Review: Sweet Bean Paste

 After reading Days at the Morisaki Bookstore, Amazon recommended that I read Sweet Bean Paste next. The book looked short and Hoopla had it available so I checked it out and read it.

At first, the book read like the typical sensei teaching student mastery novel. You had a guy who was lackadaisical about his job, when a master shows up to teach him how to make really good bean paste, and how to pay attention to every detail in order to master the process.

Then midway through the book we get a sudden change as we realize the identity of the sensei isn't what we think it is, and the book suddenly goes into a history of Hansen's disease and its stigmatization in Japanese society. This in itself is not bad.

What annoyed me, however, is that the book ends in a place that leaves all plotlines dangling. That does'n't mean that there's no closure. The closure is all about one of the main characters, but I'm wasn't very satisfied by it. That makes it hard for me to recommend the book.

Review: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

 I shouldn't like Days at the Morisaki Bookshop as much as I do. It has a lot of cliches in the "bookshop" genre that seem to get repeated:

• A non-reader would suddenly start reading books just because she's surrounded by them. (I'm sure something like this has happened in real life, I've just never observed it)
• A romance is started by accidentally (or deliberately) sharing a book. (I'm sure it's happened in real life, I've just never observed it)
• A mysterious crazy uncle helps the protagonist, and somehow his backstory makes his behavior somewhat more understandable.

Set against that is that the prose (despite being translated) is transparent and direct. The book is also short, and therefore never overstays its welcome, and finally, the protagonist is uncharacteristically surprised by the behavior of other people, breaking with the stereotype of the empathic female character. Events move quickly, and you're never stuck wondering what is the point of the story.

I enjoyed the references to Japanese literature (some of which has never been translated into English and therefore difficult to find or reads for non-Japanese audiences), the used bookstore district in Tokyo (sounds like a wonderful place, but again, if you're not Japanese what incentive do you have to visit?), and the character development that takes place with the protagonist, who does discover the power of stories to heal and empower.

It's an easy book to like and enjoy. Of course, it nowhere comes close to Among Others. If you haven't read Among Others, and you like Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, you owe it to yourself to grab Jo Walton's superior novel.

Re-read: The Last Wish

 Back to my reading duties with Boen, I decided to read him The Last Wish, the first book in The Witcher series. There's a lot to like about this book, chiefest of them is Sapkowski's penchant for twisting fairy tale classics and turning them into a plausible story set in his grim n' gritty setting. The classic story of The Witcher encountering Snow White and then eventually killing her sets the tone for the rest of the book. You also see encounters with the monster in the Beauty and the Beast, as well as the titular story, setting up the classic relationship between Geralt and the sorceress Yennefer. I love the twists in the story and I will happily say that Boen never saw them coming. The action is also intense enough that Boen didn't fall asleep as easily from this book as from say, a typical Neil Gaiman story (which shows that when picking bed time reading you probably shouldn't pick action packed novels).

Reading it a second time, however, I'm constantly reminded of how bad a writer Sapkowski is. His conversations drag on overlong, constantly bringing up irrelevancies. The prose is stilted and he has a penchant for trying to let you view important action from a distance or from the point of view of an irrelevant or ancillary character. So for instance, the terms of The Last Wish are never disclosed to the reader. In some sense you can understand this --- the author wishes to maintain control and authorial discretion over the long term. But it feels like a nasty cheat upon second reading.

I remember that by the third book this technique becomes overwhelmingly frustrating and I gave up on the series. This is one of the few book series where the video game is way better than the book. I'll probably keep reading the next book to Boen but stop after that.

My Chain Waxing Experiment

 I've always been skeptical about chain waxing despite in my early cycling career reading a book about an 80-year-old bicycle tourist who would cook her chain religiously every night. That seemed excessive and not worth the effort. The inimitable Pamela Blayley, however, posted a pictures of her bicycle tour in Ireland last year on Facebook featuring an incredibly clean chain and declaring that she was now convinced it was the way to go. Unlike many chain waxing advocates, Pamela doesn't stop riding when the pavement stops, neither does she stop riding in the rain, so with her experience (along with an appropriately timed Silca sale), I ordered some chain waxing equipment for experimentation.

This included a mini slow cooker, Silca Hot Melt Wax, Silca Chain Stripper (now superseded by Silca strip chip), and Silca Super Secret Lube. The process is far more involved than I'd like, using the chain stripper, then rinsing it off, and then dropping the chain into the melted wax. (Using the strip chip makes it easier --- you no longer need to strip the chain) The irony is that winter is when you might have the most time to do this involved process, but winter is when it's going to rain and quickly wash away the wax.

My experience in winter is that you pretty much have to either rewax or use the Super Secret Lube every time you ride in wet conditions, even if it didn't rain and you're just getting road splash from a wet road. The wax might do a good job protecting the chain from dirt, but it disappears immediately upon encountering any sort of moisture. Silca's claim that each waxing is good for 100 miles is too optimistic.

Having said that, once waxed, the chain stays very clean and the drivetrain on my bikes with the waxed chain is the cleanest I've seen in years. While I do clean the drivetrain every time I replace a chain, I don't do a perfect job, and the chain wax does a good job of picking up the dirt and preventing it from working its way into the chain rollers.

Having said that, it only took 3 months of fairly rainy weather before I worked through a 4oz bottle of Silca Super Secret Lube, making this much more expensive than the oil-based Silca Synergetic Lube. The oil-based lubes only need to be reapplied at most every 400 miles, and don't need relubing even after it rains, at the penalty of being much more dirty than the wax.

Silca and other chain waxing advocates claim that by keeping the chain so clean waxing increases the life of your chain and drivetrain components significantly. My oil-based chains don't last more than 2500 miles and on the triplet I don't get more than 2000 miles. My gravel bike/roadini probably won't get more than 2000 miles either. Having said that, I get my chains for $10/pop, which means that the effort of waxing and re-waxing simply doesn't pay for itself in drivetrain longevity.

So what's the use case for waxing? First, if you don't ride enough to require rewaxing every ride (I have friends who ride enough that 100 mile intervals is essentially every ride or more often than every week), then maybe it's OK. Secondly, on tour where I have to manhandle the timing chain every time I take apart the triplet it's useful to have a very clean drivetrain, though the penalty of essentially having to wax the chain every night seems kinda off-putting.

Ultimately, I don't consider chain waxing to be worth the effort, but in the summer where the intervals between waxing might be worth it (using the wax lube to touch up between waxing efforts). In winter you should just use oil and forget about keeping the drivetrain clean.

Review: Ass Saver Win Wing Gravel

 

I found a batch of Ass Savers Win Wing Gravel on eBay for about $10 each (plus shipping). At that price I bought a whole bunch of the gravel model and installed them on all my bikes and even a couple of my kids' bikes. The contraption looks flimsy and not worth $28 Amazon charges for them, but the installation is a cinch, and to my surprise it had sufficient clearance even with 700x40 Continental Terraspeed tires! A friend took the above pictured Roadini off pavement on the Montebello traverse and I didn't hear any scritch-scritch sounds coming from the fender, which is one of the most annoying things about riding off pavement with fenders.

Ok, does it work? I've been using them on various rainy commutes and I have to say it works as well as my previous, heavier fenders, and I definitely don't get a nasty stripe up my back. The fender does seem to direct a steady stream of water and dirt at the sidepull caliper brakes, but my brakes don't work any less well and it's California so I don't expect the Win Wing to stay on the bike all year.

At full price of $28, it feels like a rip-off. It's just a bunch of plastic and a rubber strap. But for $10 each I think it's good value. I probably should have bought more and given them to friends, etc (I'll grant that most of my friends, being Californians are hard to talk into riding in the rain), or to have as spares, but my kids definitely bike to school every day and it's worth it to keep their backs and pants clear of dirt if not dry, since I have a hard time getting them to wear rain pants.

Recommended if you can get a good deal on them. Though I guess to be honest the SKS clip-on fenders cost about the same but have the distinctive problem that they don't work well with the Garmin Radar, while these work great with the radar.

Review: Ours Was The Shining Future

 Ours Was The Shining Future is an indictment of the "Brahmin Left" approach to politics. It doesn't brand itself that way, touting itself as a history of the story of the American dream, but it reads to me that way, since it was published pretty recently.

The book explains that we had one shining moment in time in the US where government policy, economic trends, and immigration came together to create momentum for a highly progressive future. He points out that the New Deal was outrageously unlikely:

The historian Jefferson Cowie has pointed out that the New Deal depended on an outrageously unlikely series of events—a depression that gripped the country for more than three years before a reform-minded president took office; an unsustainable coalition of northern liberals and southern segregationists; a reactionary Supreme Court that yielded only after the president won a landslide reelection; and, finally, a world war that unified the country and solidified the creation of mass prosperity. (kindle loc 6424)

Between the Eisenhower administration and the 1980s, the conservatives engineered ways to undo the New Deal whenever it was possible, publishing papers, drawing up list of politicians who were amenable to persuasion, and creating "supply-side economics" as a smoke screen to provide cover for administrations to lower taxes on the wealthy.

Leonhardt points out the similarities between Britain and the USA, in contrast to countries like Japan and Germany, who had much more progressive government policies:

Britain, as a victor in World War II and an economic leviathan for more than two centuries prior, had accumulated one of history’s great collections of interest groups. These interest groups—financial traders, farmers, miners, and others—had caused sclerosis in Britain’s economy. Germany and Japan, by contrast, had been devastated during the war. “We wiped the institutional slate clean for them,” Olson said. As they rebuilt their economies and political systems, they could prioritize the national interest over special interests because their special interests were so weak. Germany and Japan did not rise in spite of their defeat. They rose in part because of it. The parallels between Britain and the United States, though not exact, are plain enough. This country’s postwar period of preeminence produced a set of interest groups that were strong enough to block change. Farmers lobbied for policies that kept food prices high, as Olson had witnessed while growing up in North Dakota. Large corporations and Wall Street firms pushed for tax breaks. Some labor unions negotiated contracts that maximized wages even at the expense of a company’s long-term success. (kindle loc 6138)

 Most of the book is a history of US government policy and the machinations that got to where we are today. The big thing I learned was about immigration:

When immigration is a salient issue, it serves to remind many working-class voters that they agree with conservative parties on questions of patriotism, nationhood, and security. When immigration fades as an issue, voters think less about these questions and more about a society’s economic divisions. Those class divisions, in turn, remind workers that they generally agree with progressive parties on economic policies, such as tax rates and government benefits. Alesina also did pioneering research showing how immigration can undermine support for a generous welfare state. Societies are more likely to sustain such a welfare state, and the high taxes to fund it, when people view their fellow citizens as similar to themselves. Large amounts of immigration make a society feel more turbulent and less like a tight-knit community, at least in the short term. The contemporary United States fits this pattern. About one of every six workers is an immigrant, up from fewer than one in twenty in 1970, and roughly one-quarter of the population is either an immigrant or the descendant of a recent immigrant. The modern immigration wave has transformed the country in myriad ways, and communalists are often uncomfortable with rapid change, even when it has no economic downsides. They value tradition and stability. This is another reason that high levels of immigration tend to make a country more conservative. (kindle 5765)

Leonhardt's argument is that communalists (most working class people) are very different from universalists, who make statements like: "When donating to philanthropy why should we weight the lives of Americans more highly than lives of people in other countries? For the same amount of money we can save more lives outside the USA."  Communalists are more likely to agree with statements like: "Charity begins at home." No prizes for guessing which group of people think are less likely to have college degrees or having working class incomes.

The net net is that recent Democratic policies on immigration, social issues, and others that help working class folks can't over-ride the important issue of immigration. Not only is this true in the USA, but it's also true in the rest of the world, explaining the rise of the popularity of right-wing parties all over the developed world:

“For those who believe in a multicultural America, this question can be uncomfortable to confront, because any system short of open borders invariably requires drawing distinctions that declare some people worthy of entry and others unworthy,” wrote Jia Lynn Yang, a journalist, in her history of immigration law. Because of this discomfort, the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of Jordan, Randolph, and other progressives who made finer distinctions. In response, many working-class voters have decided that the Democratic Party does not share their values. Notably, some of these voters are not White and are themselves the descendants of recent immigrants. In the 2020 and 2022 elections, the Republican Party made gains among Latino voters, especially in Texas and Florida, as well as Asian American voters. Polls showed that a sizable chunk of both Latino and Black voters who otherwise leaned toward the Democratic Party preferred the Republican position on illegal immigration. “Immigration,” says Haidt, the psychologist, “is one of the top few blind spots of the left, which causes right-wing parties to win all over the Western world.” (kindle loc 5754)

By the way, I will note that just being an immigrant by itself doesn't make you pro-immigrant. Most legal immigrants I've met also detest illegal immigrants, viewing them as grabbing spots from law-abiding folks who are better deserving. The book also debunks claims such as immigrants doing jobs local born Americans won't do.

Other topics the book talks about include globalization, lowering of trade barriers, and other policies that neo-liberals adopted from the conservatives. Most of them had a deleterious effect on working-class Americans, leading to resentment of the Democratic party once again.

 All in all, the book was worth reading, and brought up salient points as to why immigration will continue to be an incredibly difficult challenge for center-left parties all over the developed world to deal with. Recommended.

Review: Clover Collector's Edition

 I saw Clover's Collector's Edition at the library and the cover said it was a most daring science-fiction work. The art seemed nice so I checked it out.

It's not science fiction. It's fantasy dystopia --- and a not very good one. For instance, the main character's supposed to be a four-leaf clover, the most power kind of sorcerer there is, uncontrollable and therefore forced to be alone. This makes no sense, because anyone that powerful can do whatever she wants, so why would she submit to forced isolation. We never see much demonstration of her powers.

There's a sort of romantic relationship, and references to the past, but we never see resolution of the major event, the death of Kazuhiko's lover/partner. I only found out later through a web-search that the series is indeed incomplete.

The narration revolves around a song with elusively written and vague lyrics. That's OK, but the same song is repeated in bits and pieces throughout the book as well as reproduced frequently in full length. Again, this works in movies or TV but not in comics.

About the best thing about this book is that it's short and therefore I didn't waste much time reading it.

Boen's First Pigeon Point trip

 

Boen has ambitious goals for the summer tour, and I wanted a gauge for how things would go. There was a forecast for good weather on both days that weekend of Feb 10th, so I booked spots for us at Pigeon Point Lighthouse Youth Hostel packed our panniers on Saturday. It was a gorgeous day and Eva chose to meet us at Altamont and Page Mill, and escorted us at a good pace up Page Mill road.

At the top of Page Mill road, Stephan Ellner joined us, having ridden from Woodside, and I had the pleasure of introducing the two of them to each other. At the summit of West Alpine road who did we meet but Bob and Betty from the Western Wheelers! From there we could see all the way to the coast, an unsual sight in the summer but common in winter on days like this.

Eva would go down a bit on West Alpine and then turn around, but Stephan was planning to join us all the way until lunch. We zipped down West Alpine as only a tandem could. It was cold in the redwoods but so pretty. Climbing Haskins Hill was a bit warm as there was no good place to stop and shed clothing, so when were rolled over the top we didn't stop but just zipped down the other side. Well, zipped was a strong word as we were overtaken by the sports car club and a fast pair of motorcyclists. 

In Pescadero we stopped at Norm's market and had their usual delicious artichoke garlic bread fresh out of the oven, still warm to the touch when we bought the loaf. We tore through this using prosciutto and cheese brought from home and a pack of salami Stephan shelled out for. We then stocked up for dinner, bought some partially bake artichoke garlic bread to bring home and parted ways, with him stopping by a coffee shop and Boen and I riding on Cloverdale Road towards Gazos Creek road. Not having been there in years the scenery was fresh and even the potholes weren't as bad as I remembered. Gazos creek was babbling.

At the Highway 1 intersection we turrned right and immediately spotted Pigeon Point Lighthouse, against a 10mph headwind. Thus motivated, Boen made short work of the 3 mile and we were at the hostel at 2:30pm. To our surprise, the hostel manager was flexible and checked us in. We even grabbed the sunset spot for the hot tub!

The park system had upgraded many aspects of the area since we'd last visited, including a new exhibit with the fresnel lens, models of the various shipwrecks at Pigeon Point, a cutaway model of the lighthouse, and even outside there was now a viewing platform where you could get a picture with prisoner rock, and stairs that went down to the beach!

It was low tide, so there were also tidepools to explore. We were glad that we arrived early enough to do whatever we could. With an hour left to our hot tub time we went back to the hostel, made hot water for decaf and for hot chocolate (I should have brought more hot chocolate) and then called the rest of the family before the hot tub.

After a bike ride, the hot tub is well worth the price. We'd looked up the sunset time and had time to watch the sunset at the end of our hot tub session. After that it was dinner time. While the spaghetti and alfredo sauce went down well, Boen didn't like the artichoke pork sausage we'd bought. Fortunately, the Filipino family who were having dinner at the same time had plenty of food and offered to share.It turned out that the mother's name was Bon, a homonym for Boen, and they even brought a Fondue set and gave Boen and I chocolate Fondue with strawberries. It was so good!

Sleep for me was fitful. I guess it was the change of environment, but usually a lot of cycling makes it easier to sleep.

In the morning, someone at the hostel started smoking Marijuana in the living room. Fortunately, we were all done with breakfast by the time I noticed and we just packed up and left in a hurry. Riding North into cloudy skies, it was chilly enough to put on all our layers but by the time we started climbing Bean Hollow road I was getting pretty warm. Once into Pescadero and onto Stager Road, I stopped and took off most of my layers, figuring it was better to be chilly downhill than to overheat uphill.

Stage Road was gorgeous as always, and as we approached Highway 1 we were greeted with a stunning view to the east, with low fog lifting over the hills as the sun warmed the water vapor.

The descent on Highway 1 onto Tunitas Creek was fast and furious, and we stopped by the Bike Hut for a quick break and get rid of garbage and eat more food. The climb up Tunitas was gorgeous, dappled light shining through the redwood trees that made for difficult to photograph scenery that can only be appreciated when you're there in person. The steep part is a 16% grade. It's not a long pitch but it wore us out, so we had to stop to eat and rest.

Past the Purissima Creek Park entrance the grade evens out a bit and past Star Hill Road the grade evens out even more! Inspired, I recalled a song from my high school days:

Just around the bend, is the journey's end, and the sky's singing our song, 'cos it's just a stone's throw from the people I know, whoa, I'm coming back to where I belong.

 At the summit, who did we run into but fellow Western Wheelers Steve and Cheryl Prothero and their group who'd just climbed Kings Mountain Road. The terms of the song were fulfilled! We took pictures, ate the rest of my cliff bar, and went down the road gingerly. The road surface looked treacherous, with debris in corners, water all over the road, and at one point our rear wheel kicked out a rock down a steep hairpin. Fortunately big fat tires and long wheel bases are very stable and we made it down with no problem. I gave Boen a choice between high traffic Foothill Expressway or the lower traffic Arastedero and he had enough energy to give the more climbing option a chance.

We made it home by 1:30pm, and now I'm confident that we're going to have a good time in the Alps!

Review: The Sandman (Season 1)

 I don't have a Netflix subscription so I didn't watch The Sandman when it debuted on Netflix. Between when it debuted and when I was about to cave and subscribe just to watch it, the local library flagged it as being ready for pickup by me!

I thought Tom Sturridge made for a great Morpheus, getting the expressions right, especially the glare he had when he was trapped in the prison. I enjoyed the recasting of Lucifer as Gwendoline Christie. I enjoyed the rewriting of John Constantine as Johanna Constantine. I thought Kirby Howell Baptiste wasn't perky enough for a depiction of the best representation of Grandmother Death in literature.

So the cast was great. The look was good, but given the amount of money spent on the series ($15M per episode) I found myself wondering whether various people were lining their pockets unduely. I expected jaw dropping visuals and those were far and few between. It didn't look like a $15M per episode series.

In general, I liked the story changes such as making Lyta and Hector no longer being former super-heroes. I thought that rather than "A Dream of A Thousand Cats" they should have depicted the story of Nada instead, but those are rather minor. For instance, I thought the Hob Gadling episode didn't add much back when it was a comic book series and don't think much of it now.

I'm very glad that the showrunner chose to do the series at a fairly brisk pace, approximately 2-3 issues per episode. Would I pay for a Netflix subscription to watch it? Sure. Would I go out of my way to watch it? Probably not, despite being a massive Sandman fan. What the show did tell me though is that while reading the books, I thought that the short stories (A Dream of A Thousand Cats, for instance) were much better than the longer story arcs, in a TV show the longer story arcs made for much better depiction.

If you've never read the Sandman the show is definitely worth watching. In this case, the TV show is almost (if not quite) as good as the book.

Review: Machine Vendetta

 Machine Vendetta is the recently released Alastair Reynolds novel feature Prefect Dreyfus. As far as I can tell it's the last book in the trilogy featuring the Panoply and the Glitter Band in the Revelation Space universe. It's the first book in recent years that no longer has a jacked up kindle price since before Apple got involved in price fixing with various publishers, and at $9.99 I used some of my kindle credits and didn't bother with waiting for the library.

The plot revolves around the murder of two prefects, both previously exemplary, performing what seems to be suicidal acts. One of them is Ingvar Tench, a close friend of Tom Dreyfus, and she turns out to have a previously unknown daughter! This is by far the weakest part of the plot, requiring the rest of the police force to believe that she had a daughter at an improbable time while devoting unlimited time to her career.

The rest of the plot is great. We have battling AIs vying for dominance over humanity, a final resolution to the plot of the first novel in the series, lots of police procedural work in addition to the exciting action-filled betrayals and crisis. This book could be turned into a high budget science fiction movie and it would be fun to watch.

Alastair Reynolds is in my auto-buy list. The science in his science fiction is great, his characters are much more 3-dimensional than you would expect from science fiction, and while he has plot weaknesses if you can get over them the reading is just compelling. I finished this book over 3-4 days and it was fun!

Recommended!

Review: Road Holland Utrecht Wool Jersey

 I'm a cheapskate about clothing, and usually pick up cheap cycling jerseys for about $20/pop whenever they go on sale. People rave about Wool Jerseys, but I never found them practical: you can't toss them in the dryer, they take forever to dry when you're touring and have no access to a laundry machine, and obviously, in California they're not useful for about 3 seasons out of the year.

Someone on an internet mailing list put up his Utrecht Wool Jerseys that were in my size for $50 and threw in a Walz cycling cap as well. For that price I couldn't resist. I figured I'd wear them in winter, and save my $20 summer jerseys for summer touring. When they arrived I was impressed by how nice they were. Online research show that they're not 100% wool, but a 39/61 merino/poly blend. The jerseys fit well and aren't scratchy, though the pockets show a disturbing tendency to unfurl when you take something out of them.

For washing, I throw them into the washing machine on "delicate" and put in some Eucalan. Then I air dry them. It's unlikely this will work when touring but I have no intention of using these jerseys while touring, when days might hit 100F. I discovered that these jerseys work well around 40-70F. I've had days on top of black mountain when people who're all bundled up with gear ask me how the heck I'm possibly warm wearing a short sleeve. About 70F they start to feel a bit too warm, and no way am I wearing these in 80F.

They do make me look fat, but that's only because as my kids will tell you, that I am fat!

So far, they've shown no signs of shrinking, and are nice enough that when I wear them in the office nobody immediately points out that they're cycling jerseys, not office wear. No way am I paying their original full price (which must have been $100 or more), but at $25 they were well worth it for California winters. I can definitely see how the company went out of business but if you see them in good condition they're worth a look.

Review: Narrative Economics

 I'm a huge Robert Shiller fan, but somehow missed that he had a new book called Narrative Economics. When someone at work mentioned it, I checked it out from the library right away and read it. The book's thesis is that economists spend too much time analyzing models like interest rates but should consider ideas and stories going viral and thus causing economic events.

To back this up, the book actually goes out and proposes several different narratives/stories that could have created/prolonged the great depression. The stories all seem rather plausible but there's no proof whatsoever that these stories had massive impact. Even worse, there's no guidance as to how you could have used the stories to predict what had happened.

This book more than anything else, proved to me that if you actually want to do investing, numbers are the way to go. What a surprising waste of time.

Review: The Fund

 The Fund is Rob Copeland's take down of Ray Dalio.  Ray Dalio is the founder/owner of Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund that purportedly had a phenomenal track record of beating the market, and Dalio himself became a celebrity, writing Principles, which was actually quite a good book, and follow on books that I thought was awfully fawning of a Chinese authoritarian system that was probably more about talking up Dalio's Chinese corporate/personal investment portfolio than based on reality.

I expected an account of Ray Dalio's rise and perhaps some expose of the secret sauce behind Bridgewater Associates, but to be honest the entire book was expose. There's an early section on Ray Dalio's background and how he got rich (hint: marry a wealthy person!), but the sections on how he managed to get pension funds to give him money to manage were given short shrift, as was the heuristics/algorithms he used to become successful early on.

Most of the book focuses on post-success, where the principles he espoused actually got turned into a horrible nightmarish social-network based pile-on app used inside the company. This mechanism was made worse by Dalio rejecting any criticism of it and taking on the form of the final arbiter. What really astonished me was that Dalio was selling pieces of Bridgewater to his own employees through an employer-financed loan. His second in command therefore was living a hand-to-mouth lifestyle:

Over just three years, 2011, 2012, and 2013, industry researcher Alpha reported that he made $815 million in total. While just a fraction of Dalio’s compensation, it was also enough to vault Jensen onto the industry lists of the highest-paid hedge fund managers—he made more than most of those who ran their own firms. Only a handful of people knew, however, another reason for him to stay. The Bridgewater founder had concocted a complicated arrangement in which the more money that Jensen seemed to make, the more he actually owed. Dalio had challenged Jensen, as a condition of the younger man’s employment, to slowly buy out the Bridgewater founder’s ownership. Jensen didn’t have nearly enough money, so Bridgewater lent it to him—essentially transferring slivers of his ownership each year, building up a gigantic IOU to the hedge fund’s majority shareholder, who just so happened to be Dalio. Jensen’s debt skyrocketed as the value of Bridgewater rose. When Dalio sold a piece of the firm to the Texas teachers’ pension fund, not only his own stake was impacted. Since Bridgewater was now worth more, it made Jensen’s own tithe that year even more expensive as well. (kindle loc 2926)

This seems like a particularly bad deal, and poorly negotiated for his employees while enriching himself, hardly the "principled" man Dalio like to style himself. The various shenanigans surrounding sexual harassment was just as bad though perhaps all too common in the age of "me-too" revelations to raise too many eyebrows.

What surprised me in the book was that Dalio was perpetually pessimistic about the US economy. We know that over the last 50 years, the US stock market has been on an incredible bull run, and anyone betting consistently against it should have been wiped out, but apparently his algorithms worked even when he was pessimistic his funds were still doing well. His pessimistic outlook also meant that he loved autocrats:

Since the late 1980s, Dalio had been convinced that the United States was in an inextricable fall, not merely economically, but culturally. He saw U.S. politics as on a slow descent into unproductive squabbling, a journey that could end in nothing less than another civil war. At times, he called himself “an economic doctor,” with the prescription to fix all that. In place of U.S. hegemony, Dalio looked for a better blueprint abroad. He seemed particularly smitten with societies ruled by powerful autocrats. Thanks to Bridgewater’s long history of managing money for Singapore’s government-run funds, Dalio became friends with Lee Kuan Yew. The elder man, who served as Singapore’s prime minister for a staggering thirty-one years, was a controversial figure whose long tenure achieved stability for his nation at the cost of freedom. Lee governed through what was essentially one-party rule, restricting freedom of speech and dismissing the value of democracy...Over dinner at Dalio’s New York apartment shortly before the Singaporean leader’s death, the men discussed the best models among world leaders. Lee gave an unlikely answer in a posh Manhattan setting: Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader, Lee said, had stabilized Russia after the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union. To Dalio, the analogy would have been seamless. He, too, had stabilized Bridgewater after a tumultuous stretch. (kindle loc 3476-3487)

 The book also covered the gross mismanagement of top talent that Dalio had hired for Bridgewater, including Jon Rubinstein and David Ferruci, both of which wanted nothing to do with Dalio's "Dot Connect" app but were roped into doing them anyway. Rubinstein in particular complained about Dalio's Principles, which wasn't the clean version he espoused in his book but an unwieldy, constantly changing giant ass book:

Once Dalio caught word that his new prized hire had struggled in boot camp, he asked for some time to chat. Rubinstein, cognizant of everything he’d learned about the Bridgewater founder’s love of raw honesty, decided to tell Dalio what was on his mind: “You’ve got three hundred and seventy-five Principles. Those aren’t principles. Toyota has fourteen principles. Amazon has fourteen principles. The Bible has ten. Three hundred and seventy-five can’t possibly be principles. They are an instruction manual.” (kindle loc 3723)

 The book covers the years of Bridgewater's underperformance perfunctorily --- there's an offhand suggestion that once computers became powerful enough and the rest of wall street started hiring up quants and computer scientists to do stock market analysis, Dalio's heuristics no longer offered a competitive edge and instead started to underperform the market. At this point apparently a lot of the money being managed is coming out of new rubes in totalitarian countries where Dalio has managed to cultivate sufficient contacts to have an information advantage with which to make investments, and even those aren't sufficient.

Take downs are fun to read, and this one was compelling. While Principles was good reading in theory, as usual in practice the implementation is more than a little tricky, and Dalio's success had nothing to do with his principles but a matter of being early enough and lucky enough to have money fall into his lap in big chunks (marry rich and be a good salesman). I'm much reminded of Google's promotion committees and how despite the high sounding principles only succeeded in making Google's promotion system even more political than the traditional manager-led promotion system. It's worth reading this book after reading Principles. It also explains why Dalio is such a China-supporter and all I can say is that the business/popular press loving to lionize businessman billionaires from Steve Jobs to Rockefeller to Elon Musk has a lot to do with the worst things happening to society today.

Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium Four

 The Walking Dead Compendium Four is the last volume in the series. In this volume, the story has Rick Grimes' collection of 4 communities link up with a much larger one called The Commonwealth. The contrast between a class-based hierarchy and the much more egalitarian society that Grimes had established also parallels the much wealthier and larger commonwealth.

This contrast doesn't make a lot of sense. For instance, the commonwealth is depicted as having body armor, and specialists (including having lawyers as professions that they're in dire need of), but yet seems lacking in innovation, as Eugene, one of Rick's friends from way back in volume one is able to make locomotives work with relative ease.

In addition, we never get much of a backstory of the Commonwealth's formation and rise, which again makes zero sense --- so a couple of high class aristocrats take control once they get involved and everybody else goes along?

OK, so the story behind the series never made much sense anyway. But the action and characters? They're mostly good. We get a colorful loner who somehow managed to survive on her own and yet happily encounters Rick Grimes' group to meet the commonwealth. And for whatever reason the much larger Commonwealth never has had to deal with a huge herd before? The setup felt fake and quite rushed.

Nevertheless, Kirkman redeems himself by giving Rick Grimes a fitting sendoff and a beautiful epilogue that's got surprises, interesting twists (though again, not very believable --- it's hard to imagine a single generation being able to restore safety to the point where few people have seen a Zombie, especially since early on in the series Kirkman makes a point out of noting that even dying of natural causes would turn you into a zombie, and in any reasonably sized city at least one person would die every day), and fine resolutions for many of the characters we've gotten to know.

In any case it was compelling reading and made me put other books on whole while I zipped through it. Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium Three

 The Walking Dead Compendium Three continues Rick Gimes' story of post apocalyptic survival.  This volume features a conflict with a "protection racket" governance regime along with the "whisperer" gang. The former forces Rick to build an alliance to overthrow the tyrant Negan, but at the last minute he uncharacteristically lets Negan lives. What I can say is that some of the characters do grow and develop and we see constant action as well as the humans starting to learn how to cope with the zombies in an intelligent way (though again, I'm just surprised that nobody learns how to drive a tank or even mount automatic weapons on SUVs or jeeps).

The whisperer gang seems much less plausible to me. Living amongst the zombies by wearing their skins on your face seems like a recipe for getting all sorts of skin infection and/or other diseases (dead human bodies are toxic/poisonous to living humans, which is one reason we bury our dead or burn them), so it seems unlikely that any group adopting that survival tactic would survive long enough to pose a threat to the living.

The art is good, and the action never stops. It's quite clear that the series is turning into an exploration of various crisis governance regimes, and Kirkman is always happy to put all his characters into the wringer. I can see why the TV show based on the book would be incredibly popular. Recommended.

Review: The Walking Dead Compendium 2

 The Walking Dead Compendium Two continues with the story from the first book. The post apocalyptic story as always is pretty unrealistic. For instance, the group encounters a different community that then attacks them. That community has a freaking tank. One tank basically can make short work of any number of zombies just by running over them. You don't even have to fire your guns (though I will note that most tanks also have machine guns in addition to the main cannon). But what do these humans do? Instead of using the tank as a lawn mower to take out all the zombies, they use them to attack other humans? And since the US military has lots of tanks how did the zombies take over in the first place? None of that is explained, because it can't be.

OK. Let's take the story for what it is, which is a tale of survival. What will humans do to  ensure their survival? And after they've compromised themselves ethically, is what's left still human? One of my friends told me that after time as a refugee and watching what people have had to do to survive, they have a hard time readjusting to normal society. I can believe that's true. But on the other hand, when the nature of the threat is so obvious (we're not talking about invisible microbes here), I'm not sure that humans (especially in the small groups depicted in the comic book series --- none of the groups depicted go above Dunbar's number) wouldn't naturally form alliances for protection rather than try to fight each other instead over the scraps. After all, if 90% of the population has turned into zombies, what's left is enough to feed the remaining population for at least 10 years (and probably more given that the average lifespan took a dramatic drop!)

But instead what we get is hostility between human tribes over and over again, even in the face of an immediate zombie threat. And when the protagonist (Rick Grimes) finally decides that humanity can do a lot better if large groups of people cooperate and work together it's treated as an unbelievable epiphany. Of course, all through the pandemic I was convinced that this sort of cooperation is precisely what American society isn't capable of doing, which was why the USA was uniquely hard hit by COVID-19.

But when I think about it, even that's an aberration --- American society did cooperate in the 1940s to defeat its opponents. It could very well be that the current situation is what happens leading up to a crisis. Regardless, the book is still compelling reading because Kirkman is good at stacking one crisis on top of another and moving events along. That ability makes the book never boring, and characters change in permanent ways. Heck of a lot better than many prose novel series I've seen in recent years. Recommended.

Review: The Time-Crunched Cyclist

 With a power meter handy in on my bike I decided to once again try to read a book about serious training to see if I could motivate myself to get stronger for this summers' tour. The Time Crunched Cyclist came up with a web search, and well, with 2 kids, a job, I figured I might qualify under that rubric. For grins, I also checked out the latest edition of The Cyclist's Training Bible (touted as 100% completely rewritten) to compare.

The theory behind The Time Crunched Cyclist is straight forward. Rather than spend hours and hours on your bike building "base miles", the idea is that you will orient your workouts around higher intensity rides. These rides will feature various mini workouts such as power intervals or steady endurance, or climbing intervals, and the total stress on your body will be sufficient to build fitness. The book comes with a warning that it's a challenging program and you would start racing 8 weeks into the program and be able to hold on to your fitness for about 4 weeks after that. Interestingly, reading this book alongside with The Cyclist's Training Bible was a good idea because the other book explains how it works: the idea is that there's a model of your body's response to exercise: training stress score. A cyclist is supposed to get a certain about of training stress in order to build fitness. You can get the same stress from either a long ride with easy miles or a short ride with high intensity. The model gets you to the same place either way.

The huge difference between the two books is that The Cyclist's Training Bible is all about how to build and optimize your ideal training program. The Time Crunched Cyclist is far easier to use because it dispenses with that and just gives you a pre-cooked program and just tells you to follow it for 8-12 weeks. That way you don't have to think about it. There's even a special program for cyclists who bike to work! By contrast The Cyclist's Training Bible warns you against doing bike commuting --- if you're going to race you have to be serious about it and not ride with friends or do anything silly like that.

OK, the problem with both these books are that they're about how to excel in a one day race. The Time Crunched Cyclist claims to prepare you for a 24 hour MTB race or a grand fondo, but even their special "endurance block" training program never has you riding more than 3 hard days in a row. I looked in the index in The Cyclist's Training Bible for stage race, and found the following:

Preparing for an A event that is a stage race requires a different approach to training. With only a few exceptions, the typical stage races for amateurs last three or four days and include three to five stages. There are a few weeklong stage races, but they are rare... The three primary challenges of such races are being physically and mentally prepared for back-to-back races, managing energy expenditure in daily races, and recovering between stages... I need to warn you, however, that such training is quite risky, especialy for the rider who is not capable of managing high levels of such accumulated stress. It flirts with overtraining. The most vulnerable are novices, juniors, and seniors...For most riders, it's probably best to do no more than 4 consecutive days of such training before taking a much needed break... I call this method of closely spaced workouts over several days "crash training." That name is intended to imply a risk. You're likely to crash and burn by doing this. By that, I mean that all sorts of bad things are likely to happen, including overtraining. (pg 132-133)

So there you go. Not recommended by professionals. Good thing I don't care and generally enjoy myself on multi-day tours lasting 3 weeks.

In any case,  I found The Time Crunched Cyclist easy to use --- in fact, you can program the commuting workouts into your Garmin in very little time. Now performing those workouts are a different story. The power thresholds provided in the book are very narrow. There's a very good chance that while commuting you'll be much more worried about traffic lights, not crashing into errant drivers and pedestrians, and what not rather than staring at the power meter. Definitely something to watch out for. And of course there's no guarantee that the terrain will cooperate! You might find yourself descending just when the workout program calls for a power interval! I don't know how people deal with these structured programs. Even worse, on some weeks the program calls for a "rest day" where you're supposed to drive to work. Not an option for those of us who don't have cars!

I guess I just can't follow these programs. I'll just do what I do, which is to bike kids to school, bike to work, and bike everywhere I can, and just forget about optimizing performance. Nevertheless, the book is comprehensive, has a lot of programs that you can pick and choose from, and more importantly never over-promises. They point out at every step the limitations of the program (namely, you're expected to be able to do well in courses that take less than 3 hours to complete, and you won't be able to hold on to your fitness for more than 4 weeks before needing to back off and recover). Very honest and realistic!

Re-read: The Walking Dead - Compendium 1

 Last year was a year when Boen loved zombies. I enjoyed The Last of Us TV show, though the video game is still too hard for him. Similarly, he tried to watch the first episode of The Walking Dead TV show, but that wasn't compelling enough for him to keep watching. But he loved the comic book. I'd bought it ages ago back when the Google Play Store was trying to actually become a viable for buying books and had DRM free comics for sale. (Nowadays it's too expensive) I picked it up to read.

The premise of the series is kinda hooky. A zombie apocalypse has always seemed to me to be improbable because any pandemic that a small group of poorly-outfitted people can survive would be easily survivable by an organized government (though probably not a very democratic one). The swiftness into which civilization falls apart also doesn't make sense --- even warlords in places like Somalia rarely commit the kind of depravities regularly seen in this book.

Finally, the characters are flawed, regularly making poor decisions (even the lead protagonist in the series who starts off demonstrating how competent he is) that have disastrous consequences.

Set against that is that this is a series where there's non-stop action. Events happen that shake up the status quo almost every chapter, and it's a far call from series like Game of Thrones where entire novels go by where nothing happens. I can see why it turned into a hit TV show with lots of fans (even some Asian parents watched it!). Each chapter leaves you hanging and keeps you wanting to find out what happens next. But of course 10 years later I'd forgotten it all and the events still happen and are shocking.

The black and white art is crisp, clear, and easy to follow and probably not for people who don't have a strong stomach (I can't imagine any of this being done on TV). Hey, anything that can hold my kid's attention through two fat thousand page volume books (he abandoned the series halfway through the 3rd book) has to be recommended.

Review: Determined

 Determined is Robert Sapolsky's book arguing that we have no free will and examining the implications of it. This book is incredibly dense and difficult to read, but the summary of its argument is that essentially there is no mechanism in physics or chemistry to indicate that you and I are nothing more than moist robots. Fundamentally, you're born with the life you have with genes that you have no control over, , under circumstances you have no control over, grow up in childhood where you also have no agency, into an adolescence into which you also have no agency, so why should we expect you to be able to exercise control just because you turned 18?

Intellectually, of course, you might agree with Sapolsky. But the reality is that we see people effect change all the time. As John Douglas in Mindhunter wrote: "I never saw anyone criminally insane feel compelled to exercise his criminality in direct view of a cop." The fact that a habitual lead-footed driver would suddenly ease off his accelerator just because he happened to see a cop indicates that people can choose, and that we can actually help them choose the right thing by providing an environment in which they can effect change. More prosaically, I've had co-workers who effected a whole-scale change in their lifestyle because their doctor told them that they were going to have to go on statins and other high blood pressure medication. The engineer, being an engineer inquired: "Wait, why go to drugs right away? Shouldn't I try lifestyle changes first?" "Lifestyle changes don't work, statistically." came the reply from the doctor. "Gimme 6 months, doc!" And of course, 6 months of hiking with his kids later he had no need of medication. Of course, I recognize that the people I meet in my social life are high functioning adults and unusually capable, but that just tells me that a blanket statement is most likely wrong or at the least unintuitive. 

The rest of the book is an exploration of the implications of this on various parts of society, chiefest of which is the criminal justice system. Once you accept the premise that even the most heinous criminal had no control over his action, your goal is to prevent harm by that defective individual, rather than punish him in the hopes of achieving deterrence. There's good evidence for this --- Finland's justice system is focused much more on preventing recidivism than the US's, and it achieves those goals better than the US policy of putting lots of people in jail. But of course, first you have to be willing to accept the idea that people do what they do because they effectively have no control over their behavior. I'm not sure American society is ready for that or will be ready for it anytime soon.

I don't want to give the impression that the book is not worth reading. I did learn a few interesting things, for instance, about the brain's default network:

One level higher—do entire networks, circuits of neurons, ever activate randomly? People used to think so. Suppose you’re interested in what areas of the brain respond to a particular stimulus. Stick someone in a brain scanner and expose them to that stimulus, and see what brain regions activate (for example, the amygdala tends to activate in response to seeing pictures of scary faces, implicating that brain region in fear and anxiety). And in analyzing the data, you would always have to subtract out the background level of noisy activity in each brain region, in order to identify what was explicitly activated by the stimulus. Background noise. Interesting term. In other words, when you’re just lying there, doing nothing, there’s all sorts of random burbling going on throughout the brain, once again begging for an indeterminacy interpretation. Until some mavericks, principally Marcus Raichle of Washington University School of Medicine, decided to study the boring background noise. Which, of course, turns out to be anything but that—there’s no such thing as the brain doing “nothing”—and is now known as the “default mode network.” And, no surprise by now, it has its own underlying mechanisms, is subject to all sorts of regulation, serves a purpose. One such purpose is really interesting because of its counterintuitive punch line. Ask subjects in a brain scanner what they were thinking at a particular moment, and the default network is very active when they are daydreaming, aka “mind-wandering.” The network is most heavily regulated by the dlPFC. The obvious prediction now would be that the uptight dlPFC inhibits the default network, gets you back to work when you’re spacing out thinking about your next vacation. Instead, if you stimulate someone’s dlPFC, you increase activity of the default network. An idle mind isn’t the Devil’s playground. It’s a state that the most superego-ish part of your brain asks for now and then. Why? Speculation is that it’s to take advantage of the creative problem solving that we do when mind-wandering. (kindle loc 3493)

An argument in favor of day dreaming inside a book telling you that there's no free will and therefore you had no choice when you're day dreaming anyway feels super strange. But there it is. You probably can skip reading this book --- I'm not sure it was worth the effort and it certainly didn't change my mind --- I'm of the firm view that if you accept that you have no control over your life then you will end up with much worse outcome than if you have the view that you're the master of your own destiny. But I suppose if you want to have excuses for your failures this book will provide lots of evidence for you to justify your own foibles!

 

2023/2024 Point Reyes Wildcat Campground - New Year's Eve Backpack

 Ever since we visited Alamere Falls in 2022, I'd been so impressed by Wildcat Campground that I tried  over and over again, succeeding only in September this year for the New Year's Eve slot. Boen wanted to go, and the weather looked reasonable --- right in between two rain storms. I posited that the easiest way to do the backpack was to actually bike down the Bear Valley trail until we weren't allowed to bike any more, then hike to the campground. We'd ridden the whole thing from Five Brooks, but the horse poop at the trailhead and the ruggedness of the ride meant that I'd be pushing the bike most of the way on the return anyway, so I might as well carry a backpack and wear it.

On New Year's Eve, we packed everything we needed into the car, and then drove to Bear Valley Visitor Center. There, I confirmed that leaving our bikes at the bottom of Bear Valley trail overnight wouldn't be a problem, and that I couldn't swap out my Site #7 ticket for a Site #6 as some other person had grabbed it and hadn't relinquished it.

The ride was no big deal but I had to take it extra gingerly because I'd forgotten to bring a hammer to snap close the retaining pin on my ancient Yakima trailer. If I'm going to do more bikepacking in this configuration in the future I'm going to have to buy a new trailer. I stacked the two backpacks together on the trailer and tied it all together with bungee cords. The stability wasn't great but on the other hand it's such a tame trail that my biggest concern was getting the backpacks muddy, hence I wrapped both packs with garbage bags.

The easiest way to Wildcat from Bear Valley was up Glen Camp. We'd bought sandwiches at Point Reyes Station earlier, and half way up the trail was a good place to stop and eat --- I've learned never to let kids eat unless they're hungry. Otherwise, it's a waste of food. Even so, Boen only ate 3/4 of his sandwich.

We met other backpackers exiting the route and they told us to get onto the fire road and just stay on it --- there were alternate routes, but this was the easiest way with a kid in tow. At the junction with the Coast Trail we noticed a bunch of backpackers coming down the trail. I asked for a picture of the two of us and they obliged. Daniel, the group leader had Pixel 8 Pro, and was a pretty friendly guy. They told us that the Coast Trail was pretty, and would take us back to our bikes.

Boen's reaction to the first view of Wildcat Campground this trip was "WOW! That's an amazing campground." He didn't remember our previous trip by bike! We got to the campground and found site #7 perched over the beach, but with only a slight view of the ocean. We pitched our tent and made some hot beverages, and then visited the beach but realized that the tide was still high --- low tide was at 8pm, so we went back and explored. We took a look at Site #6, which was indeed occupied by an Asian couple with a huge antenna setup for AM radio, which looked like it would take a good hour to setup.

The views were incredible. We could see all the way to the Farallons, which surprised me because it was cloudy and once in a while I could see rain showers offshore.

We decided to try our luck again, and went to the beach to discover Daniel's group in the midst of starting a fire. I'd brought a fire permit and fire starter, but they had way more people and were way more motivated. They had a guy finding twigs, other people gathering fire wood for drying, and we could spectate. Daniel was a hard worker, frequently getting onto his hands and knees to nurture the fire.

At 4:15, I'd had enough of waiting and decided that this was our last chance to see Alamere falls before sunset. I set off with Boen and Daniels' group decided that I knew what I was doing, which was a mistake.

I cannot fault the views from the beach. The Golden Hour didn't disappoint. Sandpipers on the beach flittered back and forth, looking for grub, only to take flight when the waves came crashing down. 

We steadily got closer to the Alamere Falls, hut were thwarted at the last segment, where big waves kept crashing against the one rock guarding the actual falls. Two of Daniel's party members just resigned themselves to getting wet and soaked through, but Boen and I settled for an ephemeral fall fairly close to the actual falls themselves.

Those falls didn't exist when we last visited the area, so must have been produced by the most recent series of rains.

By the time we got back to our tent site, it was dark, so we made dinner and ate it by lantern light. I'd forgotten to bring headlamps for both of us, so the whole meal was awkward, with lots of spillage, but Boen really enjoyed his Mountain House Beef Stew. He got cold after dinner, so we hurriedly brushed our teeth and joined Daniel's party for the fire, which was nice and hot!

The stars were out, indicating that our cloud cover was gone. But the tides were still crashing down hard on the beaches, so nobody felt like venturing forth to the waterfall in the moonlight. Boen was too tired to do so anyway, and asked for an early night at 8:00pm.

When morning came, we were both refreshed enough to contemplate taking the long way back to the bike, along the coast trail. We ate a hurried breakfast and packed up and hiked up with wet tents and fly for despite the cloudless sky the humidity was high enough to induce a lot of condensation on the tent.

It didn't even take a quarter mile climbing out of the campground for us to have to shed clothing for we had warmed up plenty despite being in the shade.

Turning off on the Coast trail at 0.8 miles we saw signs for the Bear Valley trail intersection at 2.5 miles. The views became very nice, with the spray off the coast visible even at our distance.

The route took us into forests with mists rising around us, lending the area an ethereal look for us to greet the new year. It being early we saw no one else until we got close to the Bear Valley trailhead, where the views started to become spectacular.

California's distinctive sea stacks, along with a clear blue sky and a calm looking Ocean belying the crashing roar that was our soundtrack the night before reminded me again of how nice it was to live where we lived.

Finally, crossing a bridge, up a tiny hill and we were back on the Bear Valley trail. Just a mile later we were at the bikes, loading them up and headed for home.

There's nothing like the relief of pedaling a nice bike after 5 miles of walking. Even a little pump of the pedals and you're flying up a hill at twice your walking speed.  We had quite a bit of splatter on our clothing and bike by the time we got to the car. But it being New Year's Day, traffic home was non existent and we got home in plenty of time to dry the tent and put it away!