After Thursday’s failed ride on the Boone due to a broken spoke and the subsequent fat bike ramble to salvage the day, I just went ahead and planned on riding the fatty on Friday. This was a wise and a stupid decision.
It was a wise decision because I was fully prepared come Friday morning to ride the Farley; both my bike and gear was prepped in ready. It was also wise to use the Farley because unbeknownst to me, late Thursday night we had a decent amount of rain move through the area which made the dirt and gravel roads the consistency of wet cement. If I am going to ride soft, rutted and muddy dirt roads, it might as well be on a full rigid hardtail mountain bike with 4″ wide knobby tries.
Of course, there is no getting around the fact that while the Farley is a very capable fat bike and way lighter than my old Pugs, it’s STILL a 33 pound bike with a 200+ pound rider on top of it. Add in super soft dirt roads and a wind out of the south and you have the makings for one of the slowest and mental mind fucking rides of the year. Stupid indeed.
I wasn’t on the dirt roads more than five minutes before I made the decision that the ride would be a brief one. Like fifteen miles shorter than planned brief! It was taking everything I had to get up to speeds of 9 miles per hour at times. The fog was more like a misty rain than a dense fog and quickly had my glasses covered in water. The wet fog combined with the vaginal like humidity had me soaked within minutes.
So, I decided to just chill out and do an abbreviated version of an already abbreviated ride. I got myself in the mental zone to just ramble along, take some photos and goof off; to just enjoy being outside in the Michiganderburgh farm land on my bike.
In the end I did a mere fifteen miles (yes, your read right– fifteen). Yet I managed to have a good time and get some interesting shots of some deer, a family of turkey in no hurry to get out of my way, some cool found signage and other stuff.
By ride’s end, my bike and I were covered in gritty a gritty gray mud. It was everywhere: drivetrain, brakes, under my saddle, in my hair, in my ears and up my fat ass.
Through it all my Porcelain Rocket DSLR Slinger kept my camera safe and dry. The only issue I had with the camera was that when the lens got some beads of water on it, it was having a difficult time auto focusing on subjects and I had quite a few stinkers in my batch of pics. In the future taking some lens wipes might be a good idea. Of course taking some ass wipes might be a good idea too.
Once home, a good rinse off got the Farley looking semi-respectable and I set about the rest of my Friday. This was clearly not one of my best rides, but it was a ride and got me outside. Some days that all I can really ask for.
Later.