Saturday was bike-day for Joel and me. The girls went Garage-saling and Jason had to drop off some hamocks up north. If it was that simple it wouldn’t warrant a story, but it wasn’t. I brought my bike and Joel was to borrow a bike from Jason and Faye. Faye asked us if we could pump-up the rear tire and get a valve adapter since the paretta valve on the tire didn’t fit their pump. We should be able to get it done at the bike-shop at the corner of Gordon and Nottingham (in Guelph). It was 9am and off we went to the bike shop. Bike shop closed. Didn’t open until 10am. Okay, two options; wait an hour or see if we could get either a valve-adapter or a pump at Canadian Tire. We opted for the latter and came back with a pump.
The pump worked and we were pumping away when disaster struck; a piece of the valve fell off. Given the small size of the paretta valve a small part of that is really small and its brass colour gave it perfect camouflage in the grass… After 10mins of painstackingly crawling through a small section of grass we found it only to conclude that the part didn’t fall off, but broke off. Great. It was now about 10am so a second trip to the bike shop was planned. We quickly found out that we needed a new inner tube and for a small fee the shop was willing to install it as well. That gave us some more time to kill and we put that to good use to stawl around the Farmers Market across from the bike shop (you gotta love small towns…). We found some good cherries and after another 30 minute wait at the bike shop we went back to the house with a bike ready for some biking. However, in the meantime it was 11.30am and we hadn’t done a single bit of biking. Back at the house the girls were already back from their shopping spree and we didn’t leave yet. Anyway, after sharing the story and some laughs we loaded up the bikes and drove to the Guelph Lake conservation area to do some biking.
We parked the car at the trail-head on Victoria Road and biked on some nice trails. After a while the trail narrowed quite a bit and became very poorly maintained. We apparently missed a turn-off or something since the trail we were on now looked as if nobody in the last two years followed a similar route we did. When we hit the part where a machetti was more appropriate than a mountain bike we took the adjecent road and turned on to Jordan baseline and ended-up biking all around the lake without another trail entry point. Too bad, but we still got a good work-out. After stopping for some directions (I know, two guys mountain biking that are stopping for directions must either be really lost or just fed up with the pavement since they apparently missed all the trail entry points). For us it was the latter and 10 minutes later we were indeed back on the trails. By now we were coming close to our 1pm deadline so after a few more minutes on the trails we drove back to the car, loaded the bikes back up and headed back to the house for a much appreciated shower. Not quite the biking trip we wanted, but we still had a good time.
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