No Rest for the Wicked

This one was almost titled "Friends with benefits" and/or "Boys in Bikinis...Girls on Surfboards" But I just got back from a mini vaca and am not as shahhp as usual. No rest for the wicked works for our purposes. I have not been on a bike in 5 days. This is not a good thing. But it is what it is. It was time for a "rest" week anyway. We all have certainly been putting in sick miles for "winter" Damn I am using a lot of "quotation" marks in a paragraph aren't I? I wonder if the blog police will come after me? But I digress. Not only have we been riding lots. We have been riding hard. I think my friends realize what is expected of me this year and are subtly trying to get me fit so I don't suck. I love them for that. I will play along and pretend I don't notice the insane training we are doing right now. Again its been so much fun you can not put it under the headline of "training" Ok I swear those are the last of the quotation marks.

So this is a tale of two blog posts. They will come full circle trust me. I take forever to order a new bike. I hold on to the ones I have forever. They aren't disposable to me. My bikes have dents on them. Scars that tell stories. Half of them are steel. Oldish steel. And they are amazing. But I have been itching for a new road bike for a while. I have been flirting with lots of ideas. But at the end of the day it all came back to Rock Lobster. Paul has been building me bikes for something crazy like 20 years. Now granted its only been 2 bikes in 20 years but still. We are friends. We have a lot of history. He built my first cx bike way back in the 90s. It was school bus yellow and at least one size too big for me. Back then he did this cool run of production bikes. The last one he had was a 54. I bought it and loved it. My latest RL is a black cross killing machine. It is made of 7000 series aluminum and opened my eyes to the material.

Before this bike I never would have though an aluminum road bike would be a good idea. But I ride my cx bike all year round. And it is the best riding machine I have on road or off. So after all the back and forth about different bikes etc I decided to reach out to Paul and see if he could fit me in. He builds in batches. It is amazing really how many bikes he builds. The timing was perfect. I sent him my deposit and numbers and boom my bike is done. I will have it in my grimy hands in 4-6 weeks. Then we build it up and it becomes a carbon bike killing machine. It is made with some of the last scandium doped tubesets left on the planet. Carbon has killed scandium. Paul wrote a great blog post on the impact carbon has had on tubing manufacturers. When I read it I knew I had to get off my butt and order a frame as soon as I could. I am sooo stoked for the bike. And I owe Paul big time for getting it done so fast and in the midst of his preparation for NAHBS.

Back to the other part of this post. So its been day five off the bike. Acck. Losing it a touch. But its the kids school vacation and I wanted them to have a great time so we headed up to Maine. Nothing like time on the farm with family. Nothing. The girls love the farm. It is tucked into the coast of Maine. It is a combo horse farm/cow farm. The girls can just run all over the place. They had their first true New England Lobster pot feast! We went to Pineland Farms and saw cows, saw cheese being made, ate cheese, bought cheese. Just a great road trip. We are lucky to have such a great family. R&R is almost over. Then its back to sharpening the blade and getting ready for the Ronde.