Here's something I can't recommend enough - the New Years morning bike ride. It does the following:
a) it keeps you from partying like it's 1999
b) it prevents you from learning the meaning of "
coyote ugly"
d) it's better than going to a holiday sale at the mall
c) it starts the biking year off on the right foot
This year, I rode up to the top of Mt. Hamilton on New Years morning, along with a huge crowd of strangers and friends, all out for the same reasons. Mt. Hamilton is a not too steep, but very long climb, and the road has 4k feet of elevation gain. During winter, the top is frequently snowy so weather is a serious factor, but traffic is usually not. You can't do it every year, but when you can, it's great. Every part of the US (
except Florida) probably has a similarly good holiday ride.
This year, I met a friendly fellow with a really neat piece of gear. Fuzzy ear warmers on his helmet. Here he is surveying the cold, foggy valley below from the warm, sunny peak:
Notice that he's also sporting a cycling cap and that the ear warmers are velcro'd on to his helmet straps. This means his noggin is dressed in layers. Take the ear warmers off when you get warm, and the hat when you get warmer. Put it all back on for the descent. He told me that you can get these, handmade by a local seamstress, at
Cupertino Bike Shop. I haven't verified this yet, but I'm sure they'd be happy if you'd drop by and ask about them, or check out the website for yourself. I've been happy for several years with an
Outdoor Research Military Watch Cap. It's pretty handy because you can flip up the band to uncover your ears if you get warm.
The fellow with the ear warmers also had an unusual bar mounted index shifter with double paddles:
Where did these come from?
The ends of these two cables look the same at a cursory glance, but when you get them up close to eachother, you realize that the ends of a Campagnolo brake cable and a Shimano road brake cable are not the same. The Campy cable end on the left is smaller in diameter, and also shorter in length. I didn't realize this until I tried to install the Shimano cable on my Campy bike. Catalog ads tend not to say "Shimano compatible only", and the cables install pretty much the same way, so who would have thought them to be different?
While riding my road bike down a local rural road, I found a mystery tunnel. It didn't have much of a path going to it, and went under a pretty major freeway, so I decided to come back with the cyclocross bike to follow it. I also checked it out with Google maps and Wikimapia and thought it might lead into a dirt path in a neighborhood on the other side, creating a neat road/dirt bike loop. Well, on my return visit, I found this:
