_Ride 1_, or _Virgins No More!_ Copyright 1994 by Armadillo Communications captain@actlab.rtf.utexas.edu 1994Nov18 It was a full Moon night, at the tail end of the lunar eclipse. The Perseid meteors were showering silently above, and a thick fog was settling in upon the Texas hills. I was running late, as usual, but this time because of the long difficult task of installing the new Vetta cyclometer on the new Hoo Koo E Koo. Finally, I got all the wires in the right place, and took off for Ori's pad. He was sitting on his Rockhopper FS, outside his apartment...waiting anxiously. It was 02:17 by this point, and we were due on the trails by 01:30. Oh, well. We were on our way at last! We hit the streets, I with my hard-shell ANSI/fancy helmet, 5 super bright flashing red LEDs out back, and my homebrew 12,500-candle-power front light, blasting through the settling fog, Ori with...a white shirt. We had a 2-3 mile road trek before we could escape the grasp of the evil hard stuff. We spied some deer, and I said, "Where there's deer, there's dirt!" and headed off toward them to find a path. Sure enough, there was a two track dirt road leading into the brush. We jumpped the curb, I hit my light, and we headed in.... :-) My FIRST DIRT! :-) It turned out to be pretty muddy, and I somehow managed to get covered with mud, while Ori stayed relatively pristine. After passing several 2x6s, and a opossum, we discovered, to our dismay, that it was nothing more than a construction site cut-through, and ended abruptly at a major street about 300m later. :-( I stopped to fiddle with my cyclometer a bit, but to no avail. It had worked when we first set out, but had stopped somewhere around the time I hit 14mph, as that was the MaxSpeed showing. I decided to give up on it for a while, and we headed off for Bull Creek. "On the road again"... then Ori turned abruptly off the road, and started straight down a 30+ degree grass covered hill, into what looked like an enormous pit! He hollared back, "Stay on your breaks! aaaaaaaaaaaargh!.... *silence* .... and stay on your bike! heh." Needless to say, I did NOT attempt the dark unknown descent, and Ori saw the brilliance of my ways, and walked back up. We found the "easy" way down (via another short road, ick), and ended up at Bull Creek. It was _beautiful_! The water was rushing, waterfalls were gurgling their inimitable tunes, the moon was casting its pale glow upon all, and the still fog, lent a quietness not often known in these modern times. I hit my arc lamp, and we headed off down what looked like "Bubba's 4x4 testing track", which paralleled the creek. The mud was anywhere from 6" deep to nothing but a thin coating on slippery limestone. I focused all my attenion on not falling down on the fist-to-dog sized rocks that peppered the mud. We got about 300m in, and came upon a little pond in the middle of the track. Thank goodness for that light! In the moonlight it looked just like a continuation of the muddy road, and not at all like the mucky trash filled sesspool that it was. We circumnavigated the trash trap, and continued on for about another 400m, where started thinking maybe we should turn back. But when I stopped and looked up, I discovered that we had come back to the main roadway, albeit about 15m below it. We sat there, and talked, and watched nature, and listened to the sounds for a while. Then I made a brief attempt to climb the concrete embankment, which would have meant certain maiming had I fallen on the creek side. I gave up, and walked up to the roadway. It was at this point that I discovered that I might have done better to let off at least a notch or two on the preload to my RockShox Quadra 21s. Next time! ;-) We rode back, climbed a monstrous hill, which Ori had to walk half of, but I distracted myself by thinking about what I'd say to the people who sold me that pos Vetta cyclometer (anger & frustration turned to good old pedal power :-) and powered my way all the way to the top. I need more aerobic capacity, that's for sure. We rode back to Ori's, I took a hose, and rinsed off the mud from my bike, tossed it in the car, came home, and began the transfer of creek mud to keyboard. ;-) Ok, it's not much of an ending, and probably riddled with mistakes, but it's almost 06:00hrs, and I'm tired & crusty-dried-mud-covered, so I'll edit this later, and add it to my web pages. Anyone who has actually been interested enough to have read this far can get the "new & improved" version of _Ride 1_, or _Virgins No More!_ from there. Maybe I'll include a "first impressions" of the HKEK. Essentially: Great bike! :-) Thanks for reading. Have fun in the dirt! See you there. :-) -- "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759 captain@actlab.rtf.utexas.edu Bran Muffin (ACTlab system administrator)