hopewell trail ride

I went to Kim's yesterday to pick up a couple of derailleur cables to replace the one... well, it's like this: I was off Monday when it was 72F, so I cleaned up the Yellow Maserati, my grey-and-black titanium road bike. One of the reasons you want to clean your bike regularly is that it forces you to pay attention so you notice things going wrong before a catastrophic failure, and I noticed that my front derailleur cable was completely frayed and down to a single strand at the locking bolt at the derailleur itself, so I replaced it. That meant I used the last derailleur cable I had in stock, and I like to keep at least one ahead.

So that was why I went to Kim's. The older Korean proprietor (probably Dave's dad) doesn't pay any attention to me, but Senor Francisco got a couple of derailleur cables out of the shop stock, and I paid Mrs. Kim when she came out of the back. While I was there, Francisco asked if I was planning to go out with them this morning. Whew! At their 7:30 start time, the temp was barely 20F. No, I wasn't planning on that ride.

But I didn't know if I was riding at all until I got an email from Tom H that he was thinking of a pickup ride around the Hopewell Trail and environs, starting at 10. The earliest part of the ride was in the woods, out of the wind, so that seemed like a less miserable option.

A few other people agreed: Dave H and Joe M were at the start when I got there, and the Tom drove in. A moment later Jeff X came up the trail, and then Laura OLPH rolled up off the road.

We did this route.Mostly, it was the Hopewell trail on the way out, and roads on the way back. Much of the Hopewell trail is paved, but some is packed gravel... and some is mud, which mostly wasn't a problem today (as it was frozen over), but there was some ice on the trail where we needed to pay attention. The others were on mountain bikes, and Dave had a cyclocross bike (picturesquely covered in the pink-red dust of his most recent ride), but that hybrid of mine got across this route well enough. I'm not enamored of that bike, but it's done everything I've demanded of it.

(Joe M has a Bridgestone mountain bike, with nifty Nitto wide bars, with cork-and-twine-wrap grips and shellacked bar wrap, most picturesquely worn. I didn't get a picture, but I will, if I get another chance - it's a handsome ride.)

The pics I DID get:

On the trail:

Last year, Laura brought me a Santa ornament she thought was too awful for The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I to use, but we put it on the tree with the rest of our awful stuff. She's evidently taken this as a challenge; she brought a Santa in a helicopter ornament this year, to see if this will make the collection. Dave C offered to take a picture of the two of us with it, but at first he got the camera backwards:

Yeah, it's not like he planned that, or anything. Then he got the picture of Laura, me, and the objet d'art:

I promise a better picture of the ornament later.