Saturday was a warm and muggy day.  We wanted to get the slate path finished up before the rain moving in over the next few days.  Here it is pretty much finished:

We need to back fill in dirt on each side by the edging and will be putting in more sand as it settles after the rain.  It is slightly meandering around the garden bed.  At some point, we will be doing the other side – with lessons learned from this side 😀

Then it was riding time! We opted for a shorter ride since storms were supposed to be coming in the afternoon.  We thought a lake ride was in order.  At least the path sections were nice and cool to be on:

John trying to cause an accident:

The little theme park for kids is open in Lake George now.  Magic Forest.

It’s not a total rip off of Mickey riding Dumbo or anything 😉

The lake was surprisingly uncrowded. It was Elvis Festival weekend, so we thought there would be more people, but then there are the inside performances as well as outside performances.  We stopped at the park for lunch.

Another packed lunch:

I have been inhaling blueberries lately.

The sun was going in and out behind clouds and it was feeling pretty humid. We walked around town before having our treat.

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We stopped by the Lake George Baking Company.  It was hot enough for ice cream, but the bakery is so good and we can get ice cream right near our house any time 😀

View from a cookie:

You could hear a few different Elvi singing around the village.  The better ones you pay to see, the ones that are free to see can be hit or miss.  This one was not bad, though.

Not sure Elvis wore too many flannel shirts, though…

Ducks all in a row:

I noticed after I took this that all of these are male. Wonder where the ladies are?

It was time to head home.  This is one of my very favorite sections of the path:

It was really starting to feel hot in the sun, too. You could almost feel the rain was going to come.

We took a longer route home just to get in a few extra miles.  It passes by this cool old barn.

And then we arrived home.  It started raining maybe 45 minutes later, so good timing!

Temperatures when from muggy mid 80s to 50 degrees and raining on Sunday. What a turn around!

House closing happens on Monday – we can’t believe it is actually going to happen!

We finally decided we were ready for a ride to Saratoga for the year.  That means cupcakes!  😀

Saturday was quite cool, actually.  More than cool. It got down to 31 degrees overnight.  I had covered up my plants that had new growth on them to help them make it through the night, and they seem to have survived.

Going to Saratoga is a 40 mile ride, so we left earlier.  We packed lunches since I wanted a cupcake and didn’t really want to spend the money on lunch *and* a cupcake.  When we left the house, it was around 50 degrees.  It was a little chilly, but at least it was sunny.

Leaving from our new house, it is all road riding to Saratoga and on the busier route 9, which is a designated bike route, but still fast traffic.  It goes down and crosses over the Northway, but we did that once and never again. Too dangerous – so we take a detour by one of the state parks to avoid the on/off ramps.

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About 10 miles in, we stopped for a snack:

Another biker came by and chatted for a few minutes.  Then the lady that lived in the house we were stopped near came out and talked with us as well.  It was a chatty day!  She has a beautiful bridal bush in her yard.

10 more road miles and we got to Congress Park in Saratoga.  The working carousel:

There were some baby ducklings nearby as well!

Baby ducklings are just a ball of cuteness wrapped in feathers. I wanted to take them all home. 😀

We settled by a sunny fountain for lunch:

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My sandwich survived being in my bag on the way down. Yay! It was also cold enough that the coating on the protein bar didn’t melt.  Score all the way around.

After walking around town for a while, it was time for cuppies!  We stopped at Parkside Eatery. They do a fantastic job with baked goods.  I saw a chocolate chip cookie dough frosted cupcake and new right off the bat it was what I wanted:

This picture looks smaller than it was, too. Seriously – this was so ride worthy!  It had ganache instide the cupcake as well.  Uber rich. Holy moly. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Riding always makes food taste really good as well.  This was probably 550-600 calories based on its weight, so not something I would be able to fit into a normal day of eating LOL!  That’s one of the reasons I love ride days 😉

This did sit a little heavy in my stomach and I just couldn’t eat the last couple of bites. 

By this time, it was mid afternoon and time to head back with cupcake power.

All pictures taken today were done while stopped. Too busy of a road for me to snap pictures while actually riding. Safety first 🙂

We are about at mile 30 on the day here. John was having a good ride:

We avoided the Northway interchange on the way back as well and go into farm land. This is one of my favorite parts of this route we take.

It’s an undulating road and almost never has traffic on it. Check out that sky!

We arrived home a little tired, but not bad at all for the first Saratoga ride.  Cooler temps help keep you fresher, too, I think.  It topped out in the mid 60s.

My bike computer actually got bumped and stopped recording for almost a mile, so the total was actually 41.7  😀

What does one eat for dinner after a long ride? BBQ chicken, corn on the cob and sauteed zucchini.

These longer ride days make it hard to get much else done because we spend most of the day on the bikes and then feel to tired to start any big projects.  So, we settled in with our new fire pit and an adult beverage 😀

Yard work can be done on other days, right?

It was really a beautiful weekend. Spring has finally arrived.  After doing a lot of landscape work, John and I wanted a ride for some ice cream since it was so warm.

Ready for the riding season. It may be the first couple of days of May, but my skin is so sensitive and especially after this winter, I got out the big guns riding with exposed skin.

Ready for riding!

We had just gotten started on the ride and were on the main street.  I saw a cop car pull off the side of the road (no lights) and get out of his car. He then flags John and I over.  I was thinking “WTF?” What could we possibly be doing wrong? Well, turns out that he saw us riding with all the proper gear and obeying traffic signals and wanted to reward us for doing that. So, he gave us each a coupon for a free scoop of ice cream!

He said it was a new program (more aimed towards kids) to reward proper riding and educate. So, if anyone rides in Glens Falls – wear your helmet and you, too, might get free ice cream! This coupon will be saved for another day, though.

We did a fair amount of road riding.

I have always loved this old building.

It’s been for sale for years. I think it was an old schoolhouse that ended up being converted to a warehouse of some type. It would be a cool artist community building or something.

Finally back onto the path after 10 miles or so.

We took a lot of the same route that I did by myself last week, only we didn’t stop at the greenhouse…

Snack time!

Dates or dried pineapple are my favorite ride snacks. Quick calories and they don’t sit in your stomach like a lump.

My riding partner:

We had about 7 more miles to go to get to ice cream, so back to riding!

On to famous Martha’s!

Great Escape isn’t open yet, but Martha’s has been open for almost a month and it was packed on this beautiful sunny day. Lucky us, they opened a new window up right as we walked by it and got served right away.

My sundae:

I am in a rut at Martha’s. I love this sundae. It has hot fudge, raspberry sauce, and cookie crumbles.  Very ride worthy 😀

Also very filling.  We were at 20 miles at this point and wanted another 10, so we took another road loop around, so not too many pictures for safety sake.  We did stop at a pretty country club, though.

Note that the trees are starting to leaf out now! With the wamer weather, it’s like it happened overnight.

Home again!

Ride stats:

Total miles:  30.8

Average speed: 12.2 mph

Top speed:  25.7 mph

Ride time: 2 hours 30 minutes

Calories burned: 1067

Felt good. We almost were going to do a ride closer to 40, but I am glad we changed the route. 30 was a good point where it was a great workout and didn’t push the distance too much.  We will be there shortly.

And speaking of things popping out overnight, my tulips finally woke up! I had a bloom today:

I am sooooooo happy to see this. It has been a long time coming. There should be a bunch more opening this week, so I will actually have blooms for Friday’s What’s Blooming post!

What a great weather weekend! We spent a ton of time outdoors doing yard work and riding. John got a mini chain saw and started cutting down some shrubbery. Then came the digging out of the stumps, which was really hard work. Here is the overgrown before:

And progress made:

It is a ton of work getting this down to a clean slate. We will be removing those other shrubs as well, but the half dead ones had to go first as they were such an eyesore. I do have to say that the soil is wonderful and it makes my gardener’s heart sing to have that to work with.  I don’t really have a plan quite yet for these beds, but some ideas. I would like to have some climbing roses around the front stoop, so I am going to get a couple Zephrine Drouhin, which are old-fashioned climbers that bloom in partial shade. Hopefully they will look something like this:

This landscaping is going to be years in the making. Not a bad thing about that, though.

Anyway, on to riding!  We decided to go all the way to the lake on Saturday since the paths were finally cleared of snow.  We are about 6 miles closer to the lake at our new house, so what used to be about a 32 mile round trip is now 19. It also cut out most of the flat part of the ride and plops us right into hills for a challenge.  

It’s still pretty brown, but I think buds are starting to appear on the trees if you squint really hard.

The marshy area is quite wet right now. 

We be biking!

😀

The peak point of the climb.

It’s actually a little easier to get up this climb with a shorter ride in front of it. Still tough early in the season, though. Phew!  This is right by the outlet malls. Later in the season this road gets backed up with traffic going to the shops. We can just skate on over it.

They freshly paved this part. The tree roots were buckling the path in this section and it was really bumpy. Now nice and smooth for riding – and taking pictures while riding!

Arrival at the lake!

There was a surprising amount of people out and about. I guess all the locals got out to the lake before the tourists get here.  Only some shops are open. Most wait until Memorial Day, but not this place :

The phantom was playing on the second story. That’s him in the purple. Gotta love Lake George.

We stopped by the Lake George Baking Company for a snack and took it to sit near the lake.

The wind was actually starting to pick up pretty hard while we were here. We saw later that gusts were up to 49 mph, which seemed right. It was almost blowing us over a couple times waiting at stop lights on the way home.

We are still exploring different roads around our new place and when we took a loop home, we came across this nature preserve:

The cool thing?  It’s only 1.5 miles from our house!  I can’t wait to check it out.  We might try doing some cross-country skiing next winter.  I tried downhill and really didn’t enjoy it at all, but I did like cross-country when I tried it.  Then maybe we might get outside more in the winter.

We have the hiking shoes now 😀

Home.

Not a bad ride for early in the season.  It was actually about 20, but my bike computer wasn’t working for the first part of the ride. We will likely be going to the lake a lot more rather than Saratoga, especially earlier while we build the distance legs.

The weather has finally cooperated and we spent a lot of time being active and out!  Friday was Siblings day and while I didn’t see my sis then, we did get together on Saturday.  

Nice picture for Colleen.  I had to be a goof, of course:

Sunday was so nice out. It ended up in the 60s – even though the day started below freezing!  Eek!  We walked to breakfast and got 2 miles of walking in.  Then we tested out John’s new purchase for his bike – a trailer!

He got this for taking packages to the post office. At our old place, he walked to the post office every day (1.5 miles round trip) and he misses doing that here since it is farther and we have been using the daily pickup. Now he has this so he can get that exercise back again.  We can also use it for grocery shopping!  The store is only a shade over 1 mile from the house, so we tested it out today.

It fit about an average week of groceries in there. We can’t get anything huge, like a 20 pound box of cat litter or a meg pack of toilet paper, but we did get a gallon of milk in there with all the rest of our stuff. It also comes right off the bike for regular riding, which we did later!  Too bad Pixie can’t ride in it.

We headed towards Lake George on the path again and decided to take it to the top of the hill we call the B*tch, which is about 2 miles from the lake, which would be a good test for the legs.

Here is the country club.  No golfers out yet as there is still snow on some of the greens.

This part was snowy before and now is clear.  Still so brown, though. 

This is the part right before you start climbing up the big hill.

Nobody ever gets off their bikes here, either. Stop, yes. Get off the bike. No.

Going along gangbusters and then oops!

Not really surprised to see this because it just hasn’t warmed up enough on the treed section yet. So we turned around.  It was pretty, though, with the snow melt.

After riding back in, we decide to make the first yogurt stop of the year! 

This is the place that serves Only 8 and while they sell ice cream all year, they only sell the froyo from April to October. Not sure why.  Anyway, it wasn’t a super long ride, so I had a kiddy vanilla with some raspberry sauce:

It’s amazing how warm 60 degrees can feel after months of really cold temps. 

So great to be out biking again for real!

Today’s total?  19 miles.

Legs are doing pretty good. Riding the trainer over the winter helps keep the saddle area ready for riding, but it does nothing for the hill legs.  This was a somewhat hilly ride and my legs were a little tired. Not bad, but I have a ways to go before a 50 mile ride. Looks like the weather will cooperate this week with some nice temps for riding as well!

Riding, riding, riding!  It was a biking weekend, that’s for sure.  I had barely any work on Friday – so I ended up with a much needed 3-day weekend!  Friday we went out riding and I ended up with a broken chain. That is really very uncommon to totally break a chain, but leave it to me.  Once we got the bike home, John was able to repair the chain, so all is well now.

Saturday was the usual long ride day.  We decided to head to Saratoga.  It was really a gorgeous day, sunny and in the 70s.  It was windy, however, and that is really the riding condition that I dislike the most.  Going to Saratoga is all road riding as there are no paths going down there.

Lots of sunshine today! River Road is really such a pretty route to take down.  It gets hardly any traffic, which is wonderful in itself, but it has some really great scenery.

This is farm country.  I took this picture as this llama was just going away.  He did not want his picture taken!

At mile 20, we stopped for a shade break and a snack:

Dried pineapple and mini chocolate bars.  I was getting a little hungry. We each had a protein bar right before we left the house, but that didn’t last long.

I think these are wild daisies?

It was only about 7 miles to go to get to lunch, so we moved on out.  We got to Saratoga and stopped at The Local to eat. I was hangry by this time!

They serve a lot of locally sourced products, which is nice.  I decided to get a breakfast burrito.  I almost got a sandwich with fries, but I didn’t feel like getting anything greasy.

I didn’t eat the beans. Why serve beans with a breakfast burrito that has eggs, potato and cheese? 

Anyway, a couple doors down from The Local was a bike shop.

We stopped here after lunch so I could buy a few spare chain links in case my chain ever gives me problems again.  Do you ever buy something you think will just be a few bucks and you are shocked at the price?  That would be me. I bought 4 links. They are half an inch, if that. Anyway, 4 links cost $20!! Not sure how much that would make a whole chain.  Anyway, I need to treat those links like gold.

We biked back into the downtown area and walked around the shops – and then you know what time it was!!

Now, this was a big cupcake. This picture doesn’t really show how big it is. Normally I get the smaller size and John and I will split another one and 1.5 of the smaller cuppies is still smaller than this single bigger one.  I was feeling still somewhat hungry and my burrito wasn’t that big – so I went for the big one.  Note to self – no matter how long the ride, don’t get the big one.  It was delicious, though.  Cookie dough – it had a ball of cookie dough at the bottom of the cuppie!

By this time, it was after 3:30 and time to head home, although I was really full LOL. I was a little concerned that my cupcake might revisit, but it stayed down.

This is when the wind really started to take a toll. Usually around here the wind will be at our backs for one way and headwind the other.  That’s fine.  The wind this day was a cross wind and a changing wind, so you hardly ever got a break.  It was relentless. Plus it would get gusty.  It’s hard having wind push you from the side because it can knock you over if you aren’t paying attention. Then it would suddenly change and be right in your face. Phew!

We ended up back at the Wildlife Preserve again for a break on the way home.  This would be a fun trail to hike some day.

Again, this is really such a pretty ride.

Here is a peak point of the ride.

We were swapping the lead so that one person could draft and the other would take the brunt of the wind. On a windy day, drafting can really help save energy, but we still stopped a few more times than usual. Not to mention this ended up being a really long ride. This was around mile 48 or so?

Then no more pictures. I was really starting to drag.  Normally in a ride I gain strength as the ride goes on and I finish really strong, but the wind just plum wore me out!  Not to mention I got a stinger in my shoulder blade. Do you ever get those? Ugh.

The last 5 miles or so, I really hit the wall and John told me to just stay behind him and he let me draft the rest of the way home. Now that is an awesome husband!

Finally home!

Ride stats:

Total miles: 57.4

Average speed: 13.1 mph

Top speed: 31.2 mph – downhill, baby!

Saddle time:  4 hours 28 minutes

Calories burned: 1477

Calories burned probably higher than that considering the wind, but what are you going to do? It’s just an estimate anyway.  This was a tough ride, but a pretty one.

We did our usual 20 mile breakfast ride on Sunday, which is good to do after a long ride to keep from being too stiff. All these miles helped put a dent in my 400 mile goal for the month. Only 285 miles to go!

It really feels like summer now! We had a hot weekend around here.  Need to remember to do early rides on days like this, but we had stuff to do in the morning – and then there was the parade for our town’s Heritage Days.

As I have said before, we live on the main road in town, which is annoying for traffic, but gets us great seats for all the parades!

I love the bagpipes, too:

They are really good!

After lunch, we headed on out to the lake! Very sunny, so I loaded up on the sunscreen today.

I made us stop fairly often in the shade to keep cool.

That’s sweat on my nose and not sunscreen 😀

John was laughing at me taking a selfie, so I took his picture.

Now who’s laughing?  That would be me.

Now for the climbs to the lake!

The lake was busy!

This was about 16.5 miles into our ride.  We didn’t go into Lake George Village, but just stopped here and had a snack and a rest:

Then it was time to turn around.  It’s all innocent looking, but this is the start of a 2 mile climb up.

Then zooming along in the shade.

Our destination was Martha’s!  Mile 22. John missed the first trip to Martha’s a couple weeks ago when I went by myself, so he wanted a visit.  Mine was a hot apple sundae with cheesecake flavored ice cream.  Yeah, baby.

Now I think Martha’s sundaes are the best. They don’t just put the ice cream in and pour a topping on it. They put in some ice cream, then a bit of topping, then more ice cream and the rest of the topping. Their sundaes are very ride worthy 😀

After a fill up of water bottles, it was time to head back home.  Someone had taken the time to work on their property that abuts the path. This was all new.

Foxglove!

I am getting me some of these in our new house.  

This is the cinder part of the path that we don’t go on very often.  We stopped here to look at some ducks. 

Home, sweet home. You can see the settee project in the background, too.

Ride stats:

Total miles:  32.4

Average speed:  12.3 mph

Top speed:  31.3 mph

Calories burned:  1047.

Not a super long ride, but a good distance on a hot day.