Hudson had his first crabbing trip with Grandma and Grandpa. Here’s the footage.
New MacBook!
New MacBook arrived! Woo Hoo! Much faster than the old one and much cleaner HD since I get to start over essentially with file management. My only beef is that I’m still on the developer’s version of OS X Lion and there are still a few annoying bugs even as close as they are to a final release. Things like Aperture, Firefox, wifi and Thunderbolt still have some bugs.
Other than that, I love the machine. Quick, small, fairly light and quite powerful with the i7 processor, 8 GB and a half a TB of memory. Paired with 2 back-up drives for media and backups and I’m good to go for more movie editing.
I will most likely keep my version of Final Cut… just no need to upgrade with Premier PRO 5.5. Adobe’s latest is quite powerful and adequate enough to do what I do.
Categories: Mac, Random CraP
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The Paris Roubaix Cycling Challenge – checked off
feels like I just was there… but it’s been over a month ago…
Here’s a synopsis of the photos I took… still more to publish
use this link if you’re not able to view the slideshow… LINK
Categories: cycling stuff, European Adventure
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Paris Roubaix – It’s Race Day!
Time for the PRO race. Again, we were up at the crack of dawn and off to the start for the PROs… Compiegne, France. The drive in the bus was pretty uneventful until we got close to Compiegne and started seeing team buses and team cars. The excitement in the bus was building. Once we arrived, I buddied up with Andrew so we didn’t get back to the bus late (they insisted that they would leave us behind if we were late). So, Andrew and I wandered around the team buses… taking photos and getting glimpses of PRO riders. I was soaking it ALL in… In football, baseball and even soccer, the fans only get so close to the players… In cycling, it’s different. You are standing next to rows of 10-15K dollar bikes and riders who ride thousands of miles a year… The vibe is crazy. The aura around a guy like Bjarne Riis is like nothing else… Here is a guy who won a Tour de France and runs his own team… just chilling out before he has to put his game face on.
We did a lot of driving in the bus to view a few key spots of the race… none of which compared to the area around the finish at the Velodrome in Roubaix… The riders come rolling into Roubaix after riding 150 miles and they still have the gas to unleash some serious power on a bicycle. As the winner rolls into the Velodrome, the surrounding crowds ERUPT… no joke.
So here’s a little video recap pf the trip itself and my days with the PROs…
This was a good way to celebrate turning 40… checking off something I’ve wanted to do since I was 17. Maybe this would be something the boys and I would do together someday.
Categories: cycling stuff, European Adventure, Filming
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Riding the Paris Roubaix Course
up at the crack of dawn to eat a good breakfast and head to St. Quentin for the start of our ride. The place was packed with a few thousand riders, all staged in waves according to ability. I have no idea how they calculated my ability, but no matter… I was determined not to draft off of others, not get a flat carelessly and to not crash… so riding near the back was ok by me. I was surprised to see Bernard Hinault standing right next to me at the start and after scanning my bright yellow riding gear, he gave me a thumbs up.
Interestingly, we had a beautiful 30+ miles of rolling countryside before ever hitting a cobble… It’s been said that Paris Roubaix is flat and while it’s not hilly it is undulating (I never needed to get out of the saddle to handle any rises). Overall, in a word… amazing riding. About 20 miles in, I encountered two people who were on our tour… 2 sisters from the US. One with bike trouble. I happily stopped and helped fix her bike…. we rode together until mile 60 when we discovered on the Pavelle section of cobbles that she (or someone else) didn’t tighten her rear wheel skewer… and it was gone. I rode around to a few caravans set up on the course to see if anyone had a spare for her… nope. Finally, I flagged down the Garmin Team car (which was following their riders out on recon) to see if they had any spares… nope. The sister was able to get a replacement from the Mavic moto on the course so we parted ways and I rode the last miles solo. I’m still trying to take it all in and there’s no way I could write it all down, but I will tell you this… there is no way to describe riding these cobbled roads… it’s like riding a mile or two of hitting curbs… the banging is just insane and if you don’t hit the sections going maximum speed, you’ll never go any faster… there is no way to speed up once you’ve slowed.
So here’s a little video of the practice ride and the ride itself…
One thing to note… I finished the ride no problem… no blisters, no crashes, not even a flat. They say that one of the hardest sections is the last one we did… the Carrefour d’Arbe section. It’s made of these breadloaf sized cobbles with little or no filling in between them. They’re anything but even and the gaps are twice the width of a tire. The dirt sections provide only temporary relief. When I saw the sign that I was entering Carrefour, I stepped on the pedals hard and gassed it, knowing that I would only have a little over a mile of this torture until the official finish. Surprisingly, I skimmed over the entire section, passing people until I was spit out at the finish… not so bad.
Categories: cycling stuff, European Adventure
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