.:: DonnieNix.net ::.

I went for a ride this morning. It was about 38 degrees.

I have a good bit of decent cold-weather gear. I bought a baselayer shirt yesterday that’s made of the thin material that let’s moisture out but keeps warmth inside. It worked pretty well. I was impressed. I also have Pearl Izumi leg warmers and Sugoi arm warmers that are made of lycra and fleece. Those things work very well. I wore two Dri-Fit shirts and a bike-specific wind breaker and my torso was nice and warm. No problems there.

Oops, one problem is that there’s about a two-inch gap between my socks and the leg warmers. So that part of my legs froze.

I have a Nike/Trek balaclava (full head cover with a slot for your eyes) that is made of a thin dri-fit materia, but it kept my head fairly warm. The only problem is that when you breath through the material, some of your breathing is routed up out of the slot and across your sunglasses, which fogs them up. So you can either ride without sunglasses, or stop breathing. I think I chose correctly.

My feet froze. My bike shoes have on the top part of your foot, so wind just blows right in. I have some Pearl Izumi shoe covers. I’ll wear them next time.

My hands froze. I wore my Fox full finger gloves, but those are made for warmer weather and let a lot of air through to your fingers. I need some good cold-weather gloves.

I had a decent ride. After I got warmed up, I didn’t notice my cold fingers or feet anymore, but noticed how bulky the arm warmers and jacket were together. I need to do something different with the jacket. Maybe get a better one.

So I need a good moisture-wicking fleece-y jacket that is warm and flexible; I need leg warmers that go all the way down to the shoes; I need some ant-fog stuff for my sunglasses. That’s pretty much it. I’d like to ditch the windbreaker for normal rides because the sweat goes through the dri-fit stuff and just stops at the inside of the jacket. When I take the jacket off, the inside is soaked.

Well, enough of this palaver…..

As you probably know from my other posts or from knowing me personally, I’m a gigantic over-planner. I love to bust out the Excel spreadsheets and work out a vacation plan. On our Grand Canyon trip, I started planning this thing in January and we pulled it off with only a few hitches, mostly caused by an unwillingness by certain people to stick to the plan. But we won’t go there.

For 2008, I am in the extremely early stages of planning a bike road-trip to Crested Butte, CO, around the 4th of July. This would be me and Casey doing basically what we did in Oct ‘06 when we went to Fruita. The Crested Butte trip is something he and I have been talking about since Sept 05 when we tried to ride there but were kicked around by the weather.

The plan now is to toss the bikes on the rack, load up the Hyundai Tucson and head west on June 30. We’ll spend 3.5 days riding around CB and Gunnison, CO, then come home on Saturday. Since this will be around the July 4 holiday, I’ll only have to take 2 days off from work. That will work out pretty good.

I think I’m going to make great efforts to NOT over-plan this road trip. For instance, we don’t really need to take so much food with us. The last time, we took enough to eat for a week, but ate out a lot more than I had planned or budgeted. We ended up tossing a lot of the food out because it either went bad or we needed the space. The same thing happened on the Grand Canyon trip.

The thoughts of a July 4 holiday in CB is very cool. It will be awesome seeing a fireworks show against the backdrop of the Rockies. We’re not going to do any side trips, like to Boulder or Moab, this time. We plan to focus all our efforts on Crested Butte. This should be fun.

Later in the Summer, Melanie and I are thinking of heading to either Hilton Head, Destin, or someplace in the Smokies like Gatlinburg or Pigeon Forge. Maybe even Western NC. It’s still up in the air. We considered doing another massive vacation and flying to San Diego/LA, but after some consideration, we decided to delay that for another year and do a simple vacation in 2008. We’ve kind of had our fill of cross-country vacations for the time being and so we are taking a break. I am looking forward to going to Southern Cal, just not this coming year.

Other than that, I think we’ll do an early Spring trip to Louisiana to see relatives, a trip to NC to also see relatives…short weekenders here and there…It should be good. I’m looking forward to 2008.