Upgrades

Life has been upgraded on numerous fronts!  I am now an automobile owner again after being a carless hobo since September.  I don't just own any automobile though, behold my 1986 VW Vanagon!

 I'm pretty stoked about this purchase.  This isn't just an upgrade from no car to car.  This is a lifestyle upgrade.  This machine can take you and your stuff places in style!  It didn't come with a middle seat, but that is probably a good thing, because otherwise there would be a middle seat sitting in my garage right now.  So within 24hrs of purchase I set about filling the void left by this middle seat with an easy to clean floor and some secure bicycle mounting devices.

 A quick trip to the hardware store and I was off and running.  I'm not usually much of a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to non-bicycle things.  But with a little help I created a pretty slick floor that should be easy to sweep out and can also be easily removed.

 After the floor came the bike mounts.  These can also be easily removed so that when not going bikin' there is lots of space for activities, as demonstrated here.

I'm still waiting on some more bike mounts to finish it off, but 4 bikes will easily be accommodated.  I'm quite excited about the possibilities of my Vanagon.

Wait... I haven't directly written about bike racing yet in this blog entry...  So ya, I went to the Cherry Blossom Classic a couple weeks ago.  It was relatively awesome.  Young buck Logan Owen won the first stage for our team.  Then we did a time trial and a criterium in the dark. Oh my!  Those were plenty of fun, but the last stage was a legend that I had only heard of beforehand.  Here are some of my traveling companions discussing it over morning coffee.

Oh wait, actually they claimed to be "warming up" for the stage 2 time trial at this point.  Either way the last stage lived up to its hype with a lot of climbing and some sweet gravel.  I got into the early breakaway which turned into the leader's group on the final lap.  I hung on until the end, but I was real tired and could only muster 4th on the stage.  I did leap up to 6th overall though.  These results were enough to finish off my category 1 road upgrade.  So there you have it, life upgrade number 2 for the week.  I'll leave you with some action from the Cherry Blossom gravel. Thanks to Oregon Cycling Action for the photo.