Happy Birthday Henry

We had Henry's 7th birthday party at Scioto Park. Henry had been campaigning hard to have a pool party at the Dublin rec, but the cost and logistics of that steered us towards the city park idea. In the event, the weather was great and I think it was our best birthday party yet (last year: fire station; year before: pumpkin farm).

Between Henry's classmates, neighbors, and cousins, we had about 20 kids and probably a dozen adults show up. The party started at noon, and by 11:55, Henry was at his station near the parking lot to receive his guests. Most of the kids came in a rush right about noon, but even after they all ran to the playground to play, Henry stood by to greet the rest of the kids. No one asked him to do this. I was very proud of my responsible seven year old!

The playground was a popular place all afternoon:

Drop Bars on the Cross Check

So after flirting with Soma Oxford bars for a while (both upside down and right side up), yesterday I changed my Surly Cross Check back to a drop bar, geared machine:

A Brief History of Rawland Bikes

Last week, someone on the Rawland Cycles Owner's Group email list asked for information on past Rawland models. Since I've had a number of Rawlands, and need ideas to fill blog space now that my quest is done, I'll take a shot at it here.

Rawland was started back (I'm not sure when) by Sean and Anna Virnig. Sean was inspired by the all around usefulness of the later steel Bridgestone models. For a while, they used the tagline, "Choose Your Own Adventure":

which I guess indicates that Sean and I are both children of the late 70s.

S24O: Mansfield to Mohican State Forest

This past Saturday buddy Charles and I finally got to our first joint S24O this year. Rather than the usual meet and ride the short hop to Alum Creek SP, we had something new in mind. We started by driving an hour north to Mansfield. Our plan was to take the Richland B&O rails-to-trails as far as it extended towards Mohican State Forest, then make our way the rest of the way on roads.

Our first challenge was finding a non-sketchy place to leave my car. This turned out to be difficult in this part of Mansfield (no offense to Mansfieldians). We finally ended up in the parking lot of Mansfield High, ready to roll:

Belvedere Park, again

Way back at the beginning of this blog, we visited Belvedere Park just across Brand road but failed to take any pictures. Tonight was our chance to set things right. Sam was very excited to be here again:

Bike #67 Intro: Niner SIR9... YASH!

Yet Another Steel Hardtail... someday I'll either get it right, or just give up and go try something else. Anyway, I was browsing through one of my secret shopping areas (the pacelineforums classifieds... mostly this is a roadie forum, so the mountain bikes seem to go a little cheaper) and came across a good deal on a Niner SIR9 that had been lingering on there. The seller was pretty slow in shipping it, but almost three weeks later, it finally arrived here on Monday. I was planning to ride on Tuesday after work, so I put together a quick single speed build:

650B revisted

I went to a trail work today at Alum P1. We did a lot of cleanup on the beginner's trail for next week's race. This week's work day was sponsored by local bike shop roll:, so they had some demos on hand of some of their new models. Since lunch wasn't ready, I was the first to hop on an Anthem 27.5 3 (MSRP $2250) for a quick demo after work was done:

They had just built up the bike on Friday night, so I was the first to really ride it. It was a size Large, too small for me, but the biggest they had in the demo fleet.

I only rode for a mile or two, so take this with a grain of salt:

One more playground: Glacier Ridge Metro Park

Both my playground visits and my blogging have really tapered off since we finished our summer goal. But last night, with Henry and Kate at my parents' place, it didn't take much campaigning by Sam to get me to agree to take him to a playground.

I actually felt sort of fast with only one kid back there:

Best and Worst Parks in Dublin

Drumroll, please, for the moment you've all been waiting for: Bikes and Playgrounds First (and maybe last) Annual Best and Worst Parks awards. Let's jump right in:

Best Community Park: Amberleigh:

This is about the only park that Henry has been asking me to go back to: "can we go back to that firetruck park?" (the twins mostly want to go to ANY playground). Between the village play area and the musical instruments, it has a lot of unique features. I would like to see more shade trees, though, and it's quite a haul to get there from our place.