Tour de France here I come

I finally bought a bike! This is slightly delayed--I actually bought it about 2 weeks ago. My whole reason for getting a bike is so that I can start riding it to work (it's only 3.5 miles, so this is hardly an unattainable goal). I guess I wanted to delay posting about it until I actually rode to work a couple of times. Well I'm currently averaging 1 ride to work/week. Alright, let's do the math: I've had it for two weeks, so that means twice; that doesn't sound quite as cool. My goal is to get up to 2-3 times/week (I'm trying to be realistic, the optimist in me wants to go for 5/week). The ride so far hasn't been to bad; in the morning it's mostly downhill and not too hot. Somehow I managed to choose the hottest day ever to ride home last week--it was over 100 degrees--but at the time I didn't know it and it wasn't too bad, so I'd say that's a good sign. For now my real goal is to ride all 5 days of Walk and Bike Week here in the Boulder/Denver area.

I took it out for it's first recreational ride yesterday and had a great time. It's really nice to be able to hop on most roads around here and find a decent bike line/gigantic shoulder. I found a couple of good bike trails that run along creeks and lakes which I definitely like better than street riding. This leads me to the sad conclusion that I might need to get a proper mountain bike so that I can head up to the foothills for some more serious nature rides. But I'm okay with the local trails for now: they're pretty flat, not to rocky, and I got to see prairie dogs up close.

For those of you interested the bike is a Kona Dew, a hybrid bike that has a pretty sturdy frame, thinner tires that still have a bit of grip, and more of an upright sitting position. It doesn't have a name yet though...any suggestions?

Planes. Trains, and 80 year olds

We took a trip out to Chicago last weekend for Kelly's grandmother's 80th birthday party. It was supposed to be somewhat of a family reunion with a lot of people coming into to town for it. So the plan was to catch a flight Friday afternoon (5:30ish), get into Chicago around 9, hang out for 3 days, and leave late Monday night. So Friday rolls around; Kelly's got the day off work and I get out of work early so that I can pack. I get home, throw some close into a bag, and then we run off to an eye doctor's appointment for Kelly. They told us 30-40 minutes tops. Well an hour and a half later we have a slightly nervous Andrew and Heather and some really shitty Friday afternoon traffic. Andrew's driving and going as fast as he can in spurts but we keep hitting traffic jams. Ugh. Then we park in the econo-lot at the airport, power-walk to the security check-point which we thought was going to be the hard part--it actually didn't take that long--and then waited forever for one of the trains to the C concourse. We book it up the escalator run to the screens to find our gate...where's the Chicago flight? It's not listed? Ohhhh, it left without us.

Try Again

Luckily we were able to get on standby for a flight Saturday at 7:00am. The best part about a fllight at 7:00 am is that you get to wake up at 4:10am! I said I'd drive since Andrew drove us on our last attempt. The good part is that there was no traffic and it was a breeze getting to the gate. All of us made it onto the plane and a couple of hours later we were at Chicago-O'Hare. We didn't check any bags, so we deplaned, walked right out and our ride was already there waiting for us.

Day 1

I meet 18 of kelly's 200 Chicago relatives

We went into the city on the train (there's a station in Northbrook where we were staying). Now for all of you who haven't taken the Metra into Chicago, this is in fact a real honest-to-god train. An above ground, double-decker, with an ever elusive club car. For some reason I always like being able to take a train into the city so this was cool for me. It was a lot like the CalTrain b/w San Jose and San Francisco.

It turns out that I am in fact the only person in the group who hasn't been to Chicago before so I end up kind of dictating where we go. Right off when you get out of Union Station there's the Sears Tower which is pretty impressive surrounded by the rest of the downtown buildings. I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking:

The picture in the middle there is the new art installment in the new Millenium Park affectionately known as The Bean. It's done by a man named Anish Kapoor. There's a lot of neat public art in Chicago.



Below is a picture of an installment Picasso did for the city. The story is that they were discussing commissioning him for the piece and he decided it was going to be so ridculously expensive that he would just do it for free. It's a really cool piece. From the front it looks like a dog or a horse, but when you go behind it and slightly to the left, it's the back of a woman's head. Genius.
Sorry its so dark...it was getting late by this point.










This is actually a 50ft digital tower where the face makes all sorts of expressions and then at the end it spits a giant stream of water.

We also happened to luck out and be in Chicago just in time for the annual blues fest. We went in, had some delicious Chicago pizza and some ridiculously expensive beers and jammed out for awhile. Anyways, it was a fun trip. The last pic of the trip is the rarely seen picture of the foursome of Kelly's sisters.

Anyhow, we've been pretty busy so there's plenty more to come. Stay tuned.