Alvin!

[Razors Edge ★]

Last weekend was hot and humid, and I mistakenly thought I could find more shade & stay cooler riding gravel vs the road.  Anyway, I was wrong about that, but it did have me enjoying - among other things - the "horse" trail that runs parallel to our paved MUP for most of the distance out to where I can hop on true gravel roads in Leesburg.  This is maybe 7 miles of the probably 13 miles of that horse path at 2x (no one wants to see me puttering at 15mph), so I also get the Alvin "chipmunk" sound going   I think I passed under a dozen folks on the gravel - no cyclists - compared to hundreds I would have encountered 20' away on the paved bits.

 

[Square Wheels]

do you have a gravel bike?

[Razors Edge ★]

14 hours ago, Square Wheels said:

do you have a gravel bike?

Yeah - I was riding my Diverge.  

That horse trail you could get by with a road bike and 25s for 95% of it, but there are a few rocky sections - you can see the more "yellow" patches a few times - and a few very chunky gravel patches where a road bike would suffer  

[ChrisL]

A lot of my “gravel” is like that.  SoCal is just too built up for long dirt roads (that aren’t mountain fire roads more suited for a MTB).  Still fun to mix it up. 

[Razors Edge ★]

5 minutes ago, ChrisL said:

A lot of my “gravel” is like that.  SoCal is just too built up for long dirt roads (that aren’t mountain fire roads more suited for a MTB).  Still fun to mix it up. 

Yeah - it's actually quite fun to hop on that side trail.  Sometimes, on my Tarmac, I'd see folks on the paved trail ahead, and decide it might be fun/safer/easier to hop to the gravel and pass there rather than stay on the paved stuff.  It's just a bit of "different". 

In the Tours this year, the men and women had Super Planche de Belles Filles and that extra strip of gravel/dirt/hard pack was a fun little stretch   While I dislike the monster cobbles in the GTs, I do like a little "Strada Bianche" in the mix

[Longjohn ★]