Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Bike Pics & An Unfair Hill

Today I went out and spent a little "Me" time riding into Knoxville to a spa & yarn shop. I took the long way home to avoid a lot of Interstate riding & rush-hour traffic.

Shhh! Don't tell anyone, but also because I LOVE those curvy East-Tennessee back roads.

My first stop was to drop off my son's sneakers at Kroger. I parked in the same place as this bike (it's not mine), which had, of all things, a bag of chicken feed strapped on the back. Funniest thing is, I've hauled home chicken feed on my bike too!

Once a bike is moving and in the gear you need for a while (no approaching stops, etc), you really only need the throttle hand, so I got my phone out of my pocket & snapped some sexy action pics. Yes I really did.

In a couple pics you can see the gear (5th, which is the top gear) and speed (the one pic that shows speed, I was going 40MPH). Enjoy!!








This last one doesn't look that bad maybe, but it's about a 30degree downhill grade involving 3 curves and is less than 2 lanes wide. Very fun & kinda scary to ride!


These next two pics I took on our local greenway. I start at about the 1.6 mile marker and walk the trail down to .3 miles and back. At the 1.4 mile marker there is a hill. From my end approaching it, it's a small rise, about 10degrees and maybe 30 feet. But this is the view from the top...


And what's particularly unfair about this hill, is that on the way BACK, after powerwalking over 2 miles, and *almost* when the end is in sight, you're confronted with the UP side of the hill. It's what keeps me from skating the trail. I could see getting 1/2way up and rolling backward at a high rate of speed, missing the curve at the bottom and ending up in the river 20 feet away. Not a happy thought. LOL


One last pic! The honeysuckle is blooming now! I stuck this sprig of it in my (sloppy from riding) braid & took the pic with my phone!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

love the 3rd pic down. zoom.

what's the name of that park in knoxville? argh. lived in too many places to remember. but there are old buildings there and baseball diamonds and it's by a river. i always loved going to that park. miss it. but walking up that last hill used to kill me. i used to call it my nemesis. :)

Teresa said...

Love the photos! :D

Vixen of Vixensden.com said...

Jealous. Just plain jealous of the entire ordeal. Yarn, bikes, honeysuckle...all of it.

Mommab@sbcglobal.net said...

wow I envy you wish we had somewhere here to walk like that and I had the time. LOL Guess when the pool opens I can get my exersize that way! Hugs and thanks for shareing your beautiful ride!!! Marion

Rachel Kovaciny said...

A spa and yarn shop? Are they one and the same? Okay, I'm being silly, I'm sure they're not, but wouldn't that be fun? Browse some yarn, get a massage, start creating something while you get your pedicure....