I am super excited about my brand new 2009 Kona Sutra. I took my first ride on it last week to work and back, with a detour up to Naked City Brewery/Taphouse for Alex’s surprise birthday party. But today Andy and I took our bikes out for their first _real_ ride. The picture above is over looking Mt. Rainier from the I-90 bridge.
We did a big loop around (most of) Lake Washington from Capitol Hill, up over the north end of the lake and then over to the Microsoft campus. From there we headed south to go over I-90 and back home for a total of 46 miles. We took a break in there for lunch at the Matador in Redmond, which has an amazing pork BBQ sandwich.
The GPS tracks are here: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/22019770
Altogether it was almost a 4 hour ride – not including the hour or so that we stopped for lunch. The fastest I got the bike up to was 41 mph, which was a blast! Just like skiing, I love it when gravity works in my favor. :) The disc breaks which worked really well; I could really feel the stopping power. But I will say that both Andy and I had a tough go of some of those hills. Also, there’s got to be an easier way to get back from Madrona than the way we took – those hills were just ridiculous!
I can already see that our training for the Europe trip is going to take some serious work.