3/10/2010
By: C. Kent, aka (Superman)

Hemet, Ca

It seemed like a great day for a ride today, clear but a bit cool. It was also the second day I would be riding my new bike and I was looking forward to it. So I got cleaned up, had breakfast and got dressed and headed out of the door. There were two rides planned for today, one to Cactus Valley and one to Mountain Center. I was planning on leading the Cactus Valley ride.

At the Burger King parking lot the Mountain Center group consisted of Tool Man, Shadow and Attack Cat. The Cactus Valley group was made up of Cossack, T-3, Hit Man, Huntress, Highlander, Duramax and I. The C group had Deacon, Traveler and Ian. As we got ready to leave the Mountain Center group decided to first ride over to Cactus Valley with the rest of us and ride with us till we got to Fairview. That was the plan as we headed down Kirby and got ready to head over to Sanderson.


I had a good conversation with Highlander as we rode down Kirby and anticipated a good run down Sanderson and over on Domenigoni. Behind me everyone was riding smoothly and I had every reason to expect this would be an uneventful yet enjoyable ride. Enjoyable it might have been uneventful it was not. Once we turned right off of Kirby things started to slow down. The first small glitch happened as we made the right turn off of Kirby and Shadow had to stop and make some adjustments. We all pulled over and took a short break. Whatever the problem was it was fixed quickly and we were back on our way. Highlander, Attack Cat and Hit Man led the way as we got over to Johnson and hit the stop light at Sanderson.

We had to make one other small stop before we got to Domenigoni but once again we were on our way fairly quickly. As we turned onto Domenigoni heading for State Street Attack Cat decided to stretch his legs and Tool Man and Cossack went with him. They were soon pulling away from the rest of us. Once we made the turn on State Street we could see the three disappearing towards Cactus Valley Road. As we came up on McSweeney Hit man pulled in front of me and pulled us all the way to the rise as the road made a left turn. T-3 developed a problem and decided to return home so we were down one rider. I decided to try and close on the receding lead group but ran out of steam shortly after climbing the little hill just passed Sage Road. So I dropped back into cruise mode and followed them to the end of Cactus Valley. Turns out my camera must have had a problem because the group picture I took simply didn’t show up. I didn’t realize that till I got home.

We made a fast run back to McSweeney and watched first Tool Man and then Cossack and finally Attack cat head for Domenigoni. However Cossack wasn’t planning on going with Tool Man so he turned back to join us. However he hit a bad spot in the road and went down. Like any good cyclist he sacrificed his body to save his bike. We can only hope he isn’t too sore tomorrow.

Tool man came back to see what had happened to us and Attack cat continued on towards Stetson. Shadow developed some stomach problems and had to stop at the Golf course. Cossack left us and the rest of us continued on to Stetson and Huntress pulled up on to the High School. We met up with Attack cat at Fairview and rode together to Florida. Turns out Attack cat had to make the climb to Mountain center himself. He E-mailed me that he decided to go all the way to Idyllwild and that his total time from Burger King to Cactus Valley and to Idyllwild and back to Burger King was 4 hours and 26 minutes.


The rest of us met up at Carl’s and ended up riding home with the C group. It was pretty much like I had planned it with at 33 miles.