Whistler MTB: Day 3

 On Tuesday we worked on more technical intermediate trails like Funshine Rolly Drops, Blueseum, World Cup Single Track, and more flow trail with Crank It Up. We  would eat lunch at the grocery store, but it wasn't cheap with how hungry Bowen and I were, as we kept going back for seconds and thirds. Our hands were beaten up so we agreed to take Wednesday off. We asked Guest Services for a creekside instrutor but they weren't interested in helping us. After e-mailing an calling around Tommy said he was available on Friday so we went with a half day for Friday morning. 

Review: REI Link Seat Bag

 We were planning an overnight trip to Aptos, and we wouldn't have had enough saddlebags for if all 4 of us were riding singles. I liked the Revelate Designs bag I'd bought used, but what I noticed was that it didn't have a taillight loop for the Garmin Radar, which has quickly become an essential safety accessory on all kinds of rides.

REI is selling out their Link Seat Pack for $40 each, which is a good deal. The seat bag isn't waterproof (not a problem in California), and comes with 2 smaller stuff sacks for pack organization. Most importantly, the bag has a taillight loop, so I bought two.

The bag looks like it would sag, but it doesn't even come close to the wheel on a 51cm Ritchey frame. For an overnight, the weight gain was minimal, and Xiaoqin reported no handling problems. The taillight attachment worked well for a Varia Radar.

For a tour where I expect rain, I would bring along silnylon dry bags  rather than going for a revelate with no tail-light attachment.

All in all, it was a successful trip and I can recommend the REI Seat Bag. Get them before they're all gone.

Whistler MTB: Day 1-2

 

We had painstakingly picked out a recommended instructor but events intervened and Whistler assigned us Tommy Steele instead. Rather than meeting us at Creekside they wanted us in whistler village, so we had to ride 15 minutes to the village with our downhill bikes, which are not ideal for riding flat or uphill. 

Tommy put us through a barrage of lessons (we rode Beeline, Easy Does It, Del Bocca Vista, Tod, Rod, and various trails while he kept telling us not to sit down) and even went out of his way to drop us into Creekside village at the end of our lesson. I got his number in case we wanted more lessons later. 

On our first day of riding together we did Weasel Juice to Little Addler to Blueberry Bathtub. Tommy had told us we needed to be able to do Monkey Hands easily before going up to Top of the World, so we did Naughty Hands and then tried Monkey Hands which was way too hard. We did a few more technical loops before going up the Garbanzo express to ride Unamoss, Midguard, Southpark, and Earth Circus back. I discovered that the Garmin Edge 840 has a jump detection momde when mountain biking. It would detect when you jumped, record how long your jump was for and how long you stayed up in the air ("hang time"). It would also chirp at ou as positie reinforcement. On my first day I got 2.68s of air time. 

Back at the AirBnB Bowen started watching Youtube videos to design our progression. 

Whistler MTB Trip: Prolog

 After last year's Canadian trip, Bowen really enjoyed his time at the Whistler MTB park I told him it was very expensive, but he said: "So's the school Costa Rica trip. I'd rather do this than go to Costa Rica. I should have made more conditions, but didn't think about it at the time, and so agreed, as I'd never seen Bowen excited about any sport before. 

We bought 5 day bike passes for the Whistler MTB trip, booked 9 days at an AirBnB in Whistler, and bought plane tickets with frequent flyer miles. Having price shopped, I realized that Coastal Culture Sports was much cheaper than the actual shops owned by Whistler, and they had full on Downhill (DH) bikes, which Brad Silverberg recommended. The decision to stay at Creekside was driven by the memory of how busy the Whistler village was, and how long the lines were. When Brad brought me over to Creekside, I noticed how there was never a wait for a gondola, and resolved that Creekside was a better location. 

Arriving on a Friday night at 9:00pm, we took the airport shuttle to the hotel. The morning bus left at 10:00am, so we had time to eat Pineapple Buns at a restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. It was a good thing we went there early, as there was a line that formed even before the restaurant opened. 

Bowen wasn't impressed by the Pineapple Bun and neither was I, but the rice porridge was good. We made our bus with plenty of time to spare, but the skylynx express got caught in traffic and we arrived half an hour late to Creekside, which made the whole point of taking the express bus vs the regular bus pointless. 

Being dropped off at the Legends hotel, we walked towards our AirBnB and dropped by the visit the Coastal Culture bike shop, who assured us we didn't need to do anything that day. We should pick up our bike passes, they said. We arrived at tie AirBnB, checked in, and then claered up a backpack to go to the grocery store. 

But first, we visited Creekside Guest Services, picked up our bike passes and then had lunch at Dusty's. At the grocery store, we bought dinner and breakfast --- our friends would show up much later and they had a car. We then took the bus to the swimming pool and swam. The bus was free but the swimming pool wasn't, and we discovered how frequently late the bus service was. We wouldn't visit the swimming pool ever again. 

John, Amy, and Sarah showed up late, long after dinner, and we had an early morning the next day so we went to bed early. 

Review: Janissaries

 I started reading Janissaries because of Jo Walton's What Makes This Book so Great. (I may never finish the latter books because it keeps sending me to the library to checkout books that sound intriguing) To my surprise it caught my attention to the point where I abandoned other reading just to finish this (relatively) short book.

The concept is the familiar one where aliens have been visiting Earth secretly and abducting Earthlings. Where it differs is that this has happened during various eras, to the point where a whole other habitable planet has humans in it from various different epochs that are mysteriously stuck in a low tech environment.

The protagonist of the novel is an educated officer who's dropped into this settings with limited amounts of technology (a rifle, a pistol, limited ammunition, but no books, computers). We get to see him put together from his knowledge of military history how Roman legions were organized and how to effectively overcome them with archers and alternate formation and layout.

The book unfortunately makes use of a frequent trope, which is of people deliberately withholding information from each other even though there's no reason to do so, all so that there's a dramatic reveal in the last few pages of the book which (unfortunately) sets up for a series of novels set in the world. It was a fast, compelling, and fun read but not so great that I find myself wanting to run out and buy the sequels.

Epilogue: Bern to Zurich to San Francisco

 In the morning, after a breakfast (in which the kids discovered a fresh orange juice presser and delighted in pressing their own fresh squeeze) Xiaoqin and I took a walk around the city, admiring the street fair/farmer's market that had sprung up in the morning, amidst the gorgeous views of the Swiss Alps. Our journey was at an end, and upon returning to the hotel we checked out and headed to the train station. There was a mix up as to where Boen and my train were, and when we finally found the platform, it was far easier to ride the tandem out and over to the platform than to walk it through the station, so that's what we did. We had time to get onto the train and hug each other goodbye, and the Bern train station's elevator happily took our tandem. 

Once on board the train back to Zurich, we could relax, since we had no exciting time-tight transfers today. Upon arriving at Zurich, I noted that we could have taken this train all the way to the airport, but it wasn't raining and I'd neglected to make the bike reservation, so we exited the train. Getting back to the surface was easy: take the panniers off the tandem, then get onto the escalator and hold on to the brakes for dear life. 

Exiting the station, I set a course for the Airport Hilton. Garmin took us on a route unfamiliar to me but turned out to be better than the one we had used before. Near the hotel, the route took us through a residential neighborhood and then up a rough stuff traverse to avoid the busy highway in front of the hotel, dumping us onto the hotel parking lot. I was impressed! The rain had held off so far. 

We checked into the hotel, and extracted the bike boxes and luggage, and took apart the tandem while rain drops fell, one at a time, on occasion on us. We were all done with the packing of the bike by the time the rain really started, and we went into the hotel after leaving the bike boxes in the hotel's luggage. 

We went down to the Coop and the Migros to buy a supermarket lunch as well to pick up extra chocolate to bring home. The storm on the way back was intense, but we managed to get back without getting too wet. We booked a shuttle to return to the airport for the next day. 

In the morning, we ate the breakfast we'd bought the night before in the room and took the shuttle to the airport. At the United counter, the counter check-in person was so enamored by Boen's story of riding in the alps that she didn't even bother weighing our bike boxes, just led us to the oversized counter with everything tagged and wished us luck! 

We spent our waiting time at the Sprungli chocolate for lunch and bought a hundred dollars' worth of chocolate to bring home. 

On the flight, I started writing the trip report. Upon landing, the bikes showed up quickly and in one piece, and Xiaoqin picked us up, having arrived a couple of hours before. Our tour was over.