What a great weather weekend! We spent a ton of time outdoors doing yard work and riding. John got a mini chain saw and started cutting down some shrubbery. Then came the digging out of the stumps, which was really hard work. Here is the overgrown before:

And progress made:

It is a ton of work getting this down to a clean slate. We will be removing those other shrubs as well, but the half dead ones had to go first as they were such an eyesore. I do have to say that the soil is wonderful and it makes my gardener’s heart sing to have that to work with.  I don’t really have a plan quite yet for these beds, but some ideas. I would like to have some climbing roses around the front stoop, so I am going to get a couple Zephrine Drouhin, which are old-fashioned climbers that bloom in partial shade. Hopefully they will look something like this:

This landscaping is going to be years in the making. Not a bad thing about that, though.

Anyway, on to riding!  We decided to go all the way to the lake on Saturday since the paths were finally cleared of snow.  We are about 6 miles closer to the lake at our new house, so what used to be about a 32 mile round trip is now 19. It also cut out most of the flat part of the ride and plops us right into hills for a challenge.  

It’s still pretty brown, but I think buds are starting to appear on the trees if you squint really hard.

The marshy area is quite wet right now. 

We be biking!

😀

The peak point of the climb.

It’s actually a little easier to get up this climb with a shorter ride in front of it. Still tough early in the season, though. Phew!  This is right by the outlet malls. Later in the season this road gets backed up with traffic going to the shops. We can just skate on over it.

They freshly paved this part. The tree roots were buckling the path in this section and it was really bumpy. Now nice and smooth for riding – and taking pictures while riding!

Arrival at the lake!

There was a surprising amount of people out and about. I guess all the locals got out to the lake before the tourists get here.  Only some shops are open. Most wait until Memorial Day, but not this place :

The phantom was playing on the second story. That’s him in the purple. Gotta love Lake George.

We stopped by the Lake George Baking Company for a snack and took it to sit near the lake.

The wind was actually starting to pick up pretty hard while we were here. We saw later that gusts were up to 49 mph, which seemed right. It was almost blowing us over a couple times waiting at stop lights on the way home.

We are still exploring different roads around our new place and when we took a loop home, we came across this nature preserve:

The cool thing?  It’s only 1.5 miles from our house!  I can’t wait to check it out.  We might try doing some cross-country skiing next winter.  I tried downhill and really didn’t enjoy it at all, but I did like cross-country when I tried it.  Then maybe we might get outside more in the winter.

We have the hiking shoes now 😀

Home.

Not a bad ride for early in the season.  It was actually about 20, but my bike computer wasn’t working for the first part of the ride. We will likely be going to the lake a lot more rather than Saratoga, especially earlier while we build the distance legs.

The weather has finally cooperated and we spent a lot of time being active and out!  Friday was Siblings day and while I didn’t see my sis then, we did get together on Saturday.  

Nice picture for Colleen.  I had to be a goof, of course:

Sunday was so nice out. It ended up in the 60s – even though the day started below freezing!  Eek!  We walked to breakfast and got 2 miles of walking in.  Then we tested out John’s new purchase for his bike – a trailer!

He got this for taking packages to the post office. At our old place, he walked to the post office every day (1.5 miles round trip) and he misses doing that here since it is farther and we have been using the daily pickup. Now he has this so he can get that exercise back again.  We can also use it for grocery shopping!  The store is only a shade over 1 mile from the house, so we tested it out today.

It fit about an average week of groceries in there. We can’t get anything huge, like a 20 pound box of cat litter or a meg pack of toilet paper, but we did get a gallon of milk in there with all the rest of our stuff. It also comes right off the bike for regular riding, which we did later!  Too bad Pixie can’t ride in it.

We headed towards Lake George on the path again and decided to take it to the top of the hill we call the B*tch, which is about 2 miles from the lake, which would be a good test for the legs.

Here is the country club.  No golfers out yet as there is still snow on some of the greens.

This part was snowy before and now is clear.  Still so brown, though. 

This is the part right before you start climbing up the big hill.

Nobody ever gets off their bikes here, either. Stop, yes. Get off the bike. No.

Going along gangbusters and then oops!

Not really surprised to see this because it just hasn’t warmed up enough on the treed section yet. So we turned around.  It was pretty, though, with the snow melt.

After riding back in, we decide to make the first yogurt stop of the year! 

This is the place that serves Only 8 and while they sell ice cream all year, they only sell the froyo from April to October. Not sure why.  Anyway, it wasn’t a super long ride, so I had a kiddy vanilla with some raspberry sauce:

It’s amazing how warm 60 degrees can feel after months of really cold temps. 

So great to be out biking again for real!

Today’s total?  19 miles.

Legs are doing pretty good. Riding the trainer over the winter helps keep the saddle area ready for riding, but it does nothing for the hill legs.  This was a somewhat hilly ride and my legs were a little tired. Not bad, but I have a ways to go before a 50 mile ride. Looks like the weather will cooperate this week with some nice temps for riding as well!

Riding, riding, riding!  It was a biking weekend, that’s for sure.  I had barely any work on Friday – so I ended up with a much needed 3-day weekend!  Friday we went out riding and I ended up with a broken chain. That is really very uncommon to totally break a chain, but leave it to me.  Once we got the bike home, John was able to repair the chain, so all is well now.

Saturday was the usual long ride day.  We decided to head to Saratoga.  It was really a gorgeous day, sunny and in the 70s.  It was windy, however, and that is really the riding condition that I dislike the most.  Going to Saratoga is all road riding as there are no paths going down there.

Lots of sunshine today! River Road is really such a pretty route to take down.  It gets hardly any traffic, which is wonderful in itself, but it has some really great scenery.

This is farm country.  I took this picture as this llama was just going away.  He did not want his picture taken!

At mile 20, we stopped for a shade break and a snack:

Dried pineapple and mini chocolate bars.  I was getting a little hungry. We each had a protein bar right before we left the house, but that didn’t last long.

I think these are wild daisies?

It was only about 7 miles to go to get to lunch, so we moved on out.  We got to Saratoga and stopped at The Local to eat. I was hangry by this time!

They serve a lot of locally sourced products, which is nice.  I decided to get a breakfast burrito.  I almost got a sandwich with fries, but I didn’t feel like getting anything greasy.

I didn’t eat the beans. Why serve beans with a breakfast burrito that has eggs, potato and cheese? 

Anyway, a couple doors down from The Local was a bike shop.

We stopped here after lunch so I could buy a few spare chain links in case my chain ever gives me problems again.  Do you ever buy something you think will just be a few bucks and you are shocked at the price?  That would be me. I bought 4 links. They are half an inch, if that. Anyway, 4 links cost $20!! Not sure how much that would make a whole chain.  Anyway, I need to treat those links like gold.

We biked back into the downtown area and walked around the shops – and then you know what time it was!!

Now, this was a big cupcake. This picture doesn’t really show how big it is. Normally I get the smaller size and John and I will split another one and 1.5 of the smaller cuppies is still smaller than this single bigger one.  I was feeling still somewhat hungry and my burrito wasn’t that big – so I went for the big one.  Note to self – no matter how long the ride, don’t get the big one.  It was delicious, though.  Cookie dough – it had a ball of cookie dough at the bottom of the cuppie!

By this time, it was after 3:30 and time to head home, although I was really full LOL. I was a little concerned that my cupcake might revisit, but it stayed down.

This is when the wind really started to take a toll. Usually around here the wind will be at our backs for one way and headwind the other.  That’s fine.  The wind this day was a cross wind and a changing wind, so you hardly ever got a break.  It was relentless. Plus it would get gusty.  It’s hard having wind push you from the side because it can knock you over if you aren’t paying attention. Then it would suddenly change and be right in your face. Phew!

We ended up back at the Wildlife Preserve again for a break on the way home.  This would be a fun trail to hike some day.

Again, this is really such a pretty ride.

Here is a peak point of the ride.

We were swapping the lead so that one person could draft and the other would take the brunt of the wind. On a windy day, drafting can really help save energy, but we still stopped a few more times than usual. Not to mention this ended up being a really long ride. This was around mile 48 or so?

Then no more pictures. I was really starting to drag.  Normally in a ride I gain strength as the ride goes on and I finish really strong, but the wind just plum wore me out!  Not to mention I got a stinger in my shoulder blade. Do you ever get those? Ugh.

The last 5 miles or so, I really hit the wall and John told me to just stay behind him and he let me draft the rest of the way home. Now that is an awesome husband!

Finally home!

Ride stats:

Total miles: 57.4

Average speed: 13.1 mph

Top speed: 31.2 mph – downhill, baby!

Saddle time:  4 hours 28 minutes

Calories burned: 1477

Calories burned probably higher than that considering the wind, but what are you going to do? It’s just an estimate anyway.  This was a tough ride, but a pretty one.

We did our usual 20 mile breakfast ride on Sunday, which is good to do after a long ride to keep from being too stiff. All these miles helped put a dent in my 400 mile goal for the month. Only 285 miles to go!

It really feels like summer now! We had a hot weekend around here.  Need to remember to do early rides on days like this, but we had stuff to do in the morning – and then there was the parade for our town’s Heritage Days.

As I have said before, we live on the main road in town, which is annoying for traffic, but gets us great seats for all the parades!

I love the bagpipes, too:

They are really good!

After lunch, we headed on out to the lake! Very sunny, so I loaded up on the sunscreen today.

I made us stop fairly often in the shade to keep cool.

That’s sweat on my nose and not sunscreen 😀

John was laughing at me taking a selfie, so I took his picture.

Now who’s laughing?  That would be me.

Now for the climbs to the lake!

The lake was busy!

This was about 16.5 miles into our ride.  We didn’t go into Lake George Village, but just stopped here and had a snack and a rest:

Then it was time to turn around.  It’s all innocent looking, but this is the start of a 2 mile climb up.

Then zooming along in the shade.

Our destination was Martha’s!  Mile 22. John missed the first trip to Martha’s a couple weeks ago when I went by myself, so he wanted a visit.  Mine was a hot apple sundae with cheesecake flavored ice cream.  Yeah, baby.

Now I think Martha’s sundaes are the best. They don’t just put the ice cream in and pour a topping on it. They put in some ice cream, then a bit of topping, then more ice cream and the rest of the topping. Their sundaes are very ride worthy 😀

After a fill up of water bottles, it was time to head back home.  Someone had taken the time to work on their property that abuts the path. This was all new.

Foxglove!

I am getting me some of these in our new house.  

This is the cinder part of the path that we don’t go on very often.  We stopped here to look at some ducks. 

Home, sweet home. You can see the settee project in the background, too.

Ride stats:

Total miles:  32.4

Average speed:  12.3 mph

Top speed:  31.3 mph

Calories burned:  1047.

Not a super long ride, but a good distance on a hot day.