Last year my bike trip was to Santa Fe to ride mountain bikes. This year, I flew to Portland, OR for a long weekend of road biking with 2 friends from Atlanta that have moved there: Paul and Austin. I flew out from Atlanta last Friday evening, and the bike crazyness began! First thing Saturday morning Paul and I picked up a rental Fuji Roubaix ACR 2.0 from the super nice guys at Waterfront Bikes. The bike was brand new and fit pretty well, and had pretty white bar tape that I knew wouldn't stay that way for long.

Saturday: Forest Park

From Paul's house, the three of us rode west out of Portland and zigzagged across Forest Park. Part of the loop involved crossing 2 pretty big bridges with traffic, and they were by far the biggest bridges like that I've ridden across. (The bridges in NYC have separated bike lanes.) We got some great views of the city, 2 big climbs, and 2 huge descents, and didn't work too terribly hard. Afterwards, we grabbed tacos from one of the many cheap and delicious food carts in Portland.

• 34 miles, 2500 ft, 2.5 hours
• GPS Trace: Forest Park

Sunday: Hood River

Sunday morning is was raining pretty badly in Portland. We found a route out of Hood River, OR on mapmyride.com and loaded up the car. Once there, we got a small break in the rain as setup for the last stage of the Mt Hood Cycling Classic was getting set up. Our plan was to get back and see the last 30 minutes or so of the pro men's circuit, but we ended up missing it by a few minutes. This ended up being a pretty awesome route, but it would have been more fun if we weren't getting rained on half the time. The long slow uphill for the first half was followed by a long slow downhill for the second half, and both had great scenic views of rolling hills covered in nurseries and orchards. Mt. Hood would have been visible the whole time if we weren't buried in the clouds. For surviving, we rewarded ourselves with food and beer at the Full Sail Brewing Pub in downtown Hood River, OR.

• 50 miles, 3800ft, 3.5 hours
• GPS Trace: Hood River

Monday: Sandy River

Paul had to work on Monday, and I was pretty beat from Sunday's ride, so Austin and I set out on a longer but easier ride out Portland to the East on bike paths. The ride was nice and pretty flat until we got out to Sandy River, where there were a few short climbs and a few great windy downhills. There were no real views, but lots of miles and lots of changes in scenery: from toothless meth heads on the bike path to Alpaca farms in the hills. We got a bit turned around riding back into town but with some pointers from a local on a bike, we made it to downtown Portland for massive burritos from another food cart.

• 70 miles, 2600ft, 4.5 hours
• GPS Trace: Sandy River

Tuesday: Larch Mountain

On Tuesday, Austin was back at work but Paul was able to sneak out for a ride, and a ride it was! We drove east to a home depot parking lot around 250th street, hopped on our bikes, and headed up the road to Larch Mountain. This was a continual climb up to the overlook at 4056ft, which took us 2.5 hours. The skies were clear and after a short hike-a-bike to the top, the view was great: we could see all of the big peaks in the area: Hood, Jefferson, Rainer, St. Helens, and Adams. After a handful of photos, we headed down the mountain at ~30MPH, getting back to where we started in under an hour. More burritos afterwards, and my legs informed me that they did not want to ride any more bikes.

• 47 miles, 4400ft, 3.5 hours
• GPS Trace: Larch Mountain

The End

What an awesome trip! 200+ miles, 13,000+ feet of climbing, and over 15 hours in the saddle including biking to dinner a few nights. I had a great time hanging out with Paul, Austin, and friends, and it was nice to be away from the internet and on a bike instead for 4 days. Based on the weekend, I liked Portland better than San Francisco, but Paul thinks the winter weather in Portland makes it a bit less desirable (weather this weekend was pretty close to perfect). There's more photos here: Road Biking in Portland, OR, though unfortunately I didn't snag any of the great views on Day 1. Waterfront bikes was surprisingly glad to see the bike covered in mud splatter and "well used", and Tuesday night I hopped on a red-eye back to Atlanta. Up next will be a mountain biking trip somewhere new and exciting. Track Racing tonight anyone? I kinda hope it gets rained out...

This past weekend, San and I took our first "real" vacation since our Europe trip in 2008. Friday afternoon we drove down to Destin, FL to spend some time with some of San's extended family. Much food was eaten and many movies were seen. On a boat tour in Destin we got up close and personal with a blue crab and a pufferfish, and we saw bottle nose dolphins and stingrays in the wild from the deck.

Once Sunday afternoon rolled around, we headed over to Seaside for a few relaxing days at the beach. Our room was a tight squeeze on the 3rd floor of a tower with a great view:

We had a great time walking around, making pyramids and sphinxes at the beach, riding beach cruisers around, playing in the ocean, swimming in the pool, and enjoying happy hour with a view of the ocean.

I left my camera in the room for most of the trip so hopefully San will get all the photos she took posted, but I did take mine to the beach Tuesday evening and got some pretty awesome shots thanks to sunset, the moon, low tide, and a f/2.8 L lens. Here's a favorite:

Here's the rest of the photos from the weekend: Seaside 2010. Who wants to go in on a big house there at the end of the summer if it's not consumed by the oil spill?

San's last day at work was last Friday (She's fulltime freelance illustrator now, let her know if you need something illustrated!), President's day was a company holiday for me, and I owed my friend David a trip to Charleston because he is stationed there with the USAF and has stopped by Atlanta a few times, so I put in for PTO for Tuesday and San and I took a long weekend and drove to the coast.

It was a pretty relaxing weekend of not doing a whole lot other than eating (starting with some midnight Taco Bell on Saturday shortly after we got there) and some light tourism. San, Dave, and I spent a little bit of time exploring and taking photos on a couple of occasions; My friend Campbell from High School joined us for walking around downtown Charleston and a few meals and movies; And Lindsey joined us to go to Joint Base Charleston to see where David works and get a personal tour of a C-17.

All the good photos from the weekend are here, and here's a small selection:

Another year, another Gallery Developers Conference. Chad (The lead Gallery UX guy) took care of organizing things this year, so we ended up in his current hometown: Santa Fe, NM. I took off the Thursday and Friday from work, but figured I might as well make a bigger trip of it so I took off the whole week and flew out last Saturday so I could squeeze in 4 full days of mountain biking before Gallery work began. I spent the first few days staying with Chad and biking on trails around Santa Fe on a sweet rental mountain bike from Mellow Velo: a Commencal Skin 2. All the photos are at: http://ckdake.com/gallery/2009/santafe-mtb/ and some highlights are below. Chad was kind enough to let me stay at his house, and his fridge was always full of beer!

Sunday - 21.7 miles, 4:25, 4427ft

Not knowing what I was getting myself into, Chad dropped me off at a parking lot at St. John's College, and I headed up Atalaya Mountain. I don't think the base altitude slowed me down that much, but the climbing was pretty nuts and I did quite a bit of hike-a-bike. Near the top, there were places I had to carry the bike on my shoulder because it wasn't even really possible to push it up hill. It took a while to get up, but the view was worth it. I cruised on past the top and headed north into Dale Ball South, which I now know is the "expert" part of Dale Ball, and I now know the longest and steepest way to the top of Dale Ball South. Another great view:

and all things considered, my first day of mountain biking was pretty crazy and pretty successful. My GPS showed me the way back to Chad's house, and the elevation profile shows the cumulative ridiculousness:

This is the most climbing I've ever done in one day on a mountain bike, and more than I've ever done in one day on a road bike since I started keeping track a few years ago!

Monday - 29.1 miles, 3:37, 2810 ft

On day 2, I biked from Chad's house to Mellow Velo for a new rear tire and rode from there to Dale Ball Central. Central was a lot more rideable and fun than South, and Dale Ball North turned out to be the most fun. Nothing super epic about the day, but lots of good riding on fun trails and almost no walking the bike.

Tuesday - 33.1 miles, 2:52, 2875 ft

Sunday's ride finally caught up to me on Tuesday, so I took it a bit easy and biked south of town on the Santa Fe Rail Trail which is a relatively flat dirt bike path following an old rail line south of town. It was pretty overcast for the whole ride, and was a relaxing change of pace from Sunday and Monday, so I obviously had to do something a little crazy on Wednesday.

Wednesday - 35.1 miles, 4:33, 3932 ft

I piled into the car with Chad and he took a big detour on his commute to drop me off at the Aspen Vista trailhead up near the Santa Fe Ski Resort. Even with arm warmers and leg warmers on, it will still pretty chilly as I started up the service road climb to the top. For over 5 miles, the grade was a steady 6.5% and it took a while to make it to the top, but the views were even more worth it than Atalaya and Dale Ball South, and the whole way up was rideable! After some photos, I continued past the antenna cluster at the top of the ski resort and climbed another few hundred feet to the top of Deception Peak at 12,357 (which did require a little walking):

This is the highest altitude that I've ever been on a bike at. Originally, I was going to try and make it up to Lake Peak which is a little higher, but after some reading around online the night before it didn't sound too bikeable and I took a picture of Lake Peak from the top of Deception Peak to show how crazy getting to the top of it would have been:

I turned around and went back down the way I came (going down a whole lot faster than I came up!), and at the parking lot, turned up the road to the Windsor trailhead. Windsor turned out to be the most fun mountain biking of the trip: 5 miles of super fast downhill that was just easy enough to be rideable on a hard tail. I took a left on Chamisa for a few miles, headed through Dale Ball Central again, and rode back along the railroad tracks to Chad's house. Wednesday was a great day, the longest time I've spent on a mountain bike, and perhaps the most enjoyable day of mountain biking I've had. The elevation for the day shows a bit of the story:

In Summary

I'm very glad I decided to get some mountain biking in, and managed to climb over 14,000ft over 119 miles which is plenty of riding for a week. This trip meets my goal for 2009 of taking a week long mountain biking trip somewhere, and the 15h26min in the saddle is even enough to meet my "spend more time in the saddle than it took to get there and get home" rule of thumb for biking in Atlanta! Here's the full map of the week:

If you're going to be in Santa Fe and ride mountain bikes, it's definitely fitting in some of these things, and the Santa Fe area might actually be a good destination for a mountain biking specific trip. Get this map, take a GPS, and stay somewhere in town! From what Chad tells me, there is more great mountain biking around Los Alamos which is very doable if you have a car, and there is more mountain biking around the Windsor trail that I didn't have time to do. Check out the rest of the photos at http://ckdake.com/gallery/2009/santafe-mtb/.

SugarCON was last week, so I was in San Francisco, California to interact with some of SugarCRM's customers and other employees. We did a good bit of socializing which is partly captured in this photo album of pictures from my little camera, but I took a lot of pictures with the big camera and some things are worth pointing out here. Tuesday evening was the SugarCON boat cruise around the bay, which had some awesome views including:

Wednesday after SugarCON ended, a few of us went to a shooting range for about an hour and took a few pictures inside. (I took this 365 picture on the way there.) San showed up on Thursday and did a bit of San Francisco exploring on her own, and after a boot-camp with some SugarCRM partners, the IT team and most of our significant others headed to Lake Tahoe for a few nights away from the city. The lake was a short walk through the woods from our cabin, and of the Lake Tahoe pictures I uploaded, these capture it pretty well:

We didn't do any winter sports other than throwing a few snowballs, but it was nice to have casual conversations with work people over beers or in the hot tub instead of on IRC. (Also, FYI, when you see "tonemapped" in a URL of a picture here, its a tonemapped HDR image resulting from a combination of 3 images that gives more details in highlights and shadows than a single image would, sometimes more accurately producing the look of a scene and sometimes just making it look awesome.) On Sunday, Jesse, Seth, San and I headed back towards the cost with the hope of reaching Point Reyes before sunset. On the way, we stopped a few times. First for a bathroom break and some pictures including:

Then, at a Point Reyes visitor center on the San Andreas Fault to walk along the "earthquake trail" and break open our 1.5lb bacon and cheese sandwich on the fault line:

Even though we made it to Point Reyes lighthouse before sundown, it was after 4:30pm so the visitor center and lighthouse were closed. Regardless, some great views:

We arrived back in San Francisco under the cover of darkness, and got in some exploring the next day before heading home including Twin Peaks, Fort Point NHS, and the Golden Gate Botanical Gardens:

More pictures from everything are in these albums:

• SugarCON Boat Trip
• Shooting in CA
• Lake Tahoe on Saturday
• Point Reyes
• Exploring San Francisco
• SugarCON etc

All in all, it was a pretty good trip but after 10 days away from home, I was glad to be back!

Another year, another Gallery Developer Conference somewhere awesome, and this year it was an excuse to take some extra vacation days from work and explore. So on July 10th, San and I hopped on a plan to Amsterdam. After a slightly uncomfortable flight due to a large group on a youth ambassador trip that decided not to sleep on the overnight flight, we arrived and found our way to the hotel to meet up with the rest of the Gallery group. I won't walk through everything here, but will point out some highlights from the trip. Read on to the full post for all the details!