Weekend Ride Roundup

Okay, I usually do about a hundred miles of riding on the weekends, at least it feels like a hundred miles, but the Sunday ride just did not hold up its bookend of the bargain.  Saturday is supposed to be anywhere from 60 to 80 miles (60 if there's climbing up to 80 if the route is flat).  Hey, I'm ambitious, but 80 miles of climbing is no good for riding alone.  I learned my lesson after falling down a mountain, hurting my shoulder, and riding another 30 miles home with just one hand on the handlebars.

But this weekend was lamer than I would have liked.  As you may have read earlier, I'm getting my buddy Warren back up to speed so he can do the metric century at Tour de Palm Springs.  So, I told him we were going to do a 40 mile ride since we did a 30 mile ride the week before.  But I lied!  His odometer's battery went out, so right now, he's "trusting" me for ride information.  I planned a 50 mile ride that was a "gentle" rolling course along the San Gabriel foothills.  Since that mileage is little low for me these days, I compensated by gearing up and doing a strength-building ride (bigger gear, slower cadence, more resistance, ouchie on the hamstrings).  Unfortunately, even though there is no climbing, per se, on a rolling course, there will still be small hills that are pretty steep.  Here's the steepest one on Sierra Madre in Azusa:

 

 

That's the view from the top.  And after a short breather, here's another view of the top:

 

 

Can you see that red dot in the middle of the picture?  Yes, that's Warren, looking all relaxed, chatting on his cell phone.  Well, he wasn't looking that well-rested, but he was talking on his phone.  Sometimes our boss gets obsessed with something and he just won't let it go.  Anyway, that gave Warren some extra motivation to punish that hill.

Our goal was the cafe Coffeeberry in La Verne.

 

Here's the front entrance.

 

This place is right across the street from the University of La Verne, which is a small Christian College, so there's usually students and staff going into this place, but not early on a Saturday morning.

 

Where is everybody?

 

Duh, sleeping, like normal people, instead of crazy people, like Warren and me.  Well, after realizing that, all we can do is comfort ourselves with cafe fare: some kind of espresso drink and a croissant.

 

Hmm, frothy!

 

After consuming the, er, consumeables, it was time to head back, but Warren didn't want to face "The Wall" in Glendora, so I told him that I had a flat way back, but also reminded him of one of my favorite sayings about riding and hills: You've always got to pay the piper.  That means, if you go downhill and you are ending where you started, at some point, somewhere, you will have to go uphill.  So, my "flat" route back was really just a more gradual ascent back to Pasadena.  (Oh, a little aside here: the San Gabriel Valley really packs in the little towns tight.  To get to La Verne in only 25 miles, we went through Pasadena, Sierra Madre, Arcadia, Monrovia, Duarte, Azusa, Glendora, and San Dimas.  Including La Verne, that's 9 cities.  On the way back, it was La Verne, San Dimas, Glendora, Azusa, Irwindale, Duarte, Monrovia, Arcadia, and Pasadena.  Another 9 cities, but 10 cities for the entire 50 miles.  Yeesh.)

So, 50 miles on Saturday wasn't that bad, because of the strength-building.  But on Sunday, I got more miles going to the start of our Sunday Ride, than I did on the Ride itself.  Let me give you a hint for riding in small groups: always buy long stem tubes.  I don't care if your rims are short or medium, but somebody's going to be riding "aero" rims, and if you guys have a lot of flats on the road, you are screwed.  Long stem tubes are like Type O Negative blood: everybody can use them.  Well, one of us had a flat at the beginning of the ride, from yesterday, so she had to change the tube before the beginning of the ride, which made us start late.  Then, 5 miles into the ride, the tube went flat again.  I thought, "This is ridiculous.  How can you have 4 flats in less than 24 hours."  I saw her check the inside of the tire before replacing the tube and I didn't see any debris rattling around in there, so what was going on?  I checked the valve and it seemed loose, so maybe that was the culprit.  We pumped it up and it was holding, but then I realized that I was hearing a sssss coming from somewhere on the tire.  I checked a gash and it was shiny inside: a piece of glass was embedded in the tire causing all the flats.  Grr!  I had to pop the glass out like it was a zit!  But we had no more long stem tubes.  So, quickly, the small group of riders got their first patch kit clinic.  I was thinking, "Okay, we're going to be on the road in 5 minutes now, then I can get all this frustration out of my legs and on to the pavement."  Denied!  As I was pulling the pump off of the stem, I pulled the valve with me, and worse, the valve got stuck inside the seal of my little pump.  Ride over, call SAG, have fun driving back and forth to pick up the bikes, see you at the bakery, and I'll be eating comfort food.  8 miles to the start, 5 miles to Gold's Gym to say hi to a friend, 5 miles back to South Pasadena.  I got 18 miles at least, but our group got either 10 or 5.  Guh!

Well, sometimes rides get washed out.  On New Year's Eve Day, a small group of us were supposed to have a 50 mile ride, and then the rain that ruined the Rose Parade came on and washed us out.  Stuff like this happens every once in a while.  But come on!  (Sigh)  Let's just say I'm looking forward to my daily rides this coming week.

Road Trip, Part Whatever. Gimme that hooch!

Saturday was sleeping in day.  That meant about 8:30 AM.  For me that's really late.  I get up at 5 AM for work every day, and I "sleep in" 'til 6 or 6:30 on the weekends before I start my weekend bike rides.  Then there was a brunch and good cistercian coffee from a monastery in South America.

 

 

So, around noonish, after much catching up and trading stories amongst ourselves (ourselves being the bros and Sean), we sauntered over to the Wine Tasting Room in the pouring rain.

 

 

So here's Jeffrey with his daily portion of wine.  Just kidding!  That was my brother James' joke, don't blame me.  Actually, that's not just a decorative cask, that is aging white vinegar that will be for sale later this year.  Okay, everyone pose with the big vinegar barrel!

 

 

What else they got in here?  Here's the banner of the Abbey's Crest, which appears on the wine label.

 

 

Remember, I showed you the picture of the label in the last entry?  What do you mean, you don't remember?  Okay, okay, I'll show it to you again.

 

 

All the grapes grown at the New Clairvaux Vineyard are Spanish varieties.  The Spanish Syrah, Petite Sirah, Albarino, Tempranillo, Viognier, and Zinfandel grapes all like the hot weather, and in Vina, it can get into the 100's for weeks straight during the summer.  The reds they have are Zinfandel, Tempranillo, Syrah, and Petite Sirah, from lightest to heaviest.  The Zinfandel and the Syrah are my favorites.  The Petite Sirah does not have a lot of flavor yet, but the brothers believe that is because the first harvest grew too much in the plentiful topsoil.  The trappists are still new to wine growing since they're used to taking care of orchard trees, which have a lot more patient timetable.  The blush they have is a New Zinfandel which is very tasty.  The whites are the Albarino and the Viognier.  The Albarino is like a dry Cabernet Sauvignon, crisp with a fruity finish.  The Viognier is not like anything I've tried before.  It's definitely dry, a bit tart, which I was not expecting, with a hint of a Chardonnay finish.  Weird.

Oh, I'm a bit of a wine buff, although I don't have any favorite labels.  I just know what a certain wine is supposed to taste like.  My favorite wine is the Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc from Napa.  Leave it to me to enjoy obscure fruity wines.

Then Jeffrey took us on the backroom tour of how the wine is made and aged.  Now, remember, their operation is taking place in the largest freestanding brick structure built west of the Mississippi. Two square acres. The winery used to be filled to the brim with equipment and barrels, up until 1919 when Leland Stanford sold it away.  The trappists operation takes place in less than 2000 square feet.  That's less than 2.5% of the area underneath the Old Winery's roof.  So, here's where all the action takes place.

 

 

The crushed grape stock gets placed in those big silver vats for fermentation and mixing.  Here's the crusher:

 

 

Once, the effluvia has been mixed, aged, and a little fermented, and after Sean, ahem Fr. Sean, takes a little sip to make sure everything's okay:

 

 

Some of the mass gets placed into a big vat for the reserve:

 

 

And the rest gets poured into the barrels for final aging:

 

 

During this time, the wine is periodically tested to make sure the aging process is going well and there are no other problems.  Part of the room looks like a mad scientist's laboratory:

 

 

Thank you James for pointing that out.  But the best part is sampling the wine with nature's best testing kit, your own taste tester!  Here we see Br. Placid sampling barrels that are two weeks away from bottling.  That means this shit tastes pretty good!

 

 

Gimme some more of that hooch!

 

 

And so that was our rainy day wine tasting tour.  Let me put in a word about the weather.  It tried to rain on Friday as we drove up to the monastery.  It started raining sometime Friday night, and the rain did not stop until Saturday afternoon.  But the sun came out for one day, right before it was going to rain for 3 days straight.  And that was Sunday, just in time for Placid's Solemn Profession.  There were some more interesting serendipitous coincidences, or graces in Catholic theological terms, that happened during Jeffrey's big day.

 

 

Road Trip, Part 2

 

The reason for the road trip: my brother Jeffrey has been preparing for his solemn vows for the last six years at The Abbey of New Clairvaux.   New Clairvaux is in the little town of Vina, population 800, 105 miles north of Sacramento.   The Solemn Profession of the vows of obedience, simplicity, and stability is like the vow of marriage for a monk, except he is getting married to a place and a community.   It's a big deal.

My brother James flew into LAX from Chicago on Thursday night, so that the family could all drive up together from Pasadena.   That's right, a family road trip. It's how I've been spending my vacation time for the last five years: reliving summer vacation road trips with my parents so that we could all visit Jeffrey at the monastery.   Jeffrey understands the emotional sacrifice and is especially appreciative of James and I seeing him every summer.   During Jeffrey's formation (training) he was allowed very limited contact so that he may practice detachment.   But he still got to see his family for a week once a year, provided they go to the monastery to do it.   This occasion is way different, since there are scheduled to be 20 people from around the country coming to see Br. Placid make his final vows.

So, Friday the 13th, the Morrises took off from Pasadena in a cousin's minivan.   In it, we had the immediate family, plus an aunt from the Philippines and a cousin from Upland. Here's James reading during the 8 hour ride:

 

 

The wind was particularly strong as we came down the Tejon Pass on the I-5.   Cars were dodging tumbleweeds as they made their way across the highway.   There were a couple of tumbleweeds the size and shape of VW bugs taking their sweet time to make the crossing.   Things didn't get interesting again until we were almost to Sacramento.   Here's a big ass water tower that says: Sacramento City of Trees.

 

 

I have no idea what that means since Sacramento is one of the flattest places I have ever seen and is known more for it's rice and bridges, than any trees that I could see.   See, here's one of the many rice transports that we passed along the road:

 

 

This trailer actually had the motto: "Have a Rice Day" on the back.   We arrived at the monastery around 4:30 and hung out at the Guest Center before we got the keys to all of our rooms.   The Guest Center has a Koi pond with the most spoiled Koi I have ever known.   If a person just stands near the edge of the pond, the fat carp do this:

 

 

Lazy beggars!   Behind the pond is the Guest Chapel and meditation room. You can see it here:

 

 

As James and I settled in, we hung out with our brother before we sat down and ate:

 

 

We settled in and caught up with Jeffrey and his friend Sean, ahem, Fr. Sean now, from Jeffrey's theology school days at St. Meinrad's.  He's about as loud and obnoxious as I am.  You'll get to see him in action when I post my entry on the wine tasting tour of the Abbey's Vineyard.  Here's a look at their wine label:

 

 

The wine tasting happened on Saturday and we got all Sideways with the Spanish grapes.

Road Trip, Part 1

For those who haven't read my previous entries, I am the oldest of triplets.  This weekend, my youngest brother, the one that doesn't look like me, is making his final vows join the Trappist Order at New Clairvaux Abbey in Vina, California.  Jeffrey, also known as Brother Placid, has been at the monastery for 6 years.  He made his Simple Promises of obedience, simplicity, and stability; this is basically the same formula for any type of Catholic vocations: obedience, poverty, and celibacy.  Here is Br. Placid:

 

 

The Abbey of New Clairvaux has an interesting history in its short life from its foundation in the 1950's.  The abbey was part of an expansion from the motherhouse in Gethsemani, Kentucky which was made famous as the home of the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton, whose book: Seven Story Mountain, written in the style of Augustine's Confessions, helped jumpstart the Catholic vocations boom in the 60's and 70's.

New Clairvaux was founded on the former property of Leland Stanford Ranch, a failed vineyard and winery that was converted to a Walnut and Sugar Plum orchard. The winery structure is a 2 acre brick structure, which is still the largest brick structure built west of the Mississippi.  Recently, the abbey has been successful in recovering the stones from its original structure in Ovila, Spain, which was bought by William Randolph Hearst to be built as a larger structure than his infamous San Simeon Hearst Castle.  During the 1920's and 1930's, Hearst bought the structures of many abandoned castles and monasteries in France and Spain with the intention of transporting the stones for use in new buildings. He had the stones from the Abbey of Clairvaux, which was built in the 12th Century, transported to the Presidio in San Francisco, and then ran out of funds before construction could begin on his Windhaven Project. The stones languished in storage at the Presidio, some being damaged in fires, the church stones bought by a parish in Florida which reconstructed the old abbey's church, and the rest being used in Golden Gate Park as the bedliner for manmade lakes and decorative stones throughout the park, eventually being worshipped by Druids and other assorted pagans.

In the late 1990's, Governor Gray Davis signed an act of the California Congress to cede ownership of the stones to New Clairvaux Abbey to establish the original Chapter House structure with the provision that the building be open to the public as a historic artifact.  Once completed, the Chapter House will be the oldest structure in California at over 800 years old.  Here we see the current progress of the reconstruction.

 

 

Some of the original stones have been incorporated into the window archways, as you can see here:

 

 

Here's what the inside of the construction looks like:

 

 

 

Most of the recovered stones formed the gothic arches that held up the ceilings of the walkways that enclosed the central quad.  The yellowish stones you see are new stones from a quarry in Texas which were cut on the abbeys grounds to make sure they would fit with the old stones.   Here's a view of the new and old stones placed together to make the buttresses for the outside of the Chapter House wall:

 

 

The Chapter House is the most important building in the communal life a Cistercian monastery.  It gets its name from the readings of the chapters, or writings, of St. Benedicts Rule during meetings which the monks attend to contemplate and help interpret The Rule to apply to daily life.  All monastic life in the Catholic Church is based on the interpretation of St. Benedict's Rule.  Some orders are stricter than others, which is why there are so many different kinds of monks and nuns in the Catholic Church.  The Trappists are an offshoot of the Cistercians, and have a stricter observance of St. Benedicts Rule than the other Cistercians.

 The Chapter House, therefore, is the center of community life for the monastery.  Simple vows are professed there, formal meetings, and celebrations are held there.  That's why its a big deal for The Abbey of New Clairvaux to have the original chapter house from the Abbey of Clairvaux.

This blurb about the current reconstruction project is just something that I wrote during the trip up there.  I just got back and wanted to post something, so look for the more personal stories (i.e. funny) to be posted here during the coming week.  I'm tired now and will post more later.

Here's me being tired before I took off from the monastery on Monday:

 

The Replacements

In many ways, a bike is just like any other piece of sporting equipment, not just to be thought of as a vehicle.  A tennis racket needs a new grip and new strings every so often.  Your skateboard or your in-line skates need wheels, bearings, and brake surfaces replaced after they wear out.  So, a road bike is not so different.  But like a vehicle, there are many more parts that can be replaced.  First of all, here's a wide angle of the obsession, er, bike:

That's a Trek 5200 Carbon Fiber frame.  Pretty much Lance Armstrong's climbing bike from 3 seasons ago, but much cheaper because the components are 1 class below professional grade.  The whole bike weighs only 18 lbs.  Compare that to the professional bikes that have to at least weigh just over 15 lbs to qualify.  The poor bike doesn't exactly look like this anymore because of wear and tear and because of a spectacular crash (or two).

So, what are the usual replacements on a bike?  The tires are about it.  The tires for road bikes are made by the same guys that make car tires.  You got your Michelins, Continentals, Bridgestones.  I've mainly ridden Continentals, but a buddy found a sweet deal on some Vredesteins, so I'm riding them now.  Tires usually last about 1500 miles or so before having to rotate them, then only another 500 after that.  I've put over 6000 miles on that bike, so I'm on my 3rd pair of tires.  "Wait, wait," I hear you saying, "you said rotate?  There's only two tires there, what are you talking about?"  I'm talking about the rear tire wearing out faster than the front tire because more weight is put on the back tire than the front.  See in the picture above?  Where's that seat?  Right over the back tire and that's usually where my (not so) fat ass hangs out.

Okay, so tires get replaced and the inner tubes when they get flats, but what else?  Like I said, that's about it.  Brake pads usually last about 15,000 miles, so I got another two years before I replace them.  The bike chain needs replacing every so often, but that depends on what you do with your pedals.  If you're a mountain climber or a sprinter, your chain needs to be replaced every season.  Some guys replace them for every race.  I just got my chain replaced during my bike tuneup because I'm a billy goat.  Anything else that needs to get replaced on the bike comes from damaging the bike during, er, radical maneuvers.  See the bike seat above?  Here's what it looks like now:

There's some holes in the back, the leather up front is all stretched out and coming off.  That came from my "radical" maneuver when I tried to become one with the pavement.  Yes, the bike was upside down at some point during my tumble.  So, that had to get replaced because ripped up leather chafes and wears holes in bike shorts in very private places.  So, here's my new close, intimate friend:

He and I like to have 4 or 5 hour conversations about the weather.  Great talks, large vocabulary on that guy.  I also replaced the handlebar tape, so now it's black, just like the seat.  There are other pieces of equipment that need replacing that don't belong to the bike, but they attach to the bike during rides.  That sounds appropriately vague: I'm talking about cycling cleats.  Yes, I've been reduced to talking about shoes on my supposedly manly blog.

Anyway, cleats wear down too because they aren't always clipped onto the pedals; they've got to come down when you stop at lights, or for skunks crossing the road before sunrise, or to keep your balance while you give the finger to some SUV that just cut you off in the middle of an intersection.  But when the cleats push off the ground to get you started again, they scratch the steel.  Here's what a brand new cleat looks like on my shoe:

So shiny!  So new!  Now, here's what those clips look like after 5000 miles:

The steel has been totally worn away in that one corner.  The clip starts out at 1/8 of an inch thick, so think about how long it would take you to take a fork and just scrape it on the asphault in the parking lot until you have no tines.  Now multiply that by two.  That's how much time was required to wear down that clip from pushing off at each stopsign, each stoplight, starting in the parking lot of Griffith Park, the Rose Bowl, my house, my office, etc.  You get the idea.  That's a long time!

So, you might be asking: "How comfortable are those shoes?  Can you walk around in them?"  Well, let me just say I have a new found appreciation for women wearing their high heels, especially you gals who wear the 6 inch variety for your, ...ahem..., work environment.  The shoes are only comfortable while pedaling, that's it.  My kind of cleats also don't have any traction since it's just one flat piece of metal in contact with the ground.  So, what do I do if I have to stop somewhere and walk more than 3 steps away from the bike?  I'm glad you asked that question:

Those rubber covers are called "Coffee House Caps."  Especially designed for walking around cafes while sipping espresso drinks and fueling up for the next 20 miles.  There's a whole cycling culture devoted to finding cyclist friendly coffee houses and riding from cafe to cafe.  You think I'm kidding?  Take a look at these guys:

And these guys:

And this guy:

If you look real close at the shoes, you can see the coffee caps in effect.  I don't know how I do it, but somehow all these blogs become about coffee.  Hmm, coffee...  Uh, gotta go, I, uh, gotta check on something brewing in the kitchen.

Stop and smell the roses... or something like that

One of the cooler things about being on a bike for 40 to 85 miles on a Saturday is that if you see something interesting along the way, you can stop and appreciate it.  Now mind you, most of the time you're worrying about parked cars with doors that fly open, but sometimes you can get on a stretch of road where it's just you, the bike, and the pavement.  Then you can see the weird stuff that passes for advertising or signage around Southern California.  Take this Christmas display I found in front of my favorite fruit stand in San Dimas:

 

Mopey's on the pokey side, here.

 

I've nicknamed that big brown statue "Mopey the Christmas Tortoise."  At least they could have given him a hat to blend in with Donner and Blitzen.  And while we're speaking of imaginary creatures (this blog is PG-13 kiddies, so don't go crying to mommy and daddy when I tell you the Tooth Fairy is imaginary too), I also found the home of the Warner Brothers and their sister, otherwise known as the Animaniacs:

 

Smack dab in the middle of Burbank.

 

Yes, that is the Warner Brothers Studios Water Tower.  And yes, it is only cool to certain people of a certain age who appreciate educational material sung to the melodies of '40s and '50s musical comedies, jazz and vocal standards, and the occasional opera.  That water tower may be big, but I've also found liquid refreshment containers of various sizes around the Los Angeles Basin:

 

'Oy, that Croc looks right irritated!

 

Kaldi's coffee house in South Pasadena took a much more practical approach to describing the sizes of their coffee doses instead of the Tall, Grande, Venti stuff.  What the hell is venti?  Isn't that italian for winds?  We're definitely missing some context here, which is why I appreciate Kaldi's no-brainer approach: pee-wee, wee, not-so-wee, and not wee at all.  Even I can't get that mixed up while ordering coffee.  As you can see, the interesting things we see along the way can also convey very important information.  Take a look at this sign, which gives a helpful suggestion from The Man Himself:

 

The Eleventh Commandment

 

If that's not good enough resolution for you, the text says: "11. Thou shalt not zoom around blind corners."  The eleventh commandment is good advice for cars, bikes, and people in the foothills of the little town of Sierra Madre.  There are other signs that cyclists encounter in the mountain pass roads that can alter their plans for the entire day:

 

So...what are you saying?

 

I think they are suggesting that there might be something wrong with the road to Chantry Flats.  Just a guess.  They're being awfully subtle about it.  Sometimes cyclists can ignore these signs because oral info lets other walkers, hikers, and cyclists know that the road is only closed to motor vehicles.  Glendora Mountain Road is currently closed to motor vehicles (50 foot gaps in the road that have merely fallen down the cliffside might pose a problem), but there's plenty of room for outdoor enthusiasts.  But the road closure signs for GMR are nowhere near as insistent as this setup.  However, my favorite sign on a mountain pass road just reinforces that you are supposed to enjoy yourself on the bike, not take too long doing other stuff along the way:

 

I saw the sign, and it opened up my mind.

 

I also like that it looks like I own a water source all by myself.  Hee!