68th ride - 7/23/2015

This morning I had a very good ride—my longest yet here in Colorado this year—but it was not wholly without its challenges. I set out to ride the trail that Christy had told me about, as I had wanted to do yesterday, but couldn't due to taking a wrong fork in it at one point. I had measured out a route that had me turning around 5 miles into the ride (where the trail crosses under Taft Hill Rd., for the second time). Well, the good news is that today, by paying more careful attention to both the trail signage and to the map, I was able to do this first half of the ride successfully.

However, when I got to the turnaround spot, my first challenge occurred. I went to consult the map, just to confirm what I thought, and I had been keeping it in the open basket of the trike in order to be able to get to it more easily. However, when I looked for it, it was all gone. Fortunately, this first challenge was rectified fairly easily and quickly, when, a couple of miles after the turnaround, I found it lying in the middle of a little-used road the trail crosses. (This was Wessex Rd.—I never saw any traffic on it from either direction, either on my outbound leg or my inbound.)

The second challenge occurred to me as I toiled up one of the hills ... and I remembered having asked, online, whether the trike was geared, and they said, "Yes—three gears." Now, I readily confess to being not a very mechanically adept man, but I have been unable to find them or any sort of shifting mechanism, and this makes climbing hills quite a workout in the Colorado altitude!

The final challenge occurred at the end of the ride. As the trail neared its end, and I had to cut back out to Drake Rd. so I could cross it and take Dunbar and Swallow back to Christy's, I took a premature fork—and then, confound it, if I didn't inadvertently turn west on Drake rather than east, as I thought I was and had intended to. So, when I came to Taft Hill Rd., rather than consulting the map as I should have done prudently, I confidently turned right on it, thinking this was taking me south, when it was actually taking me north, away from Christy's. I got all the way up to Prospect Rd. before discovering my foolish error, and then retracing my way back to Drake and then taking Dunbar and Swallow back to my final destination gave me a ride of 12.7 miles in 1 hour and 38 minutes. Still much slower than I would ride at home on my own trike, but getting better and more comfortable and confident out here. And the extra workout was certainly a good thing for me, anyway.