Saturday's Ride (aka Jimmy's bad weekend)

This week, since some of us were on holidays, we went riding on both Thursday and Saturday. Thursday with 3 of us, and Saturday with 4 of us.

Thursday got off to a bad start and got worse. The trails turned out to be really muddy, and we had to struggle just to get back to the road. We were slogging it out, and had taken a break to clean out the mud out of our brakes and such, when Dan and I realized that Jimmy was taking a long time to catch up. We found out that he had picked up a big stick and ripped his back derailleur off.

We proceeded to go to the road, and that's when I remembered a trick I saw on a video on YourMTB.com about a guy towing another using two inner tubes . At the time I posted a comment that included the phrase "Gotta remember that one, if that ever happens to one of our group". Guess what we did? We got Jimmy back to the parking lot, out meeting place, and that was it for Thursday. He had to replace the hanger, and got back into proper order by Saturday.

Saturday, we decided on meeting at another place to ride, the entrance to Short Hills, since that place is usually better when it is wet. At least that is what I thought we agreed on, so I called Jimmy from the entrance parking lot. He turned out to be at our regular spot, waiting for us to show up. Jimmy thought that this would be a plan if we decided it was too wet along 12-mile creek. I had already concluded that two days weren't going to change anything. So we contacted each other by cellphone and managed to meet halfway between, and then ride from there.

We met up with Jimmy and continued to ride. Again, where is Jimmy, is he coming? Well guess what? he broke his chain this time! After we had fixed him up, we continued but it was still a snotty mess. We only went 20km (12 miles), but I guess it was better than nothing.

Makes me long for the colder weather, when everything is frozen. Now that's good winter riding.