R^3

Shea and I went to a favorite place of mine this past weekend - Deep Creek Lake, Maryland, for a much needed long weekend of R&R&R. That's not a typo - Rest, Relaxing, and Riding! As a kid, my family had a cottage and ski boats there (yes, I was a competitive waterskier long before I slid on frozen water) and my institute maintains a secluded lodge there for use of all of its employees and fellows (that's me!).

Riding - we went away for 5 days and rode 5 days of it. We hadn't exactly planned on a lot of trail time, but the weather was perfect, my bike has new pieces of drive train (thanks to Gettysburg Bikes, you guys continue to rock!), and Western Maryland is remote enough to bring the four-legged friends Allie and Gideon along for a few of the rides. As I'm currently in catching up at work and laundry^3 mode, the details and photo uploads will have to wait. But by the end of the weekend, I'll share my thoughts on the briar patches Garrett County, awesome riding in Davis, WV ("honey, wait up, we dropped the dogs!"), and a less than favorite loop a few miles off the path toward home. Look forward to a few trail reviews (if I put 'em here, I won't lose them myself!).

Rest - yes, now that I'm 30, I can in fact still sleep more than 10 hours a night several nights in a row.

Relaxing - I highly recommend the little fire starter logs that you can buy at Lowe's instead of paper if you're starting a wood fire on a warm evening in a finicky fireplace with wetter-than-it-should-be wood. By round 4 on the fires, we had this nugget figured out. I also recommend steering away from "The Silver Tree" restaurant - a place that holds fond childhood memories of lasagna, whipped butter in fancy dishes, and 15cent ice cream parfaits for dessert. They reopened under new ownership this week and it's the first time in a long time that I actually sent my food back. It was that bad. The ice cream, brownies, and other assorted goodies (gotta love Candyland in Oakland) and oh yeah, wine and beer that we devoured over the weekend somehow haven't yet made it to my waistline - perhaps it was all the riding?

Recovering from R^3 with science - eh, how about some margaritas instead?