Every time I attempt to write about the Canby Ferry ride, my fingers go all autopilot on me and I type “Candy Fairy.” Which is certainly creepy, and obviously points to some deep seeded childhood issues related to my love of “tasting the rainbow.” Which is drug talk. If your drug is Skittles and you were left alone in front of a television to learn to speak. BUT I DON’T WANT TO DISCUSS THIS RIGHT NOW I’M FINE.

The ride started awkwardly when DWP and I chose to wear the same cycling formalwear. Playmanator attempted to document the event. I tried to hide my face Prince Blanket Jackson style while DWP used his powers of Gaussian blur to alter focus. Apparently Playmanator has a tilt-shift camera phone. Amazing.

Along the way, we discovered an enchanted garage sale designed to tempt each of us with the single item of our dreams, and then place that item slightly out of financial reach. Like a cruel reality show hosted by an inflexible (physically and fiscally) woman in a lawn chair, we would be forced to rely on our wits and powers of negotiation to make our dreams come true, and we would learn a lot about ourselves in the process. This is what we learned:

We can’t negotiate for shit, and our dreams did not come true.

For reference, our dream items were:

Playmator: a nearly authentic framed Spuds McKenzie poster
DWP: MTV’s Cribs – The Book
Rachel: *abstained due to religious objections
Editor: ceramic fox with doll eyes in a suit

The ride went off without a hitch. No flats. No mechanicals. No wrong turns. No whiners. Just miles of beautiful roads and a dog sitting on the roof of a truck.

It’s widely known that Vancouver, BC was colonized by hippies during the Vietnam war, eager to escape the oppressive stranglehold of “the man”. It’s less known that Vancouver, Washington was similarly colonized, but by stuffy bankers and corporate middle managers eager to escape the oh…progressive lifestyle of Portland. They knew that the only way to be “free” of the tyranny of art and coffee shops and bookstores and restaurants was to load up their convertible wood-paneled PT Cruisers and build a new community 10 minutes North. Buffered by car traffic and protected by an army of consumers at Fort Jantzen Beach, they settled into their own utopia. Four cars in every four car garage, and a Fuddruckers on every street corner. They wore pleated khakis and high-waisted mom jeans, and never again had to wonder if faded T-shirts were ironic or not. Because Vancouverites believe in the importance of clothing being earnest. They picked up golf. They built strip malls and mega churches. They stopped having recreational sex, and instead boned procreationally . You know, for the Lord.

“My god,” they thought. “This is fucking beautiful.”

You know what? It’s not. I know, because I just rode my bike around there yesterday and it was bullshit. In fact, the best thing I can say about it is that it was like riding in Beaverton. That was the best thing.

Sure, there are a couple of nice spots. But none of them are within a 400 kiloton blast radius of a place called Hearthwood. I know this. Because I looked it up with a tool called Ground Zero.

What I’m trying to say here is that Vancouver is just as uncool as you think it is. You might be fooled by the downtown area. They have some amazing, untapped second hand stores and the best Dairy Queen I’ve ever been to. But once you leave the synthetic charm of the downtown area, you’ll be lost in maze of strip malls and home construction projects that would make Robert Moses weep. If you’re looking for a Michaels craft store, Vancouver is the place to be. Those places are like Starbucks out here. And if you have a hot date, and your hot date really wants some jalepeno poppers from TGI Fridays even though it’s only Tuesday, well Vancouver has got you covered there, too.

But if you want to go on a super fun bike ride through rural countryside with no traffic, smooth roads, and beautiful scenery, no. This is not right for you. Yes, I saw a couple of cool things. There was a car dealership that had a giant paper mache tyranasaurus rex out front. And I saw some goats. And a bunch of abandoned, half finished McMansions. And a ton a late 80′s model Camaros.

And I learned the Camas High School is home to the “Papermakers” and their mascot appears to be a rabid, furry industrial paper making machine. GO PAPERMAKERS!

But it was mostly awful. Miles and miles of chipseal roads, lined with giant cloned homes, each with a trampoline and ATV in front. If you want to ride out there, here’s the map.

Infinity&Beyond

This country has a lot of weird shit in it. When I was a kid, I remember going into a rest stop in Missouri that had a severed head floating in formaldehyde, just sitting on the counter. Nobody famous. Just some guy. This head was supposed to make me want to buy more Gatorade or something, but they put it next to the picked eggs, which I remember just made me feel conflicted. And I love picked eggs. Now I’ve just read that a pawn shop in Texas has Pancho Villa’s trigger finger in their collection. Until today, I had always assumed that Pancho Villa was just another Cuban revolutionary who sold T-shirts with his picture on them to tourists who thought he somehow represented “sticking it to the man.” But it turns out that he was even more awesome than that that guy. Pancho Villa was the most feared Lucha Libre in Mexico. After years of saving money by posing for Polaroid instant photos with drunk Americans wearing sombreros, he invested the money into a patent for distributing low-quality tequila in plastic bottles. He then took all of the money he made with his plastic bottle patent and hid it in the mountains, having a map to the treasure tattooed on his fucking head. I know. Hard core. Unfortunately, he forgot to reverse the map for mirrored viewing, and spent the rest of his life digging in the wrong place, just like Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark. With Polaroid no longer making instant film and with his jar of pesos lost in the hills, his only source of income was gone, and he died broke and alone, buried in an unmarked grave clutching his beloved SX-70 camera with no pictures left.

I’m not done yet. Stay with me. I’ll get to the bike stuff soon.

Years later, someone remembered Pancho’s map. The one on his head. So they dug up his body and they cut off his head. Now they’re out there somewhere, wandering around with a puckered map on a severed head, looking for a bag of pesos buried by a washed up wrestler. Amazing. I know.

What does this have to do with cycling? Well, it’s my lifelong dream of the week to create a route around Portland so amazing that someone will want to cut off my head to find it. Sure, they’ll be disappointed when they actually do cut off my head, and find only a stick-and-poke tattoo of Tweetie Bird dunking a basketball over Taz with the No Fear logo above them both. But it will be an honor to have had them cut my head off at all.

SO what is this amazing route? What makes a route so good that it’s worth chopping up a corpse? That’s easy. This is the list:

1. A turkey so docile that it can be pet like a dog.
2. Alcohol and/or tater tots.
3. Rednecks with guns.

Here are the basics. Up Saltzman. Down Skyline. Across Cornelius Pass and left. Right on Rock Creek. Ride towards the sound of popping. When you realize that the sound of popping is gunshots, ride away as quickly as possible. Left on Elliott. Left on Skyline. Left on Johnson. Right on Pederson. Left on Jackson Quarry. Left on Helvetia. Left on Phillips. Left on Old Cornelius Pass. Right on Skyline. I know. That’s a lot of direction. Feel free to mix up the lefts and rights at your leisure. I’m sure it won’t make much of a difference.

Now go home and have some pickled eggs.

activity_8585952

I’m not one to make excuses, but I haven’t written anything lately because I’ve been in Switzerland. The big one. I was there researching this ride in Oregon, the little one, the one you’re reading about right now. It was a long flight just to check facts that I’ll be fabricating anyway, so now I’m jet lagged and nothing I say is going to make much sense. But what I learned is that there are big differences between big Switzerland and little Switzerland. This is how they compare.

First, big Switzerland is in Switzerland. Which makes sense. But little Switzerland is in Oregon. Which makes less sense. This little Switzerland ride, the one in Oregon, is called little Switzerland because, like the big one, it’s green and beautiful with vistas of snow capped mountains. Also, it wears leiderhosen and chooses not to get involved international disputes. It focuses its time and energy on watchmaking and dairy products and multifunctional cutlery. It is attractive and blonde and can play the alp horn. It dips bread in a pot of cheese and calls itself “dinner” regardless of the questionable nutritional value. It will launder your money for a percentage. Also, little Switzerland has never financially assisted the Nazis in any way.

These parts of little Switzerland are exactly like big Switzerland. Except for the Nazi thing. And in big Switzerland the mountains go much higher much faster. Mathletes call this the grade or incline or gradient or pitch or slope. I was never a mathlete, but I do know of another group of people who used words like that…. Nazis. And I don’t know anything about this hate filled science. But I do know that when I finish a ride in little Switzerland I go out and eat hamburgers and drink lots of beer and come home drunk and happy. But In big Switzerland I go to the grocery store and buy little cups of yogurt and a loaf of bread and I drink water from the tap and it costs me roughly one million dollars but I still go to sleep with a big hunger.

Little Switzerland = Big Meals
Big Switzerland = Little Meals

This is confusing. I know.

In big Switzerland I slept on the floor of a college dorm room. In little Switzerland (Oregon) I would have slept in a bed. But in big Switzerland (Switzerland) I was on a floor. Because big Switzerland is made for people who work in finance and wear nice suits and use product in their hair to make the front part look wet and stick straight up. I don’t know how to do any of those things, so I slept on the floor of a college dorm room. My host made me a giant bowl of yogurt and musli and fruit and said that it was a traditional meal called Beirchmusli. It looked like what I eat for breakfast when I’m alone and feel too lazy to cook. But in big Switzerland you can eat this at any time and call it “traditional food” and you’ll appear nationalistic rather than lazy.

This route map isn’t really the entire little Switzerland ride, so it’s more like little little Switzerland. But it’s the good parts and enough of it to be amazing. As far as I can remember, it’s the Marmot Road section that really starts to get crazy beautiful. The elevation profile below is a cruel joke. This ride is not pancake flat. It has hills. Not big Switzerland hills, but hills nonetheless. And really, does anyone actually look at my maps anyway?

04_28_2009_route

The name “Ward’s Wild Ride #2″ implies that Ward goes on lots of wild rides. Enough of them that they need to be numbered Dewey Decimal style for organizational purposes. Which is totally true. Every mysterious ride in Portland that involves skinny tires and long gravel sections can be somehow traced back to Ward. She’s the Kevin Bacon of local adventure cycling, never more than six connections from your favorite off road “road” ride.

The “wild” part of this route is at the ten mile marker of Larch Mountain. That’s the part where the gate remains closed because of snow. That’s also the part where Ward says “let’s ride this crazy steep gravel road only I know about!” And that’s the part where you follow her and your hands hurt wildly from squeezing your brake levers on what seems like an irrationally pitched fire road next to a wildly steep cliff.

To supersize your wild, it should also be really cold and raining buckets.

And speaking of wild rides, I once read something about the Ace of Hearts swingers club at 39th and Powell that has haunted me for years: they have an all you can eat buffet of lunch meats. The subject came up while we were talking about the low quality of food stuffs on some local organized rides and, like a repressed memory, the details of this Portland Mercury article (NSFW) came screaming back to me.

I don’t want to sound prudish, but I’m not comfortable with the obvious sanitation issues related to strangers getting freaky deaky on or near my pomento loaf. I imagine that it’s in violation of some municipal code, and I assume that they haven’t installed all of the required sneeze guards and hand rails and geriatric utilities one expects at a skeezy sex den.

I mean, that place always freaked me out with it’s creepy barred windows, but I’m even less comfortable knowing that there might be a sign somewhere inside that says “Balogna is downstairs.” I was grossed out enough watching a bunch of grubby fingers manhandle the buffet at the sushi orgy Pioneer Place Mall calls Todai. But at least I didn’t know where those fingers had been. A swingin’ self serve buffet takes my discomfort to a whole new level.

What I’m trying to say here is that if you happen to be swinging at the Ace of Hearts, it might be best to just get your hand stamped and head over to Subway for lunch, even if the lunch meat buffet is free.

But I digress. Back to the ride.

1. Ride the miserable headwind out to Troutdale
2. Take a bunch of country roads you’ve never heard of before (Hurlburt to Loudon to Deverill)
3. Ride Larch Mountain Road until you reach mile marker ten. Curse the cold. Make a left down Palmer Mill Road. Which is dirt. And beautiful.
4. Hit the highway. Ride to the falls. Buy a chocolate chip cookie the size of a human head. Offer to share said cookie, but don’t really mean it. Act upset if anyone asks for a bite.
5. Ride home in similar miserable headwind. Stop to research how wind can blow in all directions at once.

Download the GPS for Ward’s WIld Ride

Running from your problems is generally considered a bad thing I think, but after getting pretty much fucked in the face by school this term I decided I seriously needed a mini vacation. The problem is that I recently joined the one-less-car club (not by choice). I have also been a long-term member of the much-less-money club. This makes travel difficult. Somehow these factors led me to decide that I should ride my bike to Olympia, spend the night, and then take the train back the next day. I hastily bought a return ticket on Amtrak so I couldn’t chicken out and started trying to find bike routes to my destination.

An amazing thing about the internet it that you assume you can find anything on it, so when you can’t find something specific, you feel betrayed and confused. Commercials for Frankenstuffs (hotdogs filled with cheese) for example, are nowhere to be found on the (so-called) world wide web. Another glaring dearth is googleable bike routes. They just aren’t there. I suspect an ACA (Adventure Cycling Association) conspiracy. Even with Caitlin working on the inside of this organization we still haven’t cracked their codes or infiltrated their routing databases.

I decided to get all old fashioned and just went out and bought the most detailed-looking Washington map I could find at Powells. “I will develop the greatest route from here to Olympia that has ever been ridden,” I thought, “I will put this route on the internet and cyclists of the Pacific Northwest, nay, the world, will ride the shit out of it. I will be both Lewis and Clark and cyclists will make lovely historical markers on the side of my route in my honor!”

J loaned me his Garmin GPS (Great Pedaling Systemizer) device so that after the ride I could shoot the route info straight into the computer (with a laser beam). In actuality, I just found some solid examples of how not to ride to Olympia. But for the sake of technological high speed information sharing, I will add these facts to the internet.

For some inexplicable reason, I had been thinking about riding to Olympia for a long time. Two of my friends, Emily and Nate, had each done the ride (Nate twice) and both suggested that once I was well into Washington I could just take I-5. Now, that sounded fucking insane to me, but Nate and Emily are both smart, safety-conscious people, so I decided I wouldn’t absolutely rule it out.

My hypothesized route was this:

Ride up highway 30 to Rainier. Cross that bridge that takes you to Longview/Kelso, WA. Get on a small highway (411) that parallels I-5. Ride on I-5 for 10 miles to cross the Skookumchuck River. Find back roads from Chehalis to Centralia. Ride up Old Highway 99. Go to my friends’ house. Eat unthinkable amounts of pizza and ice cream cones. Flawless plan, right?

Well, initially it was…

I had never ridden on 30 past Scappoose. As it turns out, that’s when that road becomes just lovely. The cars mellow out, the scenery gets blindingly green, and there’s all these roadside marshy areas well stocked with herons and other big, exciting birds. Just before Saint Helens, traffic going both directions slowed to a complete standstill. I thought there must have been a bad accident and was bracing myself to see some fucked up cars. As it turned out though, a horse had jumped out of its trailer and was running back and forth across the road, totally freaked out and crazy. Everyone was trying to coax the horse back towards its owner. I quickly snapped a photo of the horse and then rode on past the lines of stopped cars.

I got into Rainier in good time and stoked on life. Sadly my elation was short lived. The bridge I had planned to cross was a total cycling nightmare. The narrow shoulder was set up with some sort of huge-bark-chunk and large rock type of slalom. I inched across, terrified that my wheel would hit one of these hazards and I’d go flying into one of the many logging trucks flying by me. I breathed a big sign of relief upon touching down on Washington soil, I assure you.

From there I tried to find a road heading east that could take me to highway 411 that wasn’t a “truck route”. As it turns out, they are ALL truck routes. I decided to just get on with my trip and rode with the trucks. Miraculously, they all just took the left lane and gave me the right lane to myself! Not a single one honked or anything. Thanks guys!

411 is a pretty highway, but the shoulder is unreliable and small at best. Still, the traffic isn’t bad and there are many farms along it with admirable horses and cows. Near Vader, WA 411 starts to turn away from I-5. This is where I planned to turn off and brave the mega-interstate.

Nervous of harassment and (obviously) death, I got on 5 north waiting to think, “hey Nate and Emily are right, this isn’t so bad.” In reality, the only thought that I had the entire 8 miles I spent on I-5 was, “this is definitely going to be where I die. Right now. On this dumb trip. Helmets don’t matter. Nothing matters. I am going to die.” I quickly exited near Chehalis and bought I more detailed map of the Olympia area.

The new map led me into Centralia quite safely. By this point the mile counter on the Garmin had crossed 100 and I felt confident that I would actually make it to my destination. From Centralia I continued on Highway 507 through Bucoda and Tenino (AND PAST AN EMU FARM!). Just after Tenino I got onto Old Highway 99 and rode (averaging about 13 mph, mumbling and singing to myself) into Olympia. The whole trip took 10 hours. 7 hours and 48 minutes of actual riding.

I went to my friends’ house, showered, ate pizza and ice cream cones, and laid in their back yard half asleep while they worked on their garden. Afterwards my friend Peter said, “guess what we’re doing later tonight?” I prayed for anything but a bike ride.

“We’re going to see a highschool production of Little Women!”

Had I indeed died on I-5, and then rode my ghostly bike up to heaven?! Needless to say, the play was great.

The next day marked an annual Washington event: Prairie Appreciation Day. For those of you who don’t know, there are many epic prairies south of Tumwater. During the year nature-loving retirees tend to them, reintroducing native plants and removing invasive species. Then once a year they invite fellow Washingtonians to come out, walk around, and learn about their state’s plants. Our guide was a gentle man named Dan who found us some Chocolate Lilies, a lot of Camas, and a garter snake to check out. I truly appreciated these prairies on this day.

At 3:00 I headed to Amtrak to go home. Compared to the Portland train station, the Olympia/Lacey Amtrak station is a shack. It’s near nothing and basically just a small box next to some train tracks. But when I walked into said box, the place was packed! A hippy-lady blues band was jamming, kids were running around, and there was a table laden with cookies. It turned out that in addition to being Prairie Appreciation Day, it was also National Train Day. A friendly grandma gave me a “Happy National Train Day” sticker to put on my shirt and plied me with baked goods. Truly there were some fine holidays afoot.

I got home at 6:00 pm, less than 36 hours after I’d left. While the ride wasn’t 100% “fun” or “safe”, I was not only happy I’d done it, but determined to do it again. I also felt like I’d packed a week’s worth of vacationing into 2 days. I went back to school feeling renewed and revived. I decided that instead of taking summer classes I would use the money I’ve saved up to pay for it to pay my rent. I will use my extra hours to instead discover the greatest bicycle route (to Olympia) that the world (wide web) has ever known. Get ready, internet!

Download the Portland to Olympia map here.

Let me offer you my account of the descent into madness that will from this point forward be called simply Vernonia. Named after the village at the halfway point of a celebrated 100 mile ride, I knew Vernonia only as a marker on the logging map from the hit Discovery Channel television show “Xtreme Culinary Disasters of Former Logging Communities of the Northwest”. I knew this ride was going to be amazing, but I couldn’t seem to convince anyone else, and no one could muster the patience that six solid hours of my company requires. Jennifer, having no idea who I was, eventually agreed to go as far as Sauvie Island…

One hundred miles later she seemed both confused and hungry.

Things began looking ominous by the time we reached Vernonia. We were ready for snacks and stopped at the Vernonia Lake snack shack, where the guarded locals explained my food options. I could have anything. As long as it was a hot dog. Anything else, I asked? Yes. They also have chili dogs. I checked the menu for the other two food groups, and found them immediately: corn dogs and jumbo dogs. They also had worms and cup-o-soup. I think it’s worth noting the order of the foods on the menu, and imagining how they came to be arranged the way they were. It’s as if the idea of serving hot dogs, sans chili, was an idea that only occurred them later, after taking a break with a bag of fruit snacks. We eventually found the Vernonia Sentry market, which I presume to be named (and incorrectly spelled) in honor of the 100+ mile ride we were currently halfway through. Said will a drawl as “Are y’all ridin’ that Vernonia Sentry?”

I spent the next ten miles seeking the acceptance of the motorcycle community by offering them the one hand signal we all share; the international sign for “index finger going into a round orafice”.

No one reciprocated.

Jennifer’s mood fluctuated between hungry, quiet and bloated. I know that these don’t sound like moods. But these are Jennifer’s moods. Bloated was my favorite. Her mood perked up only when counting dead snakes in the road, like a cross between Rain Man and the Road Warrior.

Somehow we got stuck on the highway that runs straight through the beautiful plains west of Portland. But we couldn’t see the beautiful plains, because there were strip malls in the way. And we were fearful of getting lost. We didn’t see anything beautiful, but we did see the largest “Slow” sign West of the Mississippi.

Eventually we hit rock bottom and both halucinated a giant talking banana that gave us some kind of smoothie and some lucky lotto numbers. The banana calmed us down and told us that there was nothing to be afraid of, and then asked us to follow it into the light. I’m told that halucinations can’t be photographed, but if they could, our plucky banana diety would look like exactly like this.

The next thing I knew I was at home drinking a beer.

The map of our ride, which should be totally ignored after the 75 mile marker, is below. Here are the basics:

1. Highway 30 to Vernonia Highway, and follow it all the way to Vernonia. Stop when you smell microwaved hot dogs.

2. Make a right on Timber Road.

3. Stop a a swimmin’ hole and get your feet wet. Also get poison oak.

4. Cross Highway 26

5. Make a left on Highway 6, and follow it until you reach Gales Creek Rd.

6. Miss a turn somewhere and stay on Highway 8; keep muttering to yourself, “This doesn’t look right.”

7. Follow this road straight into hell. Curl up into a ball and wait for the giant banana to save you.

8. And… you’re home.

vernonia

In the kitchen area at work they have stash of tea. Usually it’s just the awful Lipton variety. But today they had something different. Something special. It was called New Mother tea. It promotes lactation. I don’t know what “lactation” is, but I assume that it is similar to “endurance” and that it is a byproduct of “electrolytes” and “antioxidants”. I always hear my more athletic friends talking about their lactation threshold and their lactation acids. So I made some. I’m drinking it now. I can’t tell if I’m lactating more than usual because I don’t have a power meter. But my cheeks are flush and I feel a warm glow.

I wish I’d had some of this performance enhancing wonder tea yesterday when I rode what the indigenous cyclists call “Birdland”. It’s a traditional route through Helvatia with a small side trip through the most magical place you’ve ever seen. There are peacocks and goats and ponies and geese and rainbows and flowers and moss and a wise old talking Beagle named Copper who speaks both French and Dutch fluently. While Dawn riled up the menagerie with her underwater camera, I asked Copper if he’d like a ride into town. He replied “Ah joh, ben je betoeterd, ik loop wel.”

Luckily, this is one of the two Dutch phrases I know (the other being “Jij lachte mij gisteren uit maar nu heb je zelf een puistje, lekker puh!” which roughly translates as “You laughed at me yesterday, but now you have a pimple yourself, serves you right!”)

At one point Dawn insisted that we all lay on the hood of a mossy car and pose sexy. It was obvious that none of us have any idea what sexy is. The pictures are not sexy. But I think that if I keep drinking this tea, I’ll bring sexy back.

The ride is 55 miles. Roughly 50 miles of normal and five miles of magic. Keep your lactation levels high for best performance.

birdland

Okay, so I can’t do this ride in an hour. But I really wanted other people to do it, and come home thinking “Wow, that Editor is fast!” But it isn’t true. I’m not fast. And I can’t do this ride in an hour. This is why in high school I was voted “most likely to lie to make friends.” I was also voted “least attractive” and “most deserving of obvious self esteem issues.” My high school was a cruel place.

But this ride is amazing. Every time I ride it, I’m reminded that Old Germantown is least likely to be voted “most likely to be voted the best downhill in Portland.” That road is super fun and terribly underappreciated. And Keiser is a fantastic,  low-traffic road that feels like riding in France, if the French had torn down all of their history and built hacienda-style McMansions with vanity farms (le McMansiones if you are French).

Davy introduced me to this ride. Davy hates a lot of stuff, but Davy likes this ride. And I remember thinking “If Davy likes this ride it has to be good” because Davy hates all sorts of likeable things, like panda bears and birthday cake and fun and cookies and the evening sunlight that comes with spring-ing our clocks forward.

So back to the one hour thing. I created this whole section for “one hour rides” and I felt like I needed another one in the list. maybe someone can do it in under an hour to justify it’s title. In fact, let’s consider that a challenge to my three loyal readers; the gauntlet has been laid. Start at Blend Coffee in the North, Williamette, over the St. Johns Bridge, up Saltzman, North on Skyline, down old Germantown, Keiser back to Skyline, down Germantown, back to Blend.

In one hour.

Then post your time so I can vote you “most likely to lie to me on my own website”.

davy_loop

I’ve got nothing to say about North Plains and I blame the winter. Early this season I was really excited to ride. Anywhere. It was so sunny and brisk all the time. But now when I ride, I’m spending all of my time thinking about future rides in the sun. So even when it gets sunny on Winter rides, I don’t notice. Because I’m already upset with my current ride for the Winter-ness that it has the potential to display. The same way a lousy dog owner will sit around with a rolled up newspaper just waiting for the rug-peeing that every untrained puppy has the potential to commit.

Stop peeing on my rug, Winter.

I tried to talk to Tommy about my magic Xbox, that streams movies and plays weird Japanese import games from the 80′s and tells me the weather and remotely starts my car when it’s cold outside and talks to me when I’m feeling down and runs completely on the energy created by the Powertap’s internal fusion reactor. Tommy wasn’t impressed. Tommy just made fun of me.

But my Xbox is amazing.

I don’t know where we went today. It was all a blur of lefts and rights and straights. A couple of factories. Some bucolic charm. Six thousand other cyclists. A little bit of residual snow. Forty something degrees most of the time. It was everything that I could possibly want out of a winter ride. But that doesn’t make me appreciate it any more. My toes are still bitter about about cold. I can’t wait for Spring. Here’s the map:

northplains