Mumford

Total for this ride: 60.1 miles

Total for this year: 766.8 miles

Last long ride before next week's Tour de Cure century.  It was not fun...

I'd originally planned to drive to Geneva and do a lap around Seneca Lake, which would have been a 75-mile ride, but the weather forecast was calling for thunderstorms and I didn't want to get stuck in a downpour 35 miles from the truck.  So at about 11:30, when it looked like there was going to be a long enough stretch of clear weather to get in a shorter ride, I changed my plans on the fly and decided to do a loop from home out to the west, toward Caledonia and Mumford.

Having ridden parts of this route before, I knew where I'd be doing most of the climbing, and rode in a direction to get that out of the way early.  That was clearly the right decision, but unfortunately, since my loop would take me west, I would also be heading directly into a stiff 15-20 mph wind during the first half of the ride too.  (Uphill + against the wind) X 20 miles = no fun.

Knowing I needed to get home for a dinner with friends, I minimized the number of stops.  One five minute break in Avon to fill the water bottles and empty the rider, then a few brief stops to snap pictures of some historical markers.  By the way, if you haven't checked out my online collection of geolocated historical markers I've seen on my rides, CLICK HERE to check it out.  There are over 100 posted there now.

So although the ride was moderately miserable there was an up-side... this was the first ride I'd taken since getting the Trek back from its initial tune up.  And I must say the boys at Full Moon Vista did a pretty good job.  Most importantly, the insanely annoying clicking from the bottom bracket is gone.  Apparently it was the crank arms, and not the bearings as I initially suspected.  Had no trouble shifting into the small ring on the front (although shifting up wasn't as smooth as I would like).  The sticky shift lever on the right was fine.  Only thing they totally dorked was the tension on the back break cable which caused it to ever-so-lightly rub the rim every time I turned the handlebars to the left.  They completely tubed this and made it even worse, but fortunately, it's something that's easy to fix and I was able to make an adjustment myself to solve the problem.  So all in all, I'd say it's good enough to ride in the TDC next week Sunday.