Pedal Poppers does 20 miles!

It's been a week already since I've seen the top of Bald Hill, but we've discovered more than a handful of other great trails on Google Maps around the Corvallis area, so we've just been exploring what's out there. Many of these are near our house and around the McDonald-Dunn Forest. For a few days, Pedal Poppers has been eager to get to the clearing at the top of Dimple Hill, which is actually a small mountain at 1500 feet. There are biking and hiking trails everywhere around this, and I was hoping we could do this journey together, but my body is not quite ready to tackle such a strenuous bike and hike. After mapping out a very steep-hilled 21.3 mile loop through the southern portion of the "MacDunn Forest" (McDonald-Dunn) and back down into the town of Corvallis, Pedal Popper's really wanted to take on this adventure. (I've discovered the bike mapping feature on Google, which I failed to find on an earlier ride, so this is awesome, and as you can see, the elevation changes are shown as well.)

Since I had plenty of homework to do and just simply cannot keep up the pace needed to do this yet, I did my exercise at home, and we loaded up Pedal Popper's bike with granola energy bars, lots of water, and a cell phone in case of any trouble. It was a cool day yesterday, but still partially sunny. The route included roads and trails; the roads are of more concern to me than the trails for Pedal Poppers. The reason is that some of the roads to these trails are narrow, single lanes of automobile traffic both ways without bike routes. And Pedal Poppers has long had an issue with finding a helmet that fits. (Sprocket can easily wear a M-L sized bike helm, Pedal Poppers... not so much.)

We're dealing with needing an XL helm that is actually XL and not just Large - that perfect fit is very hard to find, but among a wall of a hundred helms at our local bike shop, we finally found just one helm that fit Pedal Poppers - only problem now is the price - $80, and the color - gray - which is not as visible as we'd like it to be. Our bike shop is ordering one in a brighter color with a much needed sun visor. The $80 doesn't sound like much when we're talking about protection of the head, but it's just a bit more than we can squeeze out of the grad school budget this term, so until the end of March, we'll just be as careful as possible and hope for the best on roads and trails.

Probably what you want to see are the pics from Pedal Poppers' adventure, so here they are:

The trip took three hours, and Pedal Poppers took some nice pics with the phone. One of the funniest stories about the voyage was that Pedal Poppers saw some mountain bikers reach the open area at the top of Dimple Hill, then, just like that, they seemed to ride off over a cliff. Pedal Poppers needed to look at a map to make sure there were actually trails going down that steep hill. Thankfully, there were.

When Pedal Poppers got home, we ate our favorite Omega Hot wheat free, gluten free pizza. You can find that recipe on one of my previous blogs. Well, we need to get going on our daily adventure, going to see if we can find a Specialized AWOL Elite at one of the downtown bike shops (I may have written that bike off too soon - I like the geometry on it, and it looks like a very good option for Pedal Poppers. The Trek 520 is still a nice bike, but we want to try others too), so catch you all later. Pics of Bald Hill to come.

-Sprocket