Building Community

A few years ago Rob Vandermark, founder of Seven Cycles, possibly in an attempt to fill every hour of every day with work, opened a shop near us that combined two of my passions, coffee and bicycles. But the Ride Studio Cafe is so much more than a coffee shop that sells bicycles or a bike shop that sells coffee.

Because Sometimes the Road Goes Up

Hello Mountains!

"Because sometimes the road goes up" - This was my gut reaction recently when, after posting these photos on facebook, a friend asked about the advantage of the nominal mountain bike derailleur on a road bike. I did think the "Hello Mountains" caption was pretty clear, but it seems it wasn't.

Fall Five - Part Two

The fabrication of this awesome trophy!

To my twitter followers - Wondering what all those tweets with the #fallfive tag were all about?

We managed to complete (and blog about) the first three stages of the Fall Five before Superstorm Sandy breezed through the area with a glancing blow. While NJ, NY and CT took the brunt of the damage, we just got the winds swirling above the eye. As a result of all the severe forecasts for the area, and previous occasions where warnings had been ignored with dire consequences, everything was essentially closed down on Monday, while we waited for Sandy to arrive. Around mid-afternoon, we had some impressive rain and wind, and then we heard the loud crackle of a nearby transformer blowing as our power went out. John was working from home, but no power spelled the end of that. We decided to try and get out for a walk to get a little exercise for the day, and very quickly spotted what had taken out our power as a tree had fallen across the street, taking down power and phone lines, and was resting on a neighbors house. We saw lots of leaves down everywhere, but relatively little significant damage, other than this one downed tree.  It turns out this pattern repeated itself lots in the area. There were lots of little pockets of power outages caused by similar circumstances, but nothing major.