The new bike is pretty great. I haven't gone on an epic ride yet, but I'm slowly getting miles on it. I found some good places to ride online and have been exploring a little bit. The first route that I've done twice has a good hill climb at the beginning and takes me about 40 minutes to do (16 miles, 680 feet of climbing). Today, I changed it up a little bit and headed out on Foothills Parkway. For some reason I was thinking this would be flat because it is in a straight line, but that wasn't quite right. It was uphill the whole way out and I missed a turn at the ended and ended up going up a gigantic hill at 25% grade for over a mile. Ouch. As it turned out, this route was pretty good and I'll likely do it again tomorrow and go out further. This time was 1288 feet over 24 miles and tomorrow will likely be 1400 feet over 34 miles (taking Steven's Creek Road further). Next on the list of things I want to do is make it to the Pacific ocean. This is the likely route there and I'd turn around and come back the same way which would put me at 50 miles and ~3800 feet. It should be doable, but I might need to convince Ben to go with me. So a while back I was riding along and managed to rip apart a pair of pedals. I mentioned it in a thread on Faster Mustache. I finally called Crank Brothers about it, finally shipped off the pedals to them, they finally shipped them back, and my roommate mailed them (and all my mail) to me in California. They completely rebuilt them and they're pretty much brand new pedals with all new parts. Turns out, my pedals went to "The Pedal Spa." Awesome! It's good to know that there are still companies out there with good customer service that stand behind their products.