Getting Dirty

Oh look, I have some blog catching up to do again...  I'll start with the clean stuff.  After Cascade I did some resting.  Before I knew it though I was off to the Tour of Elkgrove in Chicago for three days of UCI sanctioned stage racing.  That just means that there were some big time bike racing teams there.  The race was super cool with all three days taking place in Elk Grove Village, a suburb of Chi-City that seemed to be one large well groomed American-Dream of a neighborhood.  The road race was 10 laps of a circuit that had 26 corners per lap.  That is 260 corners in just a hair over 3 hours!  That turned out to be a lot of hard accelerations following those big time bike racers around.  Just what I needed to get ready for cyclocross season right?

After getting home from Elk Grove I was looking for a bit of an adventure.  So what better adventure than three days of mountain biking and camping out of the Vanagon with some bros?  Alright so this is shaping up to be a rather dirty adventure...  First I took a ferry boat with Ian Terry over to Winger's house.  I sure was glad that I was only taking this boat for recreational purposes.  A certain few HB team members ride on these boats to nearly every bike race that we attend and sometimes even for work!  That is insane.

Thankfully once we picked up Winger, some sort of cartoon character was able to keep us entertained with a Ukelele from the back seat.

We rode some awesome trails a bit south of Sequim.  The Gold Creek and Lower Dungeness trails if you are familiar with the area.  Green stuff and big trees are good for you.

wingerstudios.com

After an awesome day on the trails we set up camp, ate good food, made a fire, and had 'smores.  Just the usual camping things right.  But then...  There was the Jiffy Pop which we had purchased.  Jiffy Pop seems like such a great idea, but in reality it rarely ever actually works.  Most often it just gets really really burnt and popcorn is probably one of the worst things to eat when it has been burnt.  I read the instructions which specifically said not to cook this popcorn-in-a-pie-plate product over an open fire.  Since our camp stove had long been put away though, I said "whatever" Jiffy Pop lawyers!  I went for it and I cooked that Jiffy Pop so well!  Below we have both the cooking process and the celebratory eating captured by Ian Terry.

After many more camp fire songs it was time for bed.  Winger tried desperately to trick me into cuddling with him by saying that this was a 3-person tent.

I opted for the Vanagon instead and it proved to be quite comfortable. 

All in all it was an awesome weekend filled with three days of mountain biking and many other good times. Getting dirty on the way to transitioning into the cross season.  I'm super stoked to race bikes right now!