I haven’t done a lot of epic riding this year, but my riding has been more social. Sunday continued that trend, with a short (25-mile) but hilly ride west of town, to Stanford, Indiana. This is becoming one of my favorite routes, and this time, I got to share it with friends. Dave G and Doug joined me. Dave and I ride together a lot, but I had only ridden with Doug a couple of times before.

I wasn’t sure what kind of bike Doug would be riding. He showed up on a Schwinn Voyageur SP, in an excellent commuting/touring configuration, complete with fenders, racks, and downtube shifters. Like me, he commutes by bicycle year-round. This is the kind of bicycle my Long Haul Trucker is patterned after, so I enjoyed seeing Doug’s bike. Oh yeah … he also wore clipless sandals. A good choice.

It was a very humid morning, but fortunately, for most of ride, it wasn’t extremely hot. Just really muggy, and a bit hazy, but the humidity was bad enough to keep us sweating buckets.

This next shot typifies the scenery: haze and plentiful rollers. At one point, we commented that Tim would not have been happy with all the rollers.

One road claimed to be “closed,” but we got through the construction zone quite easily on bicycles.

I saw the bluish-purple wildflowers all over the place during the ride. I’m not sure what they are, so if anyone can help me identify them, that would be great.

Here’s one of my favorite views, with quite a bit of haze. By the time we climbed up on this ridge, the sun had come out in full force and we were just boiling in the heat.

This was a fun ride, with good company, and I still had much of the day left for other activities (mostly just beating the heat). Good times!

File under: Bicycling, Friends, Road Biking