All posts by Mike

We’re back (Not sure what kicked us off-line)

Personal stuff, Tues/Thurs 7:45am ride

What a mess. I missed a ton of entries while playing around in Morocco for two weeks with my wife, then I come back, FINALLY get on a bike again, and BAM, I’m off-line. Our webhost, Lunarpages, deactivated my account for a few days without warning and seemingly without reason. This sort of thing nearly always relates to missed payments, but that didn’t seem to be an issue here. It’s set on auto-pay and should never have gotten behind. Well, whatever, we’re back now.

I’ll try to formally post Tuesday’s first ride back but probably won’t get to it so what the heck. Here it is. Got home around 6pm Monday night, totally out of whack because, as usual, I couldn’t sleep on a plane. Should have been able to, because we’d been able to snag biz class seats, but the plane was too danged hot! Whatever, got a few hours sleep before getting up to ride. I didn’t feel tired per se, just sleepy, if that makes sense.

Click on the photo for the larger version and check out the bike she’s riding up Kings!
Just myself and Kevin (kid) on the ride, maybe because it was cold? Strange thing that we saw nobody out on Canada. No riders returning from the “morning” ride. But climbing Kings was another thing entirely. Got passed by two people we didn’t know, and then, about halfway up, saw someone ahead that we weren’t sure we would catch. Closing speed was really slow. Eventually the gap came down. Oh. My. Talk about depressing. A younger lady on a klunky cheap mountain bike with a monstrous seat and wearing tennis shoes. Wow. I mean, depressing for us, but impressive as heck for what she was doing, and told her so as we finally passed. A little further up we came across someone riding with her, a guy on a much lighter road bike.

It wasn’t a fast ride up Kings at 36 minutes but it felt… OK. And right now, two weeks off the bike, OK is just fine. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow morning.

It’s time to come home

Personal stuff

It’s been a pretty hectic and interesting trip to Morocco, now drawing to a close on our last night in Marrakech. Our last night wasn’t supposed to be in Marrakech; the tour finishes up in Casablanca. And that’s where we would have been right now, at the farewell dinner, were it not for me getting nailed badly with something that created an intimacy with the toilet that I’d rather not duplicate. And yes, I had the fish, and yes, that might have been the cause. It’s also possible that I was a bit run down from the many early departures on this trip (an excursion with the Gate 1 company called “Kaleidoscope of Morocco” and we certainly saw a lot of it!).

In the end it wasn’t so bad that we had a day in Marrakech all to ourselves; we got to go back to the marketplace and cruise at our own speed, including a visit to one of the snake charmers. If you think vendors selling merchandise are aggressive, you ought to see the snake & monkey people!!! The use every trick in the book to try and extort more money out of you, after you’ve agreed on a price. But it is a lot of fun being among Cobras and curling a snake around your neck (and living to tell the tale).

Getting home from Morocco is not so easy! Tomorrow afternoon we fly to Geneva, then Monday morning from Geneva to Zurich (short flight) followed shortly by Zurich to SF (very long flight). It will be good to be back at work and, of course, back on the bike. Don’t think I would’ve have gotten sick if I’d been riding my usual routine, instead of never getting to push myself.