Outdoor Travel Geek

  • rainy day

    I am not a fan of rainy days. It usually means that I’m forced to spend the day indoors. Actually, I wouldn’t mind rain so much if it weren’t so cold. If rainy season were in summer like in Asia, I think I’d be quite happy with it. But unfortunately in California rainy season is…

  • foxy’s

    Foxy’s Fall Century is Davis’s century ride. The course is pretty familiar to me, since I’ve ridden it a few times, and I spend a decent amount of time biking and motorcycling out on the country roads west of Davis. But for some reason I have yet to finish the 100 mile course. Usually it’s…

  • weekend warrior

    Some random thoughts from my weekend in the bay….. When I go back to the bay, I usually bring my road bike. One of the things I love doing is biking out on Canada road, which parallels the Crystal Springs reservoirs. Sundays are especially nice because they close the road to cars, so it’s just…

  • inflection point

    If you remember from your early calculus classes, an inflection point is a point on a curve where the curvature changes sign. On an S-curve, the inflection point occurs at the transition point between the increasing-slope segment and the decreasing-slope segment. I like Wikipedia’s illustration of an inflection point- “If one imagines driving a vehicle…

  • rim shots

    I’m sitting at the Phoenix airport waiting for the second stage of my vacation. First I have a layover in Chicago before arriving in New York. From there Sam and I are driving across the US back to California. I have some downtime so I decided to take a look at some of my pictures…

  • stone soup

    One of my favorite restaurants when I was a kid was a place called Stone Soup. I remember going to Tanforan mall one day with my mom and being really sad because it went out of business. It was a small cafeteria style place like Pluto’s or Jack’s Urban Eats. I think part of the…

  • fish tales

    One of my favorite lesser known movies is Big Fish. It’s about a son who resents his dad because he thinks the crazy stories about his past are all lies. At his funeral the son finds that the traveling circus, the giant, the Chinese twins that were in his dad’s stories were all real. The…

  • fist bumps

    Our friendship started off in probably the worst possible way. I think it was my first or second month on the job. It could have been a hangover or it could have been some spoiled leftovers that left my stomach feeling queasy that morning, I don’t remember. But I do remember having the sudden urge to…

  • le tour de napa

    100 miles. Even though I think this was my sixth or seventh 100 miler and my third time doing this particular ride, it doesn’t get any easier. I think I might have been faster on the flats this year, but I was really dying on the hills. It’s probably because I’ve been fat and lazy…

  • a cure for global warming

    One hundred and two degrees. That’s how hot it was Friday afternoon. Instead of sitting in my air conditioned cubicle, I was out mountain biking a dusty trail by Folsom lake. Probably not the smartest trade ever, but I will take that trade any day. The Dike 8 trail is supposedly the easiest trail in…

  • something old….

    So today was kind of a slow day. I spent part of the day looking at old journal entries. I found one that seemed really relevant to me lately. For you see when you hit my age relatives always talk about marriage. Here are my thoughts on the subject from 2.5 years ago, copied and…

  • mikes bikes thoughts

    math 1 subaru + 2 friends + 3 mountain bikes = 1 awesome time be prepared Be prepared. The boy scout motto. Being a former boy scout, I thought I was prepared for most situations I would encounter when mountain biking. I carry a first aid kit, bike tools, and a few essential parts to…

  • the end of an epic journey

    We spent the night at my old college roommate Chris’s place in New Jersey.  It was pretty cool catching up with him.  His son Sam is really cute, and grew a lot bigger since the last time I saw him.  In the morning we took the train into New York City with him, since he…

  • Lancaster, PA to Florham Park, NJ

    Our car broke down in Amish country so we were forced to ride a buggy to the nearest car repair shop, which was over a hundred miles away.  We couldn’t find afford a horse though, so we had to take turns pulling the buggy. Haha just kidding.  We took this picture at a little Amish…

  • Dayton, OH to Lancaster, PA

    Dayton’s reason for existence is a humongous US air force base.  The air force base is home to the USAF museum.  Here they have several humongous hangers that house some of the world’s most famous aircraft including the F-117, SR-71, and even a F-22 raptor.  It was pretty cool taking pictures with all these exotic…