Not the best weekend for riding, but we did manage to get in a bit.  Things are almost starting to feel like spring around here.  The trees are starting to get some buds.  The gravel path is still too wet to ride on, seeing as it was pouring rain on Friday.  There was also rain in the afternoon forecast and it was in the upper 40s, so we decided to keep closer to home than planned.

Street riding until we got to the path after 7 miles.

 

This is right by our froyo shop that we like to visit.

 

Too cold for yogurt yet, though.  At least for us.  These people were out for ice cream!

We headed down the path.

 

Our plan was to get in around 20 miles for the day, so we headed out to what we call Decision Point to turn around.  This is about 5 miles from Lake George and the beginning of the hilly section. Mile 10.5.

 

It climbs for around 3 miles and then there is a 2 mile zoom downhill into Lake George Village.  From here, it makes no sense to do anything but go all the way to the Lake or turn around.  We decided to turn around here.

John says “Coffee Time??”   I say “YES!!”

We biked back to Glens Falls to Coffee Planet.  We spend a lot of money time at this place.  Bikes securely locked together and to the pole.

 

I also dropped and cracked my helmet on the bricks.  Now I need a new one.  👿

Downtown Glens Falls.  Very quaint.  This was around mile 15 or so.

 

I had a black and white cookie with my coffee.  I love the black and white cookie!

John had coffee cake.  Our treats were touching on this plate, but that’s okay in the dessert world.

It was clouding up on our way home and I have to say it was pretty windy.  I was sweating from the work into the wind- even though it was only in the 40s.

Another ride in the books!

 

Ride stats:

 

Total miles:  22.1

Average speed:  12.5 mph

Top speed:  22.4 mph

Calories burned:  650

No ride on Sunday as it was cold and windy.  However, we did get a lot of outside work done.  We tackled the bushes on the side of the house, which was a total bear thank to some neglectarino neighbors.

I got the garden bed cleaned up.

 

The only thing I haven’t done is trim the butterfly bush down because I like how it looks for now, but when it starts to bud at the bottom, I will cut it down.

 

Lots of bulbs coming up. Yay!  My shadow looks like it’s chugging a beer, too 😀

Warmer weather coming this week – woo hoo!

 

 

I said I was going to get my bike on the road in March and I did it this weekend.  It was going to be sunny and mid 40s on Saturday, so I decided to just go for it.  The first ride is such a rigmarole with changing the tire to my road tire, pumping up the tires and adjusting everything.  Then hauling the bike down the stairs. How stuff gets out of whack from sitting on my bike trainer is beyond me, but it is so.

Mileage set to zero.

 

Anyhoo – we decided to bike for some coffee.  I actually got John to go with. I think my excitement was catching or something 😀  Or possibly he was enchanted by my stylish attire:

I was totally layered up for this ride.  I had on leggings under my bike pants. Then long underwear, a long sleeve technical shirt and 2 jackets. I could barely move!

Can you tell how excited I was to get out there?  John was waiting for me.  Usually it is the other way around.  It’s a little weird to bike with snow piles still around.

 

It’s not as snowy in other spots, it just looks like more because of the shoveling of the driveway.

The roads were dry, but the unpaved bike path is still impassible.  We did go on a bit of the paved part.  The canal is still frozen over.

It actually turned out to be quite a nice ride.  I started to get a bit sweaty as we got towards the coffee shop.  The sun helped warm us up a lot. It actually ended up being close to 50 degrees!

At mile 6.5, we ended up at Coffee Planet.  They changed out the artwork recently and this artist encouraged participation with this large framed piece of paper and colored pencils to draw on.  This paper was blank last week.

 

We each had coffee and a snack.  No cupcakes, but I did have a big cookie!

 

It was really an enjoyable day.  It felt so, so good to get out on the roads.  Riding on the trainer just can’t even come close.  Not to mention it can’t come close to doing real life hills and terrain.  We got home at 14 miles.

Not bad for the first ride of the year.  My thighs were a little tired, but other than that I was blissfully happy.

 

As I took this picture, John said “Ear to ear”  – and he was right!  I was so happy for the rest of the day.

Sunday brought another quick 6 mile ride, although it was breezier than Saturday.  I have 20 miles on the year, which is about 0.75% of my goal miles for the year  😯

 

 

 

 

Saturday had the looks to be a perfect outdoor day.  After a Friday of soaking rains all day, it was nice to see the sun.  The roads were pretty soggy, though, so we scrapped plans to bike to breakfast to let the roads dry out.

John owed my my football meal and I waited all week to get my breakfast at the Chocolate Mill!

Brioche french toast with blueberry compote.

The coat the bread with crushed cereal, which gives it a yummy crispy crunch!  And served with *real* maple syrup, thank you very much.

Temps were warming up and the roads were getting drier and we could’t wait to get on the bikes!  We decided to bike down to Saratoga for lunch.  We had to go earlier because of it getting dark earlier and also because we were having my folks over for dinner.

Ready for some fall pictures?

Kind of past peak, but nice none the less.  We stopped around mile 5 to save this guy:

Big snapping turtle.  He was crossing the road to a field, but that wasn’t such a good place for him, so we herded him towards the river and waved cars to slow down.  He started to safely head back down to the river bank.

And they aren’t kidding.  Turtles are sloowwww…

After a bit, John asked if I wanted to stop for a picture.  Sure!

Then he said, “I meant the view.”  Oh.

I decided to shed my jacket here since we were stopped and approaching the hill section for the day.    The skies were so blue and clear, right?

I laughed when I saw this picture.  John is not ducking out of the way, he was just looking at his front tire and I got some of him in the shot.

We stopped for a break around mile 15.

We went birdwatching here once with my sister a couple years ago and there were clouds of mosquitoes – so we didn’t stay long.  I would like to hike here again some time.

 

We arrived in Saratoga at mile 24 and went to the Beekman street art district for lunch. This place is called The Local and they serve lots of craft beer and locally sourced food.

We had BOGO coupon to eat here – score for bargains!!  I saw one of my favorite dishes on the menu – eggs benedict.  With local eggs?  Thank you!

 

We kept proclaiming how beautiful the day was for riding.  Should have known that Mother Nature had a surprise in store for us.  After lunch, we bike back into town for a bit of dessert.  We each got a pumpkin cupcake at Bettie’s.

One was a cinnamon coffee cake cupcake with pumpkin buttercream and the other was a pumpkin cupcake with pumpkin buttercream.  We split both of these.  While we were eating, the skies clouded up and it started to sprinkle.  Uh oh.  We went over to the library to go online and check weather.com.  The whole state was dry, but for one big green blob coming right our way with thunder!  Eeek!  We waited for a bit.

Nothing like being stuck 20+ miles from home, right?  We thought if we left, we could skirt around the rain as we headed north, so we  left after a bit.  We bike for 4 or 5 miles and got totally soaked and decided to pull over at a Dunkin Donuts to wait it out.  Too miserable.  I was sopping wet.

I had nothing waterproof with me at all, so I did my best with my hood under my helmet.  We could see blue sky just to the side, so we were hoping it would come soon.  Still pretty, though.

The rain finally tapered off and I wrung out my jacket.  Not waterproof.  There was absolutely no rain in the forecast for the day, so I don’t know what was up with that.  Now we were on the back end of the rain the rest of the way home, so the roads were wet, but at least it wasn’t raining on us any more.  It was cold riding soaking wet, I will say.

This is what passed over us moving on off to the north.

We had a fairly uneventful ride home until….

Right about mile 42:

Flat tire.   We were both afraid to say something out loud about getting a flat during this ride and then it happened 5 miles from home!

I took some foliage shots while John was changing his tire.

 

Finally made it home with an hour to spare before my parents were to come over for dinner.  Mad scramble to cook and shower!   I think my bike shoes won’t dry out for days.

Ride stats:

Total miles 46.9 miles (eh… 47)

Average speed:  12.7 mph

Calories burned:  1403

That ride had a little bit of everything in it!

Today’s pink picture:

We had the most glorious weather this weekend! Cooler and dry.  It was a perfect weekend for biking 😀

We decided to head on down to Saratoga for our long ride on Saturday.  This was all road riding.  John wanted to have lunch down there, so we left around mid morning.  We took the newly paved bike lane on 197.  We had been kind of avoiding that because of the poor condition and now it is nicely done.  However, I kept hearing a squeaking noise coming from John’s bike.

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

It was rhythmic with his pedaling.  I decided that was going to drive me nuts hearing that for 50 miles, so we pulled over after about 4 miles for him to mess with the pedal.

The newly paved part is back there where the truck is.  This little meadow was full of butterflies. You can’t see them in this shot, but they were floating all over.

John lubed up his pedal arm and we were good to go.  No more noise!  Next stop was around mile 12. It looks like we are in the middle of nowhere, but we are actually right next to the main route 9 going south, just on a side road. Also newly paved.

We thought we saw a dog in the driveway of the house across the street, but turns out it was a goat!

He was just hanging around in the driveway.

We had snacks here.

It was bright and sunny today.  Not too hot, though, which was really nice.  Next stop was near the Wilton Mall.  This was 20 miles in.  I actually really hate biking near here because the traffic is icky.   We locked the bikes to a fence.

John wanted Hattie’s Chicken Shack.

knock, knock m***********

Now, if you have been reading, you know I have been poultried out this week.  So, I decided if I was going to eat at Hattie’s, I was going for what Hattie’s is known for.  What Hattie’s won a Bobby Flay Throwdown with.  The fried chicken.

I haven’t had fried chicken in years. Many years.  Let me tell you  – this is probably the best I have ever had.  I ended up not eating the bun and just eating the chicken out of it (it had coleslaw on it, southern style).  It was juicy, not greasy and so good!  Yummy!  We walked around a bit to let lunch settle.  We stopped at a couple stores –

And then here:

I pointed out various things that I wanted and John remarked that he could just do 1 store and be done shopping for me for Christmas.  Smart man I married, I tell you.

We decided to head to downtown Saratoga and John noted his front tire was flat.  Sigh…  While he was changing the tube, I filled up the old one with air to see where the leak was and it held air.  I am thinking what might have happened is that my bike was leaning on the pressure valve and let the air out  of his tire.  We need to test the tube later and see.  It would be nice to save $5 if it was still good.  Anyway, we got back on the road to our next stop on the tour of Living in the 10%, which was at The Bread Basket.  This was at mile 24.  I love how the front door looks like a hobbit house.

They had some cute cupcakes there:

However, we went with a more adult taste.  John’s carrot cake cupcake and my German chocolate.

They look smaller in the picture than they seemed in real life.  My cupcake with chocolate so dark light cannot escape its surface.

I forget the the cupcakes at Bread Basket are gut bombs.  Very, very rich.  There is a 4th dimension and it is cupcake vision.

John says “do I have to eat the whole thing?”

I was uber full at this point.  We walked across to Congress Park to let the cupcakes settle.

This is the Triton pool with “Spit” and “Spat”

Carved from Carrara marble. Kind of wanted to take a dip in that pool, too.

Time to head home.  We took what has become my favorite way home via West River Road.  This adds some miles onto the way back, but it’s all good, right?  I like this way because it goes through a lot of different scenery like shade, farms, open road, along the river.  There is a good mix of hills, too.  Luckily the first part leaving Saratoga is fairly flat.  I kept telling my cupcake to stay down!

Here we had just come out of a wooded area that was nice and shady.  John was adjusting his brakes.  This was around mile 32 or so?  Here is a cool barn:

We are around 40 miles here.  We took a breather, but didn’t need any snacks.  I was totally fueled on cupcakes 😀  You can see forever from here.

This is almost at the top of the biggest hill climbs for the way home, so it’s nice to get here and know that you are close to being done with the climbing.

Along the river, we spotted several birds.  One was a heron and the other was this egret.  This was around mile 46.

I was feeling pretty good and had a good second wind by this point.  We clipped along pretty well on this ride.  I was glad to be finished, though.

Ride stats:

Total miles:  52.2

Average speed 13.6 mph

Top speed:  32.5

Calories burned: 1607

This was probably the fastest average speed we have had for a long ride.  That’s 52 miles at that speed, so we were quite pleased about that.  Helps that there wasn’t really a strong wind today.

I love our long rides!