The most beautiful commute ever

If there were a beautiful bike commute contest I would win. Starting from my house, I have a 15 minute coast downhill, through the beautiful Bay View community. Often as I ride past the arts campus in the center of Bay View, I can hear the resident artists just beginning to warm up. I leave the viols and trumpets behind and cruise into Petoskey. At this point I usually break down and stop for a cup of coffee at my favorite cafe, Roast & Toast (I know, road bikes and espresso? How cliche.) From there on I take a combination of bike path and clean, wide road shoulders all the way to Charlevoix, where I work as an engineer. Doesn't sound that great? Consider then that this road and the paralleling bike path exactly follows the coastline of Little Traverse Bay, a gorgeous area of Lake Michigan. There is a reason why so many of the Chicago lumber and railroad barons built their vacation homes up here--This place reminds me of New Zealand in its friendliness and beauty of nature.
Luckily my job has flex hours, so if I stop to admire the view of the water and the land across the bay (No, you can't see Wisconsin from Michigan), I'm not in any trouble with the boss (Who is, by the way, pretty darn cool).
The only downside of this commute? It's 25 miles each way, which isn't bad, except the very last thing I do at the end of the day is climb the tallest hill in the township to get up to my house. Whew, that one really wrecks me.
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Riding the Meadow, Harbor Springs, MI

Every Wednesday night in the small town next to mine a group of riders meets to ride the local trails. Sound familiar? This scene is repeated all around the country, anywhere that people love singletrack. It had a been a while since I last had a fun group ride: too many road rides turned me off to groups. Thankfully the Harbor crowd pulled me back to my roots.
The singletrack at the Meadows is typical northern Michigan: Tight, wooded singletrack, loamy dirt interspersed with sand, and much more climbing than you would expect from the Great Lakes State. The singletrack flows and takes my mind off life--my favorite feature of mountain biking.
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Back at it / Ore to Shore

Well, after viewing some of my friends blogs, I think it's about time I save my own from the festering backwater of the internet and type a few things. Last weekend Will (My old teammate from Tech and good friend) and I did our best to defend our title as the reigning Hard Rock Mixed Tandem in the Ore to Shore, but the combination of stiff competition (yes, the tandem division is very competitve) and a flat tire did us in. Ah, the agony.

Anyways, we still had a great time pedaling 48 miles in sand. Or at least I had a great time. And I'm pretty sure that Will didn't mind the riding too much, since afterwords he got to sleep in the middle of the tent between two georgeous, fast mountain biking chicks. Who was the other girl? My friend Jane, who is also from the greater Petoskey area. She won her are division, and got 12th overall! Word.

Will (podium shot from Chain Drive '05)

Jane and I at Collegiate Nats last year

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