Donuts, with a side of RUSA miles
It had been a distressingly long time since the last time I was up at Joe’s Donuts, so I decided that I should go up there and get a dozen so the bears would have donuts available when they came back from their grandparent’s house in Mississippi. Normally it would be a 52 mile roundtrip (Springwater->212->Orient->Kelso->Bluff->26 et retour), but there’s a new populaire that makes it a nice round 103km by the simple expedient of taking the scenic(?) route along Marine Drive, then 257th/Orient->Bluff->26 (returning via the Springwater Trail, so the donuts don’t get rattled around quite as much.)
The front rack on the mlcm is a little too narrow to balance a box of donuts without using a sheet of coroplast as a shelf (I had one, but I cut it up to make baseplates for rando bags) and I wanted to make certain that the squeaking in the new(ish) Shimano M520 pedals were indeed the pedals and not something else on the bike (executive summary; Now, I am become death, the destroyer of clipless pedals) so I dragged the project bike out, moved the pedals over to it, and rode it up to Sandy and back.
An interesting thing about the project bike is that it feels slow, even when it’s moving pretty fast. So even though I thought I was just poking along I managed to do this loop in 4h57 (66 miles, because I thought I’d missed an info control and looped back a couple of miles to (not) find it) with over a hour of either sitting around at Joe’s or stopping at the side of the road to eat blackberries. The total time is no speed record (I think the fastest I’ve done a Joe’s loop is 3h45, and that was late in the year a couple of years ago when I was at the top of my form and had a tailwind going up the hill which died when I turned around and came home) but in the context of I’m never going to get a speed PR on a loop that includes Joe’s Donuts it’s pretty fast.
Sadly, I also discovered that even though the Cowbell bars on the project bike don’t foul a donut box, the brifters do – sure, I can fit the box between the brifters, but then I can’t move the downshift levers in far enough to actually downshift. So I had to tie the donut box on long ways forward, which hung it a long ways out in front of the front wheel and disturbed the handling just enough so I couldn’t ride no-handed for more than about 50 feet :-(
This makes about 800km that I’ve ridden in the last 7 days, of which 716 were for RUSA credit.
Since I didn’t have my rando bag along, that means I also didn’t have my camera, but just the birthday iPhone, which I’m not going to take out when I’m moving, because I would hate to drop and shatter it before it’s even a month old. So there are just three pictures on the loop, sorry!