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Wednesday, December 2

Went some more places. Did some other things.

"Hey, Pie.  You seen the sour gummy bears?" I asked as I was packing up for a day at Alafia.

"Yeah, I took them with me to Orlando, but I left them in the glove compartment so they wouldn't melt."

Le sigh.

I also woke up to a squishy rear tire.  Guess I went a little hard in the rough stuff at Balm Boyette.  Always travel with a decent pump, or even better, always travel with an excellent travel pump.

Whatever it was sealed up, so like, whatever.

I had the car for the day, so I drove over to Alafia, parked... chewed off a couple hunks of the melted corpses of so many sour gummie bears, and headed out.  Before this trip, I was unaware that Trail Forks had become a pay only-app, so I was navigating with MTB Project... which does not mark double black diamonds in red, so straight into Moonscape and Graviton from the parking lot.  

Good lorb.
They obviously did not have rigid single speeds in mind when they built these two trails.  Giant hucks and gaps with plenty of steeps and hard uphill turns.  Lots of looking before leaping (and/or not leaping).  Rode a few things with a puckered-up butt.  After that, I felt like I needed to headed to greener pastures.

Hlrs.

Anyways, plenty of single black diamond and blue trails... with an occasional green trail to cleanse the palate and also to get from A to B. 

When I was almost done hitting all the blacks (some of which were red again but I didn't know), I ended up over at the Quasi Berm...
 
Which The Pie knew more about than I did, because she does her research, and I just fall into things.  I hit the wooden berm once pretty low down, one more time slightly higher, and because at that point there was an accumulation of spectators on the nearby hiking trail, I went about as high up as you can get.  They were nonplussed.

The whole ride, the rear of the bike was feeling strange.  There were some weird noises coming from somewhere, but I had an MP3 player that kept them in check.  I didn't have a whole lotta tools with me on this trip, so I'd rather not know what's going on.  Got in a fun twenty mile ride with all the variety you can get here.

There are reasons The Pie and I end up in this same place that makes many Floridians say "meh."

Here The Pie is attempting to inflate my ego manually.

The Pie gets what she wants, quiet time near a pool and a hot tub and sunsets and no crowds (after two days of early alarms, a marathon, and a packed day visiting a friend).  I get trails and a happy Pie.

The next day we headed over to Ocala where things did not work out so well... for me anyways.