Pretty cool week

Last Saturday I got Karen to go to the LBS with me to look at bikes...And after looking at all sorts of bikes I finally ordered a Trek 1.5 with the 60cm frame. Took a while to pry the credit card out of her hand but finally got it.
The guys from Kingsbury Cycles in Elmira NY did a great job of fitting the bike to me which was a real tough job. If you remember I am 6'2' and weigh in at 262 and an OFG. The bike arrived on Wednesday and was ready for pickup the next day...Now I need to ride it a bit before the Tour de Cure on Saturday.
The Tour de Cure was a ball even if I only rode 10 miles. The longest I had ridden was 26 miles so I was unsure if I could step it up to the next level of 35 miles.. Still was fun..
In the days after the ride I rode a 24, 12 and 7 mile ride... not so much..Today I woke up and said today is the day of the long ride (for me) I rode 34.8 miles at an average of 10-11 mph. Doesn't sound like much but for an OFG it was a victory. I forgot my bike lock and when I stopped at Micky Dees to P and there was a state trouper eating lunch. I walked over to his car and asked him if he would would watch my bike while I went inside...He was a little reluctant but finally agreed I bet he never had that happen before..
Well I am home now resting my sore butt but all in all it was a pretty good week..

Clear out the crap

As I ride my 14 year old bike I have come to realize that that is old and it was not a high end bike even when it was new..Being a semi-broke retired guy I have pondered on how to upgrade without cutting back on food or beer..
The answer was right in my garage, I have so much crap that is left over from projects and toys I no longer play with that I can sell off some of the excess. I put a bunch of antique tools on craigslist and people started e-mailing me within minutes. Next I have to haul all the scrap metal left over from my blacksmith days to the scrapyard. Then I will sell off some of the ham radio gear that has been collecting dust. Maybe somehow I can gain some cash and free myself from all this clutter.
I have no idea what kind of bike I will be looking for maybe something in this century and it will be a road bike. My hybrid is ok for town but it is so heavy and clunky out on the road I want something a little lighter and maybe faster.

Longest ride yet

Yesterday I got up and had way to many cups of coffee. I was feeling I could conquer the world. Karen was going to see her mom in the old folks home and then shopping so I knew I had pretty much the whole day to do whatever I wanted. I got out the old Peugeot and headed down the road. My sister lives about 13 miles away in a little town so I figured if my math was correct round trip would be 26 miles..Did I tell you I have never ridden more than 17 miles before... apparently my brain didn't remember that so I set off. The first 13 miles went by in a flash. After loading up the water bottles I headed back home. I actually enjoyed the next10 miles lots of hills and valleys. After mile 10 on the return trip things started to get kind of dicey my legs were hurting and it felt like me and the bike weighed 20 more pounds than when I started. I made that last 6.95 miles not in record time but when I pulled in front of the garage I felt like I really had accomplished something.  26.95 miles total...Today I am a little sore but I think tomorrow will be a twenty mile day.

Trip to Western NY

Karen was starting to get antsy working every day to support my retired butt so she declared it was time for a mini vacation. We loaded up the bikes, car, and food into the RV and banished the dog to the kennel. The campground we stayed was Chautauqua Koa a very nice place but odd in that over half the campsites were year round with their campers being these things that looked like half way between a camper and a mobile home. Maybe Tim TPC can enlighten me on what this was all about.
Anyway I will spare you all the boring stuff about drinking beer and eating way too much like we always do when we camp. I might explain that Karen's idea of camping is staying in a bad Holiday Inn. But she loves the motor-home. for one thing it is nicer than our house. And if we keep making payments for about ten years after I die it will be all mine..Ahh the American dream..

By now you realize that I have zero writting skills and  jump form subject to subject at will..Ya just have to put up with me.

Ok what I really wanted to talk about was riding my bike around the Chautauqa Lake area. The road from the campground was really cool, seemed almost straight down. By the time I got to the stop sign I was going about 30 pretty fast for me. I was thinking maybe the whole ride will be down hill...not really. As you wind around the lake the road is constantly changing elevation. It did seem like more up than down but I managed to climb all the hills and roll down the valleys. As you may remember I usually only ride 10-15 miles a ride as I am old and fat and not quite in shape ( oh wait round is a shape). After I got out about six miles I thought maybe I should turn around as I do have to get back to the campsite sometime before dark...Holy crap the trip back seemed all uphill. And if you remember the 30 miles per hour section starting out was just a killer going the other direction. I have to admit I got off and walked for the last half mile, my legs felt like they had been run over by a truck. I did make it back to camp in time for happy hour and those cold ones tasted extra good...

The next day we went and did touristy things. We stopped at a place called Panama Rocks. The guy running the place said the trail is about 1.5 miles long and should take about an hour and half to finish. I was thinking even I could walk faster than that..maybe not. It was really cool with all these huge rocks that formed caves and passageways that were too skinny for me to squeeze through. I looked up and Karen was standing on top of a rock about 30 feet above me. She says why don't you climb up here too. By now I was soaked in sweat and puffing like a steam engine..no honey I think I will just sit here and have a hear attack..I guess if you stayed on the trail it might be  a mile and half but if you explore the rocks it seems like 10 miles. Even Karen was sweating and she never sweats ( she is the exercise queen).

So what do you do when you are sweaty and your ankles and legs are burned...go to a bike shop and dream of all those cool bikes that you won't own. The sales guy was pretty nice he only giggled a little when I told him my current  bike is a 14 year old hybrid..He was dying to show someone the new bike he had just sold. holy crap it was almost all carbon fiber. He said pick it up, I could pick it up with one finger. I'm thinking wow cool I need one of these. A couple of things stopped me from pulling out the plastic, first was it had a 250lb weight limit. Well I am loosing weight but I am still 14 pounds too heavy...bummer. then he told me it was about eight thousand dollars I think my shocked expression made him realize that he would not be selling the second one of those to me and all of the sudden he had something important to do on the other side of the store.
Well that's the end of that adventure...

While

On the road again

Karen had some vacation days to burn so we decided to hit the road in the RV. The place we are staying is a KOA campground in Dewittville, NY almost to Lake Erie and next to a lake I have no idea how to spell.
The trip out was pretty normal except for the last section of I 86 which is so rough I was pretty sure the RV was going to just self destruct. When we arrived we noticed that the pin that holds the tow dolly in the loaded position had decided to leave us. Could have been real bad and I am pretty sure Karen would have been mad if her car went bouncing down the road by itself...
I was planing on a ride last night but it rained so hard the campground road was the consistency of snot so there is always today. I feel kind of antsy not riding the last two days. My last ride was 17 miles, I know that doesn't seem like much but I started out a few weeks ago at 2 miles. I was hoping to get up to 35 miles by the Tour de Cure but I think that maybe a little nuts. I may have to keep with the 10 mile loop I am signed up for.

Staying at the marina

Tuesday I needed a break so I packed up some clothes, some food, and the bike and headed for my sailboat. It's an old 1968 Pearson Wanderer 30' and really rugged built. She is really pretty to look at and I have tried to keep her in good shape. I don't have the bank acounts that some folks have so I have to do all the work on her myself.

As soon as I was all settled in on the boat the storm warnings started coming in on the weather radio so I just hunkered down. I spent the rest of the day reading (Clive Cussler) and hanging out at marina. For those of you that don't hang out in marinas they are like little towns. Everyone knows who you are and all about your boat and your life. We sit around drink coffee and talk about trips we have taken and trips we would like to take. We also talk about our wives and families. As the day closes we usually switch to beer...

After a good nights sleep on the boat I woke to a beautiful sunrise and rowing teams practicing behind my boat. Wow some of those folks really are in shape. I started feeling a little guilty with all these people out there doing their body good and I am sitting there drinking my second cup of coffee. Ok put on bike duds and go get the bike out of the truck and go.

The city where the marina is is very enlightened being close to Cornell and Ithaca.They decided that the city should build bike and walking paths. Sounds like a good idea but I don't think they really had ridden on a bike before. There is one part of the path that goes from near the marina to a loop of about five miles through the woods and around a park. I decided five miles was not enough so I went the other way on the path. It was also a nice ride going through some trees and going to the farmers market. When I get to the farmers market I come to a sign that says future home of bike path and it just ends. Hmm good planning. I know there is a bike path across the canal so I play in search of. I end up riding along the railroad in giant gravel that I am sure will pop my tires any second. After cutting behind some businesses I come out on one of the busiest streets in town. I am thinking oh well how bad can it be...yikes it was scary. As I was crossing the bridge with no where to hang to the right a lady starts crowd me and I am trying to make eye contact with her. Well it is a little hard to make eye contact with someone curling their eyelashes while driving..jeeze what a dummy. The rest of the ride went well and I got my ten miles in without getting killed.

For some reason I am not feeling it today but I need to keep moving and get a ride in as there are less than 30 days left before Tour de Cure in Watkins Glenn NY...

Ok we are getting closer to where I am now

As spring approached I decided that i was going to do some stuff and have some fun this summer. As soon as I possibly could I had my boat launched and started sailing. I still wanted more fun stuff and less working on my house and mowing the yard. At some point I saw my old friend Harold who's blog Wayward Son was on Face book. He really caught my attention. his descriptions of his life as a locomotive engineer and his long distance bicycling really caught my attention. No I have no desire to be a locomotive engineer but the stories are really interesting. The part about bicycling really caught my interest.
Then it hit me...I have a bicycle somewhere down in the basement, in fact if memory serves me there are three. Well I will just pull my old Peugeot Evasion out and start riding...It was a pretty funny experience. Did you know that when you add air to 15 year old bike tires all sorts of cracks show up and if you are dumb enough to try and ride on them they will sort of explode..Lesson one always keep good tires on your bike. Did you also know that keeping your bike in a dirty garage or basement will really gum up the derailleurs, so much that when you go on your first ride (after putting on new tires and tubes) that when you pedal backwards the chain will fall off....
After putting the chain on for the second time I thought I was ready for the Tour de France. So I got about 1.5 miles down the road and could hardly catch my breath. Why is this so hard? My answer was I  am 62 years old, fat, and out of shape (round is a shape). I really needed to change all that so I set about riding a little bit farther each day. After I got up to about 5 miles a day Harold tells me I should join his team on the Tour de Cure. I was thinking that maybe Harold had taken too many century rides and suffered some kind of damage from dehydration. So I checked out the Tour de Cure and found that although they had some really crazy rides 100, 65, 35 miles they had one loop that was ten miles. I was half way there riding 5 miles a day so I signed up and decided I better kick it up as I only had forty days to be ready. It was really surprised how quickly the miles racked up. The first time I did 12 miles I thought I was Lance Armstrong and then a couple of real bike riders blew by me so fast that I thought I had stopped. Since that day I have been riding at least seven miles every day and two or three times a week I do 14. It's still hard but getting easier. Of course where I live is very hilly and I live at the top of the hill, the last few miles is always up hill.
I am still signed up to do the ten miler as I know 35 is way too much but it gives me something to work to. Did I mention that the 35 miler gains a couple thousand feet elevation in the first ten miles.
Ok we are sort of caught up to date so I can update the blog every once in a while.

Is it possible to be retired at 59 and not go crazy

To get this started I will tell you a little about myself. I worked at colleges and universities for most of my career in the IT field. In the early days I worked for Ithaca College managing the telephone system. From there I moved to the University of Rochester and was their cable-plant designer. My last job was Cornell university where I started as a cable-plant engineer then managed the phone system. I then moved to managing the cable-plant engineers. My last and most interesting job was wireless network engineer. Its probably a lot of blah blah blah if you aren't in that field but it paid the bills and put some money in my retirement account.
In the spring of 2009 Cornell was getting cash strapped so they were looking for ways to cut costs without looking like the bad guy and laying off a few hundred people. They offered a buyout to anyone that had been there 10 or more years. Hmm I had just been there eleven years. They gave us a years salary, health benefits to age 65, three years added to our retirement, and paid for all unused vacation. Ok I am in just to good to pass up. So now what??
I have a 30 foot sailboat, a 35 foot motor home, a big yard to maintain, and an old farmhouse that always needs fixing, that should keep me busy.
As I retired in June I spent much of the first summer on the boat, did some yard work, and tried to set up a schedule that filled my days. Geeze I never knew I would have to look for things to do. I tried to keep in touch with guys from work but they were too busy trying not to get fired by Cornell.
The first winter was awful, although I do some ham radio in the winter it was not enough. I think I was driving my wife crazy cause she was still working.
By the second year I was starting to get the hang of it and had a new group of friends at the marina and sailed and hung all summer.
In August my good friend Tom asked if I would go on his boat with another guy from Ithaca NY to the Bahamas. Well it took about 5 minutes to answer, yep I was going. Then I remembered I was married and maybe I should talk to my wife about being gone for 6 months on a sailing adventure. You can see the adventure on my other blog A Trip South. If you read the bog you can see that I got tired of sleeping in a space the size of a coffin and freezing my but off and not eating much so I jumped off in Melbourne Florida. The upside of the trip other than the experience was I lost about forty pounds. My IT days had left me tipping the scales at about 317 pounds (how did that happen)
So now it's winter in upstate NY and I am getting antsy again. My daughter managed a low income apartment complex and both of the maintenance guys had quit ( this should have been a warning). I said sure I will jump in and do maintenance how hard can it be. Well the fixing stuff was a breeze..but no one told me that maintenance guys shoveled, plowed, and salted snow. Wow, for an old fat IT guy that was sure a wake up call. Finally after it snowed for 18 straight days of my three months of employment I said ok I am done...
Somehow I made it through the rest of the winter without going stir crazy.
Spring brought new hope that I would keep busy enough to really start enjoying my retirement more.