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I'm following the Spinstry, not sure if bikepacking is right for me. I really like not having to bring a lot of items, and I really dislike being hungry or uncomfortable. I could see CC Touring for a week going from city to city, or a supported tour, but I didn't have to carry that much stuff. What's PBP? Another thing that Barry and I do is a riding tour of our favorite food places. Over the summer we will do tacos, ice cream and beer rides. When covid is wrapped up we plan on setting up a few of these days if anyone is interested. 50+ miles at a party pace. Full disclosure I do not do a party pace to ice cream, that is a sprint for me. North Austin is great for brewery crawls.

Thanks mack-turtle. Super helpful. Combining the PVD stuff made RAD make sense. Thing missing was how you could have same RAD with different lengths/heights on the other two sides of the triangle, so to speak. A while back, noticed how reluctant I was to stand and pedal on steeper tech. Bar felt too far back when standing to get good leverage on bars when pulling up. Recently lengthened stem (committing new geo heresy) and lowered bar, keeping RAD the same, but really improved bike feel especially on technical ups when out of the saddle. Your spreadsheet helped explain this.

If anyone is thinking about going tomorrow, I will be bringing 12 lbs of pulled pork which I smoked for the ASS ride on Sat, which got canceled due to rain.

'Too much of everything is just enough.'

Usually a massive suffer-fest of cobbles and crappy weather, right? I always use Trip Advisor to sus out when a budget motel is sub par or is a reasonably priced but nice accommodation. It's a very fine line.

The reach was just fine on the GG. The problem was just the standover as she couldn't stand over the top-tube without being on her tiptoes. It turned out they measured stand-over at the lowest point on the top tube (under the saddle), and not at a place you can actually stand. Over. Of course we found this out after I built up the bike and not during the 70 or more emails I exchanged with GG including every imaginable body measurement. They did pay for the return shipping and fully refund the purchase. But! This was on their old aluminum frames with the silly up-sloping top tube. It looks like they may have fix'd that issue with their carbon frames.

A crappy hotel. We probably should have looked into the joint a little more. We did talk about how a B'n'B would be a nice option for future trips. Although we'd need to make sure it was bike friendly, being able to keep the bikes inside or in an attached garage. We had almost exactly 1 mile of gravel on the return trip. On the way out we had a ton of compacted gravel-like but really paved (whatever those are) country roads. @Jessica covered a lot of the trip, so I thought I'd touch on some of the technical aspects. Like our pack-list and bags... From the list, we ended up not taking flip-flops nor rainproof jackets. We end up not using our sports nutrition, our shampoo/conditioner, or our Maxxis string backpack, but I think all of those are worth bringing again just in case. The only thing we probably could have used more of...was whisky. The Mophie rocked and we ended up showing up with our devices well charged, even the Iphone that was being used for navigation--Ride with GPS was perfect. And I suppose that I should pack a derailer cable for future trips, and maybe a Leatherman tool with a wire cutter. Although honestly single-speeding it back at 40x17 wasn't bad at all. Our bag situation worked out flawlessly. Obviously I was the pack mule and didn't mind at all--my bike is 2-3 lbs lighter after all! Jessica's Specialized Sequoia carried a small saddle pack and a Specialized top tube pack. My Evil ChamoisHagar carried the same Specialized top tube pack, a Revelate bolt-on Mag Tank, a very cheap and light Amazon handlebar bag, and 2 DOM Gorilla fork bags. All the bags served their purpose flawlessly with no rattling nor movement. The fork bags do catch wind on occasion and I almost ate shit riding no-handed at one point! We even had a little extra space in the fork bags, so we could have brought more clothes if needed.

Dude, that GG Trail Pistol was a small!

I can speak a tiny bit of Spanish and could probably pick it up if I needed. Wife is very fluent. We've talked about Spain, and have several friends there, Seville was our target. I speak no French effectively and wife is semi-fluent. We have a couple friends there. But even though it would he harder language-wise I'd probably be edging towards France, but the pandemic has shown a lot of the issues over there. Ideally I'd like Germany. I speak enough that I could get by and as long as I just stayed a resident alien and didn't try to go down the citizenship path I'd do OK. No way I could get past a B2 in language easily and wife hates the German language. But the food and beer make up for it. You can ride everywhere, very bike-forward.

Kitchen counter is full of outlets but they are all consumed by USB things these days. So I added a USB C and USB A outlet, charges phones and other devices. Really cleans the place up. I've put in about a dozen of these around the house, they are awesome. One in the bike room for Garmins and tail lights. One in the guest room because guests always have a tone of devices to charge. I was even able to get one to charge my MacBook Pro - It does it very slowly but I do not need to have the standard charger anymore. Simplicity is the best.

I pulled 5 mature shrubs from their beds this weekend. They were dead 90% through. New branches/ growth was beginning not more than 2" from the ground, the roots were probably fine. I might have been able to cut them almost to the dirt and "start over" but my wife and I want to do something else with the bed anyways. My crepes are all slowly coming out, each at a different rate. My largest oak looks good but my three younger ones all show stress, one is that is touch and go. I have no plans to remove it until an arborist declares it a lost cause.

My Mt. Laurel is showing signs of life, noticed small buds this weekend. I am glad I gave it more time, it was looking pretty bad.

We stayed at a Day's Inn- I like to be stumbling distance from dinner/drinks after a long day. I have found on our trips we are too tired to enjoy a real nice room, we try to keep it in the $60 range. There were a bit of compressed gravel roads, but nothing too crazy. Lots of county roads and farms. I did a Zwift training plan to prepare for this ride and was really glad that I did. Sometimes these rides can be a real sufferfest- besides some chafing I was relatively pain free but at my comfort limit. Never too soon to start training for this kind of ride. https://sanjuanhuts.com/

Berms clicked for me when I started dropping my heels and slightly moving back. It took FOREVER to get over the superbike at the track habits.

I watched some tips Jill Kintner was giving a YouTuber pre-Covid that just clicked. Don’t move your center of gravity i.e. body position fore/aft. Just drop you seat and move your hips up/down only. Then you aren’t sucking up momentum. Took a couple of runs to work on timing but I have to scrub speed to make a few turns now! [emoji51] Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

we've seriously considered spain as an option but we still have to work, and good jobs are hard to come by. Beyond that, it ticks a lot of boxes as both us us are 100% comfortable with spanish culture.

I've been wanting to try baitcast and all my neighbors fish, so we could find a good home for the second.

I keep thinking I have always meant to do this but never have, but yet I actually have and your post just reminded me of this! My buddies and I did an out-and-back to Bastrop. Our plan was to initially stay there a day and 2 nights and ride the piney woods, then come back the day after. We ended up just staying one night, walking to the liquor store, maybe ate Subway/Quiznos (don't remember) and we rode back. We used the MS150 Houston to Austin route on the way there (super sketchy in places) and just rode back on 71. It was perfectly fine on 71. I also remembered we did San Antonio to Austin with an overnight at San Marcos for the Ride for the Cure. That one I didn't enjoy b/c we were at their mercy as far as scheduling and food. By the time we made it to San Marcos we got white bread, mayo, and some slices of ham. The tomatoes looked disgusting. It's been a dream of mine to ride to DFW for a while, and of course do stuff to qualify for PBP Anyone here getting Spinistry e-mails? They're organizing multi-day rides some supported and not supported and even a gravel stage race. I'm looking forward to doing some of that.

This looks wonderful and that's some serious mileage each day. Did you motel it or stay in a B n B? Any gravel?

I'm 5'4" with a 29 inch inseam. I ride a medium Santa Cruz HighTower with a 29er setup and a 54cm Specialized Sequoia. Some bike shops wouldn't size me on these sized bikes, but it I feel cramped in smaller bikes. My previous bikes were smaller and hurt my posture on longer rides. Barry does spec all my parts and did put really short stems on both bikes, but I find the handling of shorter stems preferable on squirly and DH shit. Arm length- reach and inseam make a big difference on some bikes. I literally can't stand over a Gorilla Gravity medium frame with the tires inflated. Always demo a bike on a reasonable ride.

So we finally did it and it was everything that I hoped that it would be. So few things in life as this way. Remember that song "Time in a Bottle" by Jim Croce? The dreamlike afternoon of being in the middle of nowhere Texas with @Barry felt like time saved in a bottle. First of many trips to come. We were able to bring all the things we needed to stay in hotels without bringing too much to carry. Doing hotel laundry is a must. When we got to Killeen, Barry's shifter cable for the CH broke and he had to single speed the route to the hotel and the entire ride home. I did my two longest rides back to back without considering the uncomfortable 2/3 of the second day. Luckily Barry's single speed was enough of a bunny for me to chase without getting too exhausted to be frustrated We could have called this the taco-coffee tour. We stopped on average every two hours for either tacos or coffee. Total mileage 147 miles with 5400 feet of elevation in 31 hours.

Not a tree.

Bone dry here at Dana Peak.

Then this will really make your back hurt. Did this a couple years back 57 at the time. Two days by myself. Had to dig out and set five posts.

The bonnets be poppin’ and we be packin’.

Found out the trick for stump removal is a sawzall with a long blade. Just jam that freaking blade down into the soil and cut in a circle around the stump, slicing through all the roots. Shovel pops it right out. Did 9 in about an hour. Paid some guys $50 to haul it all off. Sod goes down tomorrow

For Mr Grumpy Old Tip Taken on 1/4 Notch at the convergence of DD and the bailout Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

I'm excited about this whole thing but wanted to wait until it was closer to start the chatter about it. WELLLLL, it's only a month away now. So let the chatter begin! 😄 All the RV sites are now reserved. By my count we will have 35+ people. That's not assuming better halves are coming, which of course some will. I'm also sure there will now be people deciding, "sure, why not" and will be coming. That's great. Yes, I thought we should organize some group rides. Friday afternoon, Saturday morning (time?), and Saturday afternoon(time?)? Does that sound right? I would like to find some ride leaders that know the park. Hopefully maybe three at least, and someone willing to lead a lower impact ride too. I thought of reaching out on the Dana Peak Facebook page. Knowing the mountain bike community I'm sure we could get as many volunteers as needed. Or, do we want to "keep it in the family" and not bring in strangers? Strangers that will be our friends after the ride and two beers though. I'm planning on one more ride Sunday morning but by then everyone will know the park and know what they want to do again. So that's an on-your-own thing I would assume. If anyone has decided that want to come now, say something here. The park has liberal rules about how many can tent camp on each site. So having a place for you shouldn't be a problem. We just need to be sure everyone has a place. Some folks are tenting on our site so they can use our water and electric. Remember, the few tent sites still available to reserve, have no water or electric. Our spot is number 8. It has lots of room around the fire pit to enable a big group with social distancing. It's also the closest space to the bathroom. That will be convenient for our evening Imbibing/Dranking!

Not sure about beer pairing after that much sun exposure.