Yeah Long Weekends!

I gotta take more of these things.  Or maybe I should get really active on trying to get PSU to change to a 4 day work week with 10 hour days.  Although if I had three day weekends all the time I would probably die of exhaustion in about a month.  I can't stop once I start it stings!

I got all kinds of stuff in this weekend and was thoroughly wiped out by Tuesday morning, enough that riding into work ended up being a non-option.  Saturday I got in one of my new favorite past-times, Strava hunting.  Basically consists of trying to find a loop that hits a few local KOM segments and doing little segment intervals trying to clean them all up.  In the past I have always found it really hard to get myself to do intervals on the bike, they just aren't all that enjoyable.  But I enjoy racing my bike so voila! intervals by proxy.  And it turns out I really like that format of ride because you still get a great workout and I still get to enjoy the day and surroundings during the soft pedaling sections in between.  I was even able to snap a few pictures along the route:

PEMI

I had some other ones as well but as I'm typing this I'm realizing that lots of pictures on my phone have randomly disappeared and it looks like anything that I haven't Instagram'd is now missing from my phone...not cool Instagram, not cool.  The highlight was a sweet pic of my handlebars that was supposed to be a covered bridge.

The fitness portion of the ride went fairly well.  I was able to get 2 of the 4 targeted segments and the 2 I didn't get I knew were going to be tall orders.  Both are currently owned by a very strong rider and neither are really suited to me.  But I'm sure I rode both better than I ever have before and I think I can do both a bit faster with slightly cooler and less windy conditions than I had on Saturday.

Sunday we hit the new Agway over in Belmont which is huge and awesome and we doubled down on our garden a bit and did a bunch more planting as well as some serious yardwork, cleaning up and coming up with plans for some areas that we have put off for years.  Tough work but the payoff will be pretty sweet.  We are also contemplating buying some fruit trees that they have at that Agway for really reasonable prices but we have to do a bit more research to see if it really makes sense and how much work it would really be. Man would I love to be able to grab a nectarine from my yard though!

Monday Mike and I got after some of the smaller 'middle' Belknaps that are scattered in between Mt. Major and the rest of the larger peaks over by Belknap itself.  Mike is after the Belknap Range patch and needs to tag all 12.  After my jaunt a few years ago I am actually fairly close to getting all 12 as well.  I wasn't expecting much from these peaks but it was actually a really cool day.  The Quarry Trail was much more maintained than I was expecting and the terrain was interesting and there were still some really good views even though the summits weren't exactly really exposed.  I'm sure Mike will post a very thorough account so I will link that once it exists.  For now here is the raw data: