Weekend wrapup

We had a good weekend. The weather is starting to cool off. It’s still sunny with highs in the mid-80s, but the mornings and evenings are close enough to chilly that I’m putting on a long-sleeve shirt for biking to work or taking the dog for a walk.

On Saturday we went to the Trail through Time, a short hiking trail near the Utah border, at the site of a dinosaur quarry. We saw fossils of diplodocus and camarasaurus and an unidentified sauropod, as well as some Jurassic plants. Cailan was not impressed by the dinosaur bones embedded in rocks, but he liked the pictures of dinosaurs on the interpretive signs all along the trail. We also saw many lizards on the trail and the rocks.



On Sunday morning, a babysitter came over so Chris and I could go for a mountain bike ride. Cailan was a little hesitant when the sitter Lindsay first arrived; I think he was expecting it to be Brit or Amy from Tacoma or a teacher from his new daycare. Lindsay is a music ed major who recently took the percussion methods class, so she and Cailan had a lot to talk about. When we left he was showing her how he plays the tympani on his train box.

The ride was great. We went to Mary’s Loop just outside of Fruita, which we have done numerous times (even before we moved to GJ), but it’s very close and very very fun. There are some challenging sections, a few places that we will never be able to ride, and a lot of trail that’s just fast and fun. There are also gorgeous views of the Colorado river winding through shallow canyons. We were riding the big red tandem with a new suspension fork that seems to work much better than the old one. We got to one section of rocky drop-offs that we have never cleared before but Chris had figured out a path through them. We were both so focused on that that we didn’t see the tree just to the right of the rocks, and I whacked my head on one of its sturdy branches. My helmet did its job and my head is fine but my neck and shoulder are a little sore.

That was the only mishap; otherwise we zoomed along having a great time. There were lots of people out riding, so we stopped often to chat: most people are a little surprised to see a mountain bike tandem so it draws a lot of comments. One nice man agreed to take a picture of us:



We brought the GPS along to record our trip. We don’t have perfect agreement between the Garmin, which recorded 14.4 miles, and the cyclometer, which recorded 15.3. Here is the elevation profile of the ride. It looks like there are some big climbs and descents, but the intervals on the elevation axis are pretty small, so there really isn’t that much change.


Here is a plot of the trail, laid onto a topo map. It’s kind of hard to tell from this, but we essentially rode an out-and-back trail with two excursions onto side loops.



When we got back home, Cailan and Lindsay had a lot to report. They had played all of Cailan’s instruments, they had been to the park where Cailan played kettle drums on the picnic tables, they built dinosaurs out of Legos, they played the hiding in the pillows game… Lindsay was impressed with Cailan’s vocabulary, and Cailan was exhausted. He didn’t nap right away, but later in the afternoon we were eating a snack at the kitchen counter. I was skimming through a magazine while Cailan slowly plowed through some melon and cheese. He’d been quiet for awhile, and when I glanced over at him, he had fallen asleep on his plate.