69th ride - 7/24/2015

This morning I left early in order to keep our day fairly free to go to Rocky Mountain National Park and tonight's baseball game between the Colorado Rockies and Cincinnati Reds in Denver. Leaving at 6:30, I rode the trails in the opposite direction today, going east. I rode as far as Timberline, getting to an area I had ridden to from the other direction (on the Poudre Trail) when we were here back in 2013, and it gave me a total ride today of 12.4 miles in 1 hour and 39 minutes.

I was challenged by two minor issues: no big deal (as Christy likes to say to the kids, in the interest of minimizing some inconvenience). (1) The trails pass under several major roads, but these were closed at numerous points due to high water, and, though there were detours, they were not consistently well marked. However, as I told Christy when she asked about the ride, "me and my map" worked it out just fine. (2) At the end of the ride, I missed the turnout from the trail to Drake, and so went on by to the point where the trail, heading west, goes under Drake. Realizing what had happened, I took the first fork I could off the trail, and this led me up to a little street called Hanover, which took me to Drake. I turned the correct way today, but still somehow overlooked Dunbar, so I ended up at Shields. But as Shields has a bike lane at this point, I found it to be no problem, and was soon pulling in to the condo.

And today's noteworthy achievement was that it put me over 100 hours of elapsed time in riding this year.