With our mild winter, even or “easy” Thursday rides have sped up quite a bit compared to past years. Today was no exception; even with the tougher “ride through the park” option (where we “shortcut” Kings Mtn by first turning right onto Greer and then ride up through the park, emerging on Kings at the park’s entrance about a mile up the climb) we still got back pretty early (9:23 I think) and with an average speed of just over 16mph.

As usual, no rain, not too cold (didn’t see anything colder than 38) and friendly company. Kevin (son, not the pilot), Karl, Karen, Eric, Ludo, Marcus, Todd, Nigel and one or two others I’ve lost track of. Nigel’s picked up quite a bit of speed since getting his new Madone 5.1 last week; clearly I should have filled his tires with water to slow him down a bit!

Today’s video has nothing to do with this ride. A customer came into the shop earlier, asking about video shot with the Contour GPS camera he was considering buying. That’s when I realized I had a fair amount of raw unedited footage I’d not looked at since shooting it in France, and came across scenes on the Galibier, seen below. Sorry about the strange “floating” frame; I had to use the editor’s stabilizer function because the camera wasn’t mounted very well on the bike so the image was bouncing around a lot.