Turkey day riding and freezing rain

I guess it had to arrive eventually. The cold front that dumped a ton of snow on the rockies has hit Kirksville, but instead of nice pristine, clean, beautiful snow we get freezing rain. The temp when I left my house this night was around 4 deg F with the wind chill. Nice huh? At least Eugena, Kiowa and I had a nice warm vacation over the thanksgiving break. I had a week off of school as it was between quarters and instead of driving back to slc or cali for a dinner, we headed down to the Ozarks for a mountain biking trip. We decided to ride the Berryman trail in southeast Missouri. It was noted by Bicycling Magazine and called "the best singletrack East of the Rockies and West of the Appalachians." It defiantly lived up to it's reputation. It is a 24mile loop and a ton of fun. We ended up getting down there Thursday morning and went for a nice 7 mile ride on the Courtois section of The Ozark Trail. We were camping at the Berryman campground and had the whole campground to ourselves. Friday morning the weather was perfect, 65 deg, sunny and awesome, so we geared up to ride the 24 mile Berryman trail. We started at about 10:30 am and after 45 minutes ended up riding with a solo rider down from st. louis. At the 7 mile point Kiowa was starting to really drag so we decided that she wasn't going to make the whole 24 miles before dark. We planned a shortcut the would put us at about 16miles to get back to the campground. We ended up finishing around 3:30 pm or so (Kiowa has only one speed when she gets tired, and it isn't very fast). The trail lived up to all our expectations. It is great tight singletrack. You have to be on your guard constantly because of all the leaves that cover the ground. You can't really tell what is under the leaves. Parts of the trail are really fast and smooth and parts are loaded with rocks and roots. You just never know what you're getting. We both had some good spills but came out relatively unscathed. Eugena and I decided that we want to continue this proud tradition of heritage of being active (camping, biking, backpacking, etc) on Thanksgiving. What better way to celebrate gluttony then by not being gluttonous? We had a good time and very much enjoyed our Thanksgiving dinner of Salmon and vegetables tin foil dinners. They were excellent...


Find more pics of the trip and others here.

the joys of fall

kiowa likes leaves... you can see the rest here

I retract what I said in the last post

So after Friday's mountain bike ride with eugena, cathy, kiowa, and halley (cathy's super fast greyhound) we found a little surprise on kiowa's underside right in the middle of a blood meal:



So now I am at a dilemma: Do I continue to ride in the woods (which is my seasonal exercise) or do I put it off until these little buggers finally die...
The weather is unseasonablly warm right now so maybe the ticks decided they'd make a comeback. I kind of wish it would get cold again so I wouldn't have to worry about this. As for now, Erlichiosis here we come....