Biking, with Purpose

"All your bases R belong to us" - Storm Troopers haven't landed, but this was some of the gear needed for this weekend (this really is Becca, if you couldn't tell).

This summer was going be all about putting up huge miles for distance. Notice how I already used "was" as the qualifier and summer hasn't even started yet? I'm already predicting that the big numbers I was hoping for aren't going to happen. It will still will be better then last year, which when looking at the positive side, "is" an improvement. I think Becca's "idea" is to get involved with dirt biking and to put on miles the easy way!

This weekend was a trip home to enjoy the local bike trails around my parents house. You know, all the trials that I never used growing up and never knew existed. Even though I wanted to pedal bike, the real purpose was to get Becca a demo of dirt biking with our new friend Cori. I really can't comment on what actually happened, while the girls headed out on the trails, I took the much more dangerous job of geocaching in the area. They had beautiful beach sand trails, I had to blaze trails through dense forest trails that reminded me of my time spent in Nam. They had song birds chirping, I was being chased by swarms of mosquitoes thirsty for my sweet blood. They had a group of helpful guys to tend to their every need on the trail, I had myself to remove at least ten ticks off my body once I got back to the car! Plus, found another three in the car while driving (I'm sure the other drivers thought I was drunk as I trying to catch the little critters)! Well, Becca did do her impression of an ostrich by going over her handlebars and planted her head in the sand, but that hardly sounds close to what I had to go through!

If I'm home visiting my parents, that means one thing, I'm eating. Cori got initiated to pasties. She then initiated us (really just me) to biscuit strawberry shortcake. Apparently because I grew up "urban", I like my shortcake using the easily purchased angel cake way and not the "traditional" home style of my mom slaving in the kitchen for hours. Don't get me wrong, it was good, and Cori can make it for me anytime, but if I'm having guests over, they are getting the angel cake way...deal with it!

We did get to take Cori out for her first official Geocaching experience. Though I'm not sure if she really enjoyed the walking around swamps and playing the slap mosquitoes off each other game. I thought we gave her a good experience when it came to finding various wildlife. It started with me scaring a momma partridge then almost stepping on three of her eight babies. They were pretty cute and reminded me of the candy peeps coming to life and running around. I'm sure Rascal would have loved them as much as the candy peeps as well! Deer, lots of deer. A momma turkey with I believe twelve kids and I believe the consensus favorite a huge porcupine that proceeded to climb down the small tree where Cori found him, to a much larger tree to get away from us (Cori) tormenting him. I noticed that he did stay in the tree, until Cori called him fat, then he got self-conscious.

It wasn't until the end of the weekend that we actually got some pedal biking in. I was totally shocked my parents wanted to go out and ride with us. That alone tells me that I'm not riding enough if they think they can keep up with me! We had a nice ride and I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I think it was my favorite part of the whole weekend. Now you all know how sentimental I am, so that's why you know that for me to enjoy something, it must mean there is some kind of destruction going on, there was! The tent worm population exploded and there were thousands of them running across the trail and were creating ecological terrorism. I put on my Homeland Security hat, raised the terror level, and the game became running them over with the bike tires. My favorite moment of the whole weekend was missing a tent worm, trying to point it out to Becca, only to have her not in a position to get it, but watching my mom line up and crush it with a smile. It only took thirty four years before we actually could enjoy a destructive game together. So, here's my tip for this blog post, if your goal is to bike miles, get some some tent worms on trail. Not only is it a bonding experience, but it's therapeutic and damn fun!

Lake O'Nothing

Wednesday Night dive night took us to Bristol Lake. With my success last week, I could only feel that this week was only going to bring greater treasure finds! Take a guess at how this ends. My greatest find of the night turned into being cold water. Maybe it was the overcast skies, the rain, or just bad luck picking a path, but we found nothing! I don't think I ever have to dive Bristol Lake again it was that uninteresting, it was simply a vast nothingness that reminded me a prime time tv.

It turned out that it was guess the average dive time of all the divers and win the pot (everybody chipped in a dollar). I picked 43 minutes as my time. 18 minutes into our dive I was already frozen because I found the 46 degree water and I knew it wouldn't fly with Becca that we'd end the dive that quickly, so I navigated us back to shallow water and normal temperatures. We ended with our dives at 57 minutes, both knowing that we had to bump up our time to help our chances of winning the pot. Turns out the winning time was 42 minutes! If we would have stayed down a few minutes longer, we could have walked away a whopping $12 richer.

The most memorable event and our learning experience from this dive, pay attention to where you enter the water! It was raining hard when we got in the water and though I did set my compass heading before going down, when we came up, we surfaced a couple hundred feet away from the boat lunch we started at and it was a very odd feeling having no idea where in the lake "home" was.

Holiday Weekend

This Blog entry is in the spirit of 24 for three reasons, too much happened this weekend and it will take too long to write, I'm lazy, and there really isn't a reason to do it this way because I never watch 24.

Friday:

5:32 - Cori Arrives
5:33 - The decision is made to go out to eat
5:47 - We arrive at Niskers
5:51 - Food is ordered with a tip from the waitress that the green beans suck
7:05 - Kalamazoo Kings vs the Traverse City Beach Bums starts
7:06 - Kalamazoo is already up 8 to 1
7:42 - Mark runs out of insults and now actually feels sorry for Cori's team
9:30 - Three outs to go, this game is over 13 to 5
9:35 - Bases are loaded with Bums, zero outs, and the score is now 13 to 10
9:37 - Some miracle happens and the Kings avoid blowing this lead and giving Cori endless payback for my teasing. The game ends 13 to 10.

Saturday:

7:50 - Becca begins making homemade (from a can) cinnamon rolls
8:15 - Sugar rush has started, time to head to Al Sabo to ride
9:12 - Mark tips over on his bike after stopping without unclipping his shoes
9:22 - Mark tips over after being told by Cori he would yet he tried anyway
9:37 - 7 miles in the books
11:43 - Lunch at the Big Burrito
1:15 - Cori finds her first stage of a multi-stage geocache
2:05 - The multi-geocache ends with a fail as one of the stages is in a swamp
4:23 - Grilling chicken on the grill begins
4:25 - Cori, the guest, is now grilling corn on the cob (we are horrible hosts)
5:05 - Dinner turned out pretty good
5:52 - Driving over to South Haven to watch the sunset
9:05 - Ohhh Awww the sunset was mediocre
11:15 - Time for bed, long day tomorrow

Sunday:

6:45 - I'm up, the girls are still sleeping
9:47 - We FINALLY get to the trail and begin riding
11:29 - 17 miles into the ride, Becca decides to go off the trail and into a swamp
11:30 - Mark tips over again trying to rush to Becca's aid
11:33 - Becca, Cori, and Mark are all laughing hysterically at what happened
1:42 - We all made it 34 miles to South Haven and were all smiling
3:00 - Becca showers the nasty swamp off herself
3:23 - Lunch at BW3 to watch the Wings and have wings
3:43 - Cori states she sucks at mini golf
3:44 - The decision is made to go mini golfing since the Wings were winning
4:15 - Mini golf sucks, Cori won
5:37 - Oh the cherry pie and ice cream is soooooo good
6:00 - Kevin Spacey movie night starts
10:30 - Mark slept through both movies and is now going to bed

Monday:

7:15 - It's morning already?
9:16 - we are now dodging walkers on the Celery Flats trail
9:32 - Mark tipped over for the fourth time of the weekend
9:49 - 8 more miles are in the books
10:29 - The girls are at the 9th street park attempting to fly kites
10:41 - Cori tricks Mark into flying her kite
10:42 - Cori's kite is now smashed into the ground
10:43 - 10:57 repeat the last two steps over and over
1:30 - Microwave pot roast could only be better if we didn't eat all the pie
2:00 - 4:30 Watching movies and plain hanging out
4:31 - Becca gets her dirt bike gear out, the discussion starts
5:01 - Cori finally heads home


In all, it was a very fun weekend. The main stats: a hair under 50 miles ridden and I tipped over 4 times on my bike, Becca's new name is swamp ass, and Cori got lucky at mini golf.

Not a Treasure Hunter, I'm a Treasure Finder!

I admit it, part of the fun of diving is seeing amazing creatures, the underwater landscape, wrecks, all the normal things associated with diving, but the other part is finding lost treasure! Lets be honest, if you are going to have a hobby, might as well have one with the chance of getting rich. Before you get too excited about my discovery and start asking me for a loan, lets face it, not to many pirate ships sailed in the inland lakes in Michigan.

Last night was the official start of Wednesday Night Dive Nights with the local area divers. The destination was Gull Lake, but the other side that I hadn't dove before. It turned out to be a great night for a dive with the outside temps in the 70's and the water temp was in the 50's. Becca and I headed out and found the two boats, the swing set, and a couple of the other objects. This side of Gull Lake didn't seem as cool as the other side, so then I took us on a search pattern trying to find some of the bigger fish. I thought the highlight of the dive was a dead crayfish I found, it wasn't much, but at least it was something. Soon after, I found a bullhead, that once we scared it, it took off in a silt trail frenzy. Next was a bass laying in the weeds. Finally, my orthodox path directed us to where something in the muck caught my eye. To me, it looked like a sardine can, I though "oh great, I found junk", so I let Becca reach for it, figuring to give her the disappointment of crap. Much to my surprise, when she touched it, it's gold band immediately came into view! Treasure! Real Treasure! I can't remember what phrase I shouted through my regulator, but it probably was more of a squeal then anything.

I'm sure One-Eyed Willie personally plundered this gold(plated) watch himself. In his haste to outrun the authorities, the watch slipped from his grasp (I mean his arm was severed off in a sword fight) and sunk harmlessly to the bottom of the lake, so I could find it 200 years later! Okay, so it's a crappy Citizen watch that some drunken fisherman dropped, but it's still my first official underwater treasure, so I'm sticking with my One-Eyed Willie story! Aaaaarrgh!

Three Weeks Later (I only wanna go back)

Three weeks later, I'm still thinking about my Cozumel trip. Come on, I only logged 787 minutes of underwater time! That's hardly enough to even scratch the surface of what underwater discoveries were to be had. I did come back with plenty of video footage, even though I complain about how I wish I could have done something different (or bitch about missing that amazing 45 seconds of the turtle that I missed by turning my camera off), overall I'm very happy. For my first time warm water diving and my first time taking underwater video, I'm most pleased with myself for learning on the fly. My video tape from the first day to our last day, frankly looks like two different people were taking it. That overall change has me extremely excited looking to the future of what kind of video I'll come back with on my next trip.

Here are three videos that I put together showcasing some of the great finds I was treated to over the vacation. They are HiDef (so definitely don't just watch them small, once you start you'll see a HD button on the right).