Bikes on trainers need maintenance too

I've had a Trek Madone on a smart trainer for a year now, I know this because my Rouvy subscription just renewed. Lately it has been shifting poorly and the drive train has become very noisy. I cleaned the chain, but it only helped a bit.

Eventually it occurred to me that I couldn't remember the last time I replaced the chain. I've ridden about six thousand miles on it while it was on the trainer, and I had quite a few miles on the chain before that. I grabbed my Parks chain wear tester and WOW the chain was toast! You're supposed to replace the chain when it reaches 0.75 wear. This chain was at 1.0 and the tool still wasn't tight in the chain.

I had always assumed that an indoor trainer would not wear out a drive train as quickly because there's no road grime getting up into the mech. It seems it wears just as quickly inside as outside.

The chain was so bad I checked the cassette and found it was badly worn too. The chainrings seem OK for now.

So I bought a new chain and cassette from Amazon for a total of $80 (love Shimano) and installed them last night. I couldn't find my Shimano cassette tool (I think its in a shed under six feet of snow) so I bought a new one. The shifting is now silky smooth and the drive train is much quieter. I must remember to monitor the chain for wear.

One of the SPD pedals was very squeaky so I replaced them with an old pair from one of my (stuff-which-is-used-but-might-be-useful-one-day) drawers which solved the problem temporarily. I ordered new ones from Amazon (only $42). When they arrive I'll install them.

So with the chain, cassette, cassette tool, and pedals I have spent about $150 on my trainer bike which is about the same as my annual Rouvy subscription. The total I've spent on the trainer bike for a year of usage is about $300. I spend about 400 hours a year on the trainer. Sounds like a good deal to me.

I live at the top of a mountain and no local roads are suitable for bicycle riding. If I add up all the money I spend on riding outside, including maintenance, gas costs, wear and tear on my car, I spend quite a bit more riding about the same distance on the road.

I have the indoor trainer setup for convenience more than anything, but it turns out it saves money as well.

Not much chance of riding lately

We here in SoCal have been hit with a series of storms, the like of which we haven't seen in 30 years. I got out of my house for the first time in a week today. This is what my street looks like.

There's a road somewhere under that snow

I've had to shovel about two tons of snow just to get to the road. It's probably going to be even harder to get the two cars out. I had dug my car out, but the last storm undid most of that. The lump on the left is my wife's truck.

How many ton's of snow will I shovel to free these vehicles?

I haven't even been able to do much riding on Rouvy. If I have any energy, it goes towards shoveling. They're plowing my street as I write this. I'm keen to see how much of a berm they've saddled me with.

Using DALL-E to create imagery for YouTube videos

This may not seem to have much to do with cycling, and it doesn't. I have some YouTube channels and I have been playing with DALL-E to generate some imagery to make the videos more appealing. Here's an example.

I created a DALL-E account and asked it to create an image using the prompt "a cyclist on a long country road in perspective in the style of turner". I got this.

 A cyclist on a long country road in perspective in the style of turner

Actually it was one of four images. I chose this one because it encapsulated "long" the best. But it's 1024x1024 pixels. I want a 16:9 aspect ratio so I cropped it using Windows Photo Editor. I could also have used a technique called out-painting but that gobbles up DALL-E points. With cropping, the image looks like this.

Cyclist 16:9 aspect ratio 1024x576 pixels 1.08Mb

The new image is 1024 x 576 pixels - quite low resolution even for an impressionist painting. My next task is to increase the resolution. This task would be even more important if I had asked DALL-E to generate a photographic quality image  This article has some options and I tried both BigJpg.com and Upscaler because they both have the ability to test drive them before paying money. Both have failed miserably.

BigJpg can't finish an upscaling. With and without a free account, both attempts to upscale the image above ran to 95% done and then hung forever. If it ever finishes, I'll update this post. Well, after an hour it did finish but the download times out. My guess is the site didn't make any money and is now not supported. The owner is still happy to take your money, but you won't get anything for it. So that's a huge NO! from me.

Upscaler failed to produce an image and is also flagged as a malware site. 

I tried Topaz last, because the article doesn't mention it offers a demo option. The product is a downloadable app that costs $159 right now. I downloaded it and quickly realized it does a brilliant job. The demo does not allow you to save the image, so I took a screen shot instead. It looks like this.

Cyclist 16:9 aspect ratio upscaled using Topaz

You can see it has increased the resolution (you have to maximize both images to see the difference) but I don't really like what it did with the red flowers. I think I'm more comfortable restricting myself to asking DALL-E for painting styles that still look good in low resolutions.

Sticking with the low resolution image, here is the intro video I created for the 300k brevet.

DaVinci Resolve has an upscaler built in, but it adds a watermark in the free version. The paid version costs $300 and I haven't paid for it. It would make more sense for me to pay for DaVinci than to purchase Topaz.

Here's the same video using DaVinci Resolve's upscaling (please excuse the watermark). I think I'm going to have to buy a license for it. It's difficult to see the difference because of BlogSpot's video compression. So here are the two videos uploaded to YouTube.

No upscaling https://youtu.be/17N89x2GSQU

Upscaled with DaVinci Resolve https://youtu.be/KNaRxN3r-gE

Upper SART reconnaissance

I signed up to ride Greg and Stacy Kline's 300k on Feb 11th which uses the entire length of the Santa Ana River Trail. Last time I was on the upper half (about a year ago) the homeless problem had become quite severe so I thought I should check it out.

I rode the top 10 miles after work on Friday evening and I'm pleased to see it has actually improved slightly. There are still several large encampments in the river bed, but almost no tents next to the trail and nothing encroaching. I still wouldn't feel comfortable being out here at night, and I think I'd like company during the day.

I didn't get a chance to ride the rest of the upper SART, hopefully it's no worse.

BrooksEngland.com website hacked?

I received a notification from YouTube this morning saying that two of my videos had been removed for violating their policies.

It looks like they are objecting to me posting a link to the Brooks saddles website. When I browse to the website I can see that Google has flagged it. As Brooks has been in business for over 100 years I have to assume they've been hacked. I bet there are thousands of YouTube videos that link to this site.

I hope Brooks sorts this out quickly and YouTube puts my content back online soon. I am impressed with the way YouTube handled the problem. Their algorithm surgically disabled the link with an explanation. Hopefully when the Brooks website is unflagged the algorithm will enable the link again.

Tour de Palm Springs

The 25th Tour de Palm Springs will be held on Feb 11th 2023. I decided to ride the route on my Brompton yesterday. I rode the first and second years a century option was offered, which I think was 1999 and 2000. In 2000 I decided to ride as far as I could without refueling. I got about 50 miles before I completely ran out of gas. I didn't really recover full strength until almost the end of the ride. That was very unpleasant but very educational.

The route is a little contrived in places to get the full 100 miles. I straightened out some of the sillier bits and took a detour at the south end to visit a date farm. I got a total of 98.6 miles and ended up riding 90% of the route.

To avoid paying for parking, I started at the Palm Springs Amtrak station instead of downtown. For a town of 45,000 people the train station is remarkably bleak. The only facility is a trash bin. The rest room is locked, the phone is destroyed, and there are no staff or even ticket machines. There are two trains a day arriving from Los Angeles, one at 10am and the other at midnight. This might be the least used station I have ever seen. Fortunately that meant there was plenty of parking available. It has nice views of San Jacinto mountain.

View from Palm Springs Amtrak station

The route can be split in two halves. The first half is through desert, hilly, with narrow or no shoulders, light traffic, poor road surfaces and few stop lights. The second half is more urban, with wider shoulders, heavy traffic, good road surfaces, and lots of stop lights - some of them two to three minutes long. I preferred the second half. The first half was exhausting on a folding bike and even though I had 35mm tires and some suspension, the quality of the road had turned my backside into hamburger. A smooth pavement and frequent rests at the stop lights was welcome.

I cannot imagine paying $100 to ride this with thousands of other cyclists.

Edgar got his new bike

Amber, Edgar, and I rode 40 miles on Christmas day. Edgar finally received his new Lynskey gravel bike and it was worth the three month wait. Apparently Lynskey builds their bikes in batches so they will produce 1000 road bikes, then 1000 gravel bikes etc. If you place your order at the wrong time you may have quite a wait.

I saw the bike has through axle fittings instead of quick releases. I'm not sure I like them. I don't know what problem they are supposed to be fixing, but wasn't the whole point of quick releases to be able to remove the wheel without tools?

A proud new bicycle owner

Amber is finding her Brompton M bars are good at keeping the pregnancy back pains at bay. That's good news. I don't know how much longer she can keep riding but she's getting good use out of her Brompton and her smart trainer.

We rode from Anaheim to the Bolsa Chica Café on two Bromptons and a Lynskey. It's cool that we can do an all Brompton or an all Titanium ride. The café was closed, of course, because it was Christmas day. We had brought sandwiches so we ate them at the café - hope they don't mind. I'm looking forward to them being open again on Jan 6th - I miss their cheese quesadillas.

A quick metric century on the Brompton after work

I decided to ride a cheeky 100k on my Brompton after work yesterday. There is a storm coming in and it looked like the weekend was going to be a washout. I hadn't originally planned to ride 100k but I got a few miles into the ride and realized my jacket was in the saddlebag of my other bike and my vest was in the car. I was expecting a low of 50F during the ride so I decided to turn back to the car and get my vest. That turned out to be a good decision.

I started at Yorba Linda park, in the pay section, because I don't think anyone is going to pay $3 for the privilege of vandalizing my car.

I've must have ridden this section of the Santa Ana bike trail 1000 times (I'm not exaggerating) and seen the gravel path that runs alongside it. I was saying to someone just the other day that there's no good gravel riding in Southern California so I thought I'd ride on the gravel for once. It's only two miles long but it was a lot of fun. I'm playing one of Mozart's Bassoon concertos on my mp3 player.

I'm riding my Brompton one handed and recording video with my cell phone. So it's a bit slow.

That was way more fun that I thought it would be. It has a totally different vibe from riding the bike path but it's only 10 yards away. 

I got to the Bolsa Chica café and had my usual Monster drink with a cheese quesadilla. It's mid December, about 4pm, and it is beautiful. There's no sign of the storm yet. Surely this is why I live here. 

Because I was stopped, I put the vest on to avoid getting chilled. Although the temperature at the start was 60F, it had dropped to 55 at the beach. I had had a mild headwind all the way here and I was looking forward to a tailwind on the way back. But I've ridden here enough times to know the tailwind would disappear when the sun went down in about an hour.

So I set off and instead of warming up slightly as I headed inland, it continued to cool until it was 49F. That jacket would have been nice. Not fast, but nevertheless another wonderful ride. I'm so lucky I enjoy cycling and I truly feel sorry for people who have the mindset that exercise is a chore.

First double-metric in 18 months

After my enjoyable century a couple of weeks ago, I decided it was time to ride a double-metric  for the first time in about 18 months. I decided to ride the Serotta, because this is such an efficient and comfortable bike.

The route is very easy, though not very scenic. I started at Yorba Linda park and rode the Santa Ana bike trail to the beach. It was overcast and cold (about 50F) when I started at 7:35am. I had a light jacket, arm warmers, and tights on. There was very little wind and I couldn't have asked for better conditions. My target average moving speed on a ride like this is 14mph but I was holding 16mph so I tried to see how long I could keep it for.

Once I reached the Pacific ocean I took my jacket off and headed north to Seal Beach, eating at The Crema. I had a ham and brie baguette and a Thai iced tea. I sat on a bench outside to eat it. Total down time was 23 minutes. I could have been faster.

Then I headed inland on the San Gabriel bike path. This has seen a significant increase in homeless encampments since I last rode on it. It was quite disgusting in places. I rode up towards the Santa Fe dam until I had a total of 100km. Fortunately I reached that distance before I had to climb over the dam. Then I turned around to the Shell gas station at Peck Rd. It was crazy busy and it would probably have been faster to go to the Mobil next door, but I stuck it out. A bottle of water and an egg salad sandwich kept me off the bike for 13 minutes. That's not too bad.

The weather forecast had been for a 12% chance of rain. I got several bouts of light rain during the ride, but nothing that even made me stop and put my jacket on.

I continued back on the San Gabriel even though this route normally follows the Los Angeles river trail. Last time I rode that trail, though, the homeless problem was appalling. So I decided to do a simple out and back. 

My last food stop was at another of my favorite places to eat - the Bolsa Chica café. They were crazy busy too so it took me 25 minutes to get and eat my cheese quesadillas. I don't think they have ever tasted so good. There was a new band playing that I hadn't heard before - very good.

I always wondered what the band would do in the rain

While I was there the cashier mentioned that next Sunday would be their last day until the next year. I guess I'll have to find somewhere else to eat for the last three weeks in December. It's not like there's a lack of places to eat along the beach :-)

So my total time off the bike was 1:01 but RideWithGPS says I was off for 1:08. I assume the seven minutes was stop lights. I finished with an average of 16.2 mph and a total elapsed time of 8:50. I'm over the moon about that time. It would have been good when I was regularly riding 200k rides. I'm pretty wrecked today, but I don't care.

Triple the fun

Brompton just dropped their prices by 20% but the offer ends tomorrow. REI has dropped their Brompton prices too. So my son-in-law, Edgar, bought one. He got an S6L with front and rear lights and a Brooks Cambium saddle for about $1500. That's a great deal. He wants a rack so I pointed him towards some of the third party titanium racks that are available.

Amber's pregnancy is giving her back pain while riding her Lynskey. We tried raising the stem an inch but it only helped a bit. She found she can ride her M6R Brompton with less pain due to the more upright riding position. So we rode three Bromptons this weekend. This is Edgar's first ride on his Brompton so we shortened the ride to 40 miles.

I gave Amber and Edgar some custom 3D printed Wahoo mounts but I need to reprint them because they got crushed by the stem bolt. I'll try a solid fill next time.

Three little Bromptons - mine, Amber's, Edgar's

We rode from Anaheim to the Bolsa Chica Cafe. 

It's late November. This is why we live in Southern California.

Champing and other stuff

I came across a YouTube video from Terry's All Bikes. This guy's in his early 60's and likes to wild camp on his Brompton. His video skills are terrible, half the videos have his finger in the frame, but they are entertaining anyway. This particular video is about Champing. Not camping or glamping, but champing. 

It seems some churches in the UK are raising money by allowing hikers and cyclists to camp in the church. You get a sleeping pad, access to a kitchen and bathroom, and a dry, safe place to sleep. It looks really cool. You show up with your sleeping bag and food, and you have a nice place to eat and sleep. Hence the term - champing.

Probably not all churches provide a teddy bear.

On a sadder note, I read an article about a promising college football player killed recently on an e-scooter. He decided to ride across a pedestrian crossing against a red light and got hit by a bus. I see e-scooter riders constantly riding dangerously - one turned left in front of me just the other day and I only just missed hitting him. I bet a psychology PhD candidate has written a thesis on why e-scooter riders think they're immortal. I doubt I'd understand it, though.

My road bike has a Campy racing triple and it has become almost impossible to get replacement middle chain rings. The problem is the ramping on the middle chain ring is designed to help the chain get on the chain ring from both directions. If I replace it with an inner chain ring for a double I will have trouble shifting from the small chain ring to the middle. It's not something I do very often, but I'd like to still be able to do it. I asked my bike shop to give me an estimate on replacing the triple with a double chain ring. I have a feeling it will be too much.

First YouTube video

My wonderful helmet light that I bought on Amazon for $15 many years ago finally died. So I bought a new one. The new light has a GoPro compatible mount. It's one of the few lights I've bought where the mount is better than the light. 

The light itself doesn't have a very good beam pattern - it's a series of concentric circles of light and dark. It's fine for illuminating street signs or cue sheets. It can maybe catch the attention of a motorist. But it's not good enough to be a stand-alone front light.

I recently bought a GoPro Hero 9 so I thought it would be interesting to mount the GoPro on this mount and record video. I rode from Yorba Linda park to the Bolsa Chica café and back, videoing parts of the ride. The camera's image stabilization feature works really well, but the weigh causes to helmet to shift. I also had it pointing too far down. It's all a learning experience. I might need to increase the thickness of the padding inside my helmet.

I cleaned up the video with the free version of DaVinci Resolve. At first I was put off this software because the official documentation videos aren't suitable for a complete novice. Fortunately I found a lot of good YouTube videos about the software and realized it's very good.

Here's the finished product. It's my first attempt at a proper YouTube video. I need to work on my speech volume and enunciation. I think my trip to Vermont will be my next subject.

Lake Champlain Bike trail

We flew to Burlington, Vermont for the weekend and I took my Brompton in my new case to see how it went. I'm pleased to say the case worked out really well.

Evo bike pod from Polaris Bikewear

It holds a vanilla Brompton with no fuss, but I had to loosen my Brooks Saddle and slide it forward and also loosen and turn my Ergon GP4 bar grips. I also had to remove my QR SPD pedals. I did all this with the Brompton tool set. Once that was done the bike fitted like a dream. I added two sets of cycling clothes into the gaps. The case, clothes, and bike were about 45lbs (I have a rack and dynamo hub) and has a total linear dimension of 62" so it is not oversize or overweight.

There's a great bike trail through Burlington called the Lake Champlain trail which is paved most of the way except for the northernmost six miles which is lovely gravel on a breakwater that extends into Lake Champlain. 

I recommend starting from the Amtrak station in Burlington and heading North. The out and back trip is about 20 miles with 400 feet of climbing - none of it steep. The trail surface is suitable for road tires and there's about half a mile of quiet residential roads - the rest is bike trail. The gravel section is smooth and has no wash boarding.

You can also go south from Amtrak which is also very nice but only about ten miles out and back and with some steeper climbs. If you do both you will get a moderately strenuous 30 mile ride.

At the Amtrak parking lot there is a Creemee stand right on the bike trail that is worth a visit. It turns out a Creeemee is just a soft-serve ice-cream. I got a large maple and raspberry. Who knew that was a thing?

This is a creemee

For me, the highlight of the ride was the gravel causeway. It's like you're floating over the water. At the north end there is a bike ferry run by Local Motion over to some more causeway and then onto South Hero Island but it doesn't run at night so I turned around. If the ferry had been running, I could have made the trip into a loop.

Lake Champlain trail

The second time I rode this trail it rained - hard! I was trying to find a way to dry my gloves. I used the old "roll them up in a towel and squeeze" trick which helped a lot. But then I decided to put a frying pan and lid on low heat and dry the gloves on that. It worked!.

It's probably not a good idea to leave the room while you're doing this

I finally made a YouTube video of the trip.

Cross Training

You know how everyone says "You should cross train, it strengthens you". Bullshit. I hiked halfway up San Gorgonio and back and I've been crippled for two days since.

My daughter, her husband, and two friends planned on hiking San Gorgonio last Sunday. She's pregnant so she decided to only hike up halfway - I agreed to hike with her so she wouldn't be out there on her own. The two friends cancelled at the last minute so her husband, Edgar, summitted alone.

We started at Vivian Creek near Forest Falls which got nailed by some recent monsoon rains. There were massive mudslides and we could see where 'dozers had pushed the mud and rocks to the side of the road. It was quite traumatic to imagine what they had been through recently.

The first mile after crossing the dry creek bed is very steep and rocky but after that the trail got very pleasant. I can only imagine how that creek looked a week ago.

We got half way up and Amber wanted to keep going but I was feeling a little stumbly so we turned around and waved goodbye to Edgar. I'm glad we turned around when we did because I was tripping on rocks which is always a sign of fatigue. There were a lot of other hikers on the trail - I would guess 20-30 so we weren't worried about Edgar being injured and alone. Some of them asked if we had been to the top already. I said it was very cold up there which was probably true, but implied we'd summitted 😁.

On the way down, we saw a small herd of deer that were unafraid of us. I expect they're used to hikers.

It's now been two days since the hike and I'm still so sore that I can hardly walk. I have to get up and walk around every hour or so or my legs really lock up. Cross-training my arse!

Back to the Beach

Our latest heatwave is over which means it's possible to ride along the beach in the evening without suffering from heat stroke. I've been missing my quesadilla at the Bolsa Chica Café so I drove down to Anaheim after work on Friday and rode the Brompton. I decided to take some photographs to post on Cyclechat.com to try to make the Brits jealous. Then I looked at their photos and I'm the one that got jealous. 

Here are my pictures, take from Bolsa Chica beach.

Here are some of their photographs, taken from various places in the UK last week.

I love it when everyone is a winner!

GoPro 9 at Big Bear Lake in the dark

You know that wonderful feeling when you discover a new bike path? I came close to that last night. Tropical Storm Kay has broken our ten day heatwave. Yes, this is the first day this September that hasn't been well over 100F at work. It was "only" 85F with 100% humidity and light rain.

I headed over to Big Bear Lake which is at 7,000' and tolerably cool once the sun has set. I have a new GoPro Hero 9 and I wanted to see how it performs in low light. But more about that later.

I started at the Cougar Crest trail head because there's a parking lot without gates so the forest service can't lock me in. I followed the pedal path to the end of the recent extension in Big Bear city, then kept on riding and stumbled upon a signed scenic bike route. It's on super quiet roads and rolls past million dollar "log cabins".

Nice bike route

The temperature dropped to the high 50s but my super reflective jack was still a little too warm which surprised me. I had a about 30 minutes of very light rain, more like mist really, and 20 mph winds when I came out from behind the trees. It was a seriously wonderful ride.

I took the opportunity to test the GoPro Hero 9 in low light situations and it didn't perform as well as I had hoped. I've Googled the problem and I think I can improve it with some different settings. Let's hope so because I plan on using it to create a video of the PCH Randos Winter Solstice 200k in late December. The entire ride takes place in the dark.

Here's two videos I shot. They were both recorded in Max Lens Mode (whatever that is). The first is shortly after sunset and is a lot darker than it appeared to my eyes at the time.

Here's a video shot under almost complete darkness. The camera picked up more than the rear screen showed, but much less than I could see with my eyes.

I'm going to try reducing the fps and some other tweaks and try again later.

Everything to Cycling Rain Jacket review

While I was waiting to leave England at Heathrow airport, I wandered into a small cycling store called Runway Cycling near my hotel at the very edge of the airport. I was trying to burn off some left over pound notes so I bought a highly reflective, medium weight rain jacket made by a company I was unfamiliar with - Everything to Cycling (ETC).

As it was the middle of summer in SoCal there was no opportunity to wear it until recently when we had a slight cooling trend and it was going to be about 60F at night in Big Bear at 7,000'. I drove over from my house as the sun was setting to explore a new section of bike trail and try this jacket.

The pedal path, on the north shore of Big Bear lake is a lovely trail and has recently been extended into Big Bear City. It's only about 10 miles out-and-back so it was an ideal ride for the Brompton. I also wanted to test a new rack bag for the Brompton, but that's another post.

The trail had a lot of debris on it from the recent monsoonal rain storms so the Brompton's wide tires were put to the test and passed with flying colors. It was a stunningly beautiful night, riding a dedicated bike trail through lakeside forest. I tried to get some pictures, but I really needed a tripod.

Big Bear City from across the lake

I stopped to take a photo of the jacket. I put it on a sign post and illuminated it with my small helmet lamp to give an idea of how reflective it is. You can't see any of the surrounding trees, just the jacket.

Incredibly reflective

It's a medium weight jacket so even at 60F I was getting warm. It would be better at 50F and below. It has massive pit zips which help cool you down and storm cuffs that let you get it on and off while wearing gloves but also allow you to cinch them down to stop rain getting in.

I'm planning to help support some brevets next year and I think this is what I'll be wearing at night. The riders will see me easily.

A fantastic weekend

I rode my usual 40 mile Friday evening ride from Anaheim to Seal Beach and back on the Brompton this weekend but I started a bit later this time and hit some heavy traffic so I didn't get started until after 6pm. This meant I got to Bolsa Café at 7:45 and found out they close at 7:30. But the cook knows me so he made me a cheese quesadilla anyway. What a nice bunch of people they are. I left them a good tip. 

The sky was heavily overcast and the sun had just gone down behind Rancho Palos Verdes. We got that cool effect where the sun peeps out below the clouds just long enough to light everything up with ruddy shadows, then it went down. 

Sunset behind Rancho Palos Verdes

Caltrans closed three of four lanes on the 215 north and ten miles later they closed all access to the 210 adding about an hour to my drive home. Bastards. I drove the 210 just 24 hours earlier and there were no signs advertising the closure. Did I mention Caltrans are bastards?

On Sunday I rode with Amber and Edgar. It was cooler (high of 84F) so we rode during the day. In fact it turned out even better because there was overcast until the last five miles. We ate at the Bistro St Germain in Seal Beach which was a real treat as we hadn't been there for a month. This was the first time I had ridden during the day for three weeks. Amber's still doing well and Edgar is looking forward to getting his new bike at the end of October. I bet two years ago he never thought he would be spending $4000 on a bicycle.