training

I just got Camille back from the shop on Tuesday and love the improved shifting. Today was a fun day, but long and very wet! It seems to rain every Thursday for some reason... Anyway, biked up to Redmond for Aikido in the morning as usual and then stopped at QFC to pick up some picnic food. Fresh hot chicken tenders and a cranberry, walnut, pineapple salad. Yum! Then we headed back to the Sammamish River Trail and followed it north to Woodinville, where we stopped for lunch and watched folks playing catch with their dogs. The wind started picking up and it was getting chilly, so we rode on to Bothell and connected up with the Burke-Gilman Trail. There was the most gorgeous scenery as we biked the trail along the river, by the sea-plane airport in Kenmore right on Lake Washington and then into Lake Forest. It's such a pretty trail! Chatty squirrels darted across the path in front of us, about a hundred black birds sat in a couple trees and cawed up a storm of insults overhead as we passed and on the way home we met three roosters who seemed to think they owned the trail. Why did the chicken cross the road? To see if the bike would swerve first...

There were a number of chocolate refreshment stops made along the way. I found an extra-dark Hershey bar with blueberries, almonds and cranberries to be just the ticket. Highly recommended! :) We fought the wind the entire way back to Redmond and just as we arrived, it started to rain again. My feet were almost completely numb with cold, so I spent a couple of hours at Starbucks nursing a venti chai with whipped cream and thawing out. Then we braved the wind and the rain back to Aikido and after class again fought the wind home. 9am to 9pm. 50 miles. And I have now completed my white belt tests to go on to yellow belt. Lots of great things today, so I'll end it by spending my first night in my new sleeping bag and tent. Lots of love, LaichandCamille! <3

tires and brakes

Due to the rather excessive number of flats that I've recently encountered, when my front tire went flat at midnight halfway home from work last Saturday, I decided enough was enough. When I got home and took a closer look at the tire, I found several pieces of glass and rock embedded in the tire as well as a rather large gash to the side. I had replaced the back tire the week before, but obviously the sides of the roads here are brimming with opportunities to puncture. So I took Camille to the bike shop yesterday and she got Armadillo tires which according to Mike are tested through fields of glass. Good stuff. Sounds just a bit like my daily commute! While changing out the tires, notice was made of poor Camille's brake pads...or lack thereof. In a mere two months the back brakes were completely worn out and wafer thin while the front brakes were about halfway worn through. With new brake pads, Camille can now stop on a dime. :) I've put almost 500 miles on her in two months. Not too bad, but not as much as I was hoping for. She's going in to the shop this weekend for a tune-up. Overdue, I think. She'll enjoy the TLC, though.

first snow!

Well I was sure excited to get up and see SNOW on the ground! Camille was a bit more hesitant as you can see, but she frolicked a bit once she discovered the joy of making tire tracks in the snow. :) This is her first snow ever, so she wasn't sure what to make of it at first. She was cold and happy to return to her spot in the garage with her buddy, the VW bug.

Happy December!

Laisha and Camille

first ride around lake sammamish

Today we rode all the way around Lake Sammamish for the first time. It's 26.5 miles or 43 kilometers. Not too far, but a good ride nonetheless. There were some nice views along the way, a few good hills and a bit of wildlife here and there. It was pretty cold though. My feet were frozen so we stopped at REI to get shoe covers and those helped a LOT! I hope to get another long ride in on Sunday, but the next few days are full of work! It's supposed to stay cold and wet it looks like...I wonder when we'll get snow!

For the both of us,
Laisha

first things first

It's time now to start thinking about communications for my trip and I've decided to post here on blogspot. :) Camille and I are really excited about the trip and thinking of all kinds of details and possibilities. We'll have to see how things go, but now that we have found each other, things can go forward. Camille is beautiful and I'm sure we'll be adding lots of her glamour shots to the page soon. :) She's fast and steady and oh, so light! It makes hill climbing much much easier!

Thanksgiving day was the four-month mark for our departure. That means that training is going to become much more intense over the remaining weeks. This first month is all about loooong slow rides to build up endurance. I'm not sure how to fit it in to my work schedule and where exactly we'll go, but we will definitely be doing many of these this month! Camille hates to go slowly, however, and I always find myself trying to catch up to the speed that she so obviously wants to run along at. Yesterday on our trip up to Redmond she took a whole 15 minutes off the usual hour to get up there. Wow! That's fast!

For both of us,
Laisha