I sleep great again. At this stage you could probably throw me in a bathtub and I would sleep well. When I get up half the house is awake.
Ryan is gone by the time I get out of the room but he left a stack of pancakes for us which is awesome. I know he wanted to stay but he was on call this weekend so he needed to leave early.
I made bacon and burnt it to a crisp.
Today is a double day so we get out of the house early and down to the lot, rolling before 9:00. We are doing a normal loop then a downhill day today. We are all set to go and roll out on time.
We head out New School to Pinkham Road, taking that up to the Butter Tubs Access trail that leads to Butter Tubs and all the way up the hill. This seems to be the way they want us to do these trails now and it’s a reasonable climb. On the way up Capers & Jim split off, and Alex bailed before we hit Pinkham Road so our crew was down 3 people already.
We take the gravel road over to Swamp Donkey and BFR, which technically means Big Ferry Rock but as the rock is 9′ tall I imagine it really means Big Fucking Rock. We head on up to the gazebo on top.
I do the Black Bear Extension 4 times, the first 3 with Mark who I then took to Stormin’ Norman then back up to meet D talking to her mom. Then we did it together for my 4th run of the day.
We run out to Stormin’ Norman then down to Flower Brook where we see Joy directing traffic and she informs us that everyone else has gone back. This is fine as D & I are off doing our own thing. We cruise out Flower Brook to the car by ourselves.
In all the “easy loop” ended up being 21 miles and 2:45 moving time. The Strava link can be found here.
From town we head home and eat some lunch, which is a turkey sandwich and some snacks and a cup of tea. We also take it easy for a little bit to rest up before we head over to phase 2 on the day.
Eventually we all gear up and ride over to the bike park for some free downhill runs. I say free because we get these tickets for free due to being members of the VMBA. BONUS!
D rode a few more runs than I did because I was done. In all I did an additional 16 miles in just under 2 hours. The Strava link can be found here.
Joy & Steve are on dinner tonight and they do chicken fajitas or soft tacos or burritos or whatever you want to call them. They’re super tasty.
Tonight is our last night here, which brings the team trip to a near conclusion. We will wake up here tomorrow but it will be a cleaning of the house and a general disassembly of the crew. We are still 11 in the house at this point which may be an all-time high for the last day.
With that, we wrap up the 9th day of our summer KT trip. Just 1 left to go.
Traveling Normandy 