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My ride plan on Saturday hinged on Nick's sobriety level on Friday night.  He even said as much.

Meet at Steve's at 9:30AM, unless he felt he couldn't make it due to self-sabotage.  His text at 8:04AM?

"I'm worthless."

I'm on my own.

I can't fathom driving 45 minutes one way to ride a trail by myself.  I was also bummed to find out that the location of our new house puts Steve's outside the limits that I'd be willing to drive for solo trail time.  What to do?

There's some new trail being built over on the west side of town that I have yet to see.  A few miles, some heavily machine built, some hand built, but no place to park a car.  Sounds like a ride destination.  There's still some part of me that enjoys the futility of riding a single speed geared for trail riding on the open road.  Ten miles one way is well within my comfort zone, so I get dressed and head out by myself.

It was nice to ride somewhere I've never been on a bike, and once I got into the woods, even more so.  I explored every piece of trail I could find (including the one steep descent that just ended... somewhere.  Had to hike back out.

Whatever.

I also took every double track I could find to see where I'd end up.  I wanted to get down to the Catawba River, but I'm pretty sure I needed to go down into this hole to get there...

So, I didn't.  This is about as close as I got:

I took zero pictures of all the machine built, bike park quality lines that are out there.  I'm pretty sure they're not trying to blow this place up quite yet.  It has so much potential, the elevation out there is legit, and you really don't feel like you're in Charlotte... not that being in Charlotte is entirely bad.

I made my way to The Spoke Easy Bike Love Party later that evening, and I figured I'd stay for a couple hours, and somehow I got home at 1:30AM...

which means that I felt the feels on Sunday that kept Nick from riding with me the day before.

I didn't need to ride Sunday anyways.  I'd been avoiding a bunch of annoying but easy to ignore bike maintenance.  I got some new XTR Trail brakes from a friend who bought them on super sale (by accident) that I wanted to put on the JaBronSSon so I could move the XT brakes to the Stickel Meatplow V.6 to replace the XTR brakes with the leaky lever I can't seem to fix but have just been ignoring for months and also (finally) replace the bottom bracket on the Vertigo Meatplow V.7 that had a wallowed out cup because I didn't own a bearing puller back when I should have... oh, and check the spoke tension on my oldest set of Industry Nine/NOX wheels (and then bring up to tension).

Nothing exciting or ride-altering, so I approached all the tasks with as much enthusiasm as due.

Which was very little.

And I can't say I got it all done either, as an entire cockpit (ENVE bars, Thomson stem, XT brakes) is on the floor behind me as I type still waiting to go on the Stickle.

A couple hours work down over five or so hours... because... burrito.  Of course, burrito.