Outdoor Travel Geek

  • 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…

  • one day at a time

    Two weeks of vacation. Day one just ended. I still don’t know what’s going on for the rest of the vacation. All I know is that it involves picking up an RV tomorrow, driving to Arizona, flying from Arizona to New York, driving from New York to California. We left Davis around 10 last night,…

  • happy place

    I wonder if it’s weird to admit this… I’m not anywhere close to having kids or even being married, but I already have the name picked out for a daughter. If I ever have a daughter, I’m going to name her Auburn. Her middle name’s going to be Connie. Auburn Connie Hong. Not bad right?…

  • 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…

  • moonlight motorcycle

    Sitting on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere playing sudoku on my phone– that’s what I was doing on a cold Thursday summer night. My camera was snapping away at regular intervals. 30 second exposures. 50 of them. So the very least amount of time I could’ve spent out there was 25 minutes.…

  • 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…

  • the topic of the week…

    Sometimes I stay late at work and decide to eat in Sac before heading back to Davis. Usually in those cases I end up going to Seoul. It’s one of the few places where I feel ok eating alone, probably because it feels more homey, and it’s usually pretty empty, and the waitress lady is…

  • 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…

  • breathe easy ride

    Today I rode in the 2010 Breathe Easy ride, a charity bike ride for the American Lung Association. My buddy Tim put together a team of bike riders to ride in memory of his sister Jenne, who passed away last year from lung cancer. Altogether his team raised over $5000 for the organization.  I would…