Mat & Amie Levine

This picture is of Maddy and I at the top of our climb, now we just have downhill to go.  Yay!  We couldn’t stay inside even though the house needs to be cleaned and papers need to be organized, it was just too beautiful outside.  So we went for a ride out at Bent Creek and joined many others in the fabulous weather. (note: all our leaves have dropped, so we are entering stick season, not the most attractive way to see the trees, but it allows for awesome long distance views that you only see in the winter around here!)

It was a quick, fun ride back down to the trailhead.  Since I was riding by myself, I decided not to go on this one trail with a lot of whoop-de-doos just cuz’ I’ve gotten too much air before and messed up on the landing, so I didn’t want to chance.  I did come across a log that I’d been eyeing for a while.  Usually it is kind of wet and slippery looking, but yesterday, it was dry and looked like I could attempt.

So I tried, and got up on it, surprised myself, so I hopped off.  It didn’t seem too bad, so I tried it again and rode it.  Yay for my balance, then at the end there was a rock placed to help with the dismount, but I didn’t realize it was there, so I wasn’t lined up correctly for it and I went off the side and must have turned my handlebars.  Because next thing I know, I am kneeling on the ground with the handlebar wrapped around my knee.  All I could think was, “oh no, I sure hope I didn’t do anything serious, cuz it will take at least 6 weeks to heal and Mat and I are going on a road trip in 2 weeks in search of mountain bike trails!!!”  But I was able to get up and ride my bike out.  So nothing was broken, I just have some attractive bruising and swelling.

I don’t know if you can see or not, but on the right side there is some swelling and then on the inside of my leg is an attractive bruise where it was jammed against the top bar.  But, hopefully, no long lasting issues.  I still have a slight limp, but I think it just has to do with the internal bruising, thankfully!

To celebrate Spencer’s birthday on Wednesday, Mat and I went on a bike ride in the North Mills River and we chose to ride Spencer’s Branch and Spencer’s Gap Trails. We had a fun time celebrating Spencer’s b-day, some day maybe we can take Spencer on them.

I love google earth and map my ride.  The bonus is Mat combining the two, so that we can see where we have ridden our bikes.  Yay!

To celebrate Valentine’s Day, we went on a “romantic” mountain bike ride.  Well, okay, it wasn’t really romantic so much as an awesome time hanging out together for the day.  It started out overcast and then turned into a beautiful bluebird day.  Perfect weather for mountain biking.  AND we saw hardly anyone else out on the trails.  It was a pretty long climb uphill on the road behind the stables and then a bit of “hike a bike” and then it was some fun downhill.  Yay!

It is a different world riding the trails in the winter time with all the leaves down.  There are so many more views!

Last week, we spent a wonderful day out on some mountain bike trails in the Brevard area.  It was tons of fun.  There was some climbing on an old log road and then a quick & tight section going down then it mellowed out to fun cross-country.  It was perfect-o.

Our friend, Eric, took us on a nice bike ride yesterday.  It was a perfectly clear day for a ride with long distance views.  Which we had lots of, but none of the pics I took did it any justice.  What you don’t see in this picture is Mat changing his 3rd flat in 2 days.  He’s back behind me.  Eric went off this jump while I tried to capture it.  (Mat had two flats on his ride the day before with Eric, so he’s now a pro at fixing a flat.)

We’ve been enjoying some wintery weather out here to get us acclimated to our trip out to Utah!  It’s been chilly w/ a tad bit of snow…just enough to cancel work Friday morning until noon.

Thanks to mapmyride.com and google earth we could check out the ride we did.

The leaves are turning right now, so it’s a bit more colorful!  As you can see in the below pictures.

Mat is riding the log…he has a much better sense of balance than I!  It was a fun day with beautiful weather and mellow riding, except for the last half hour of downhill.

We went on a beautiful ride out in Bent Creek.  It is amazing that the fall colors are still going on and it is still so vibrant!  This is the nice mellow road ride to the beginning of the trail.

Mat at the start of the trail…about the only time I can get to the front of him in order to take a picture!  We had a great ride even though the temperature high was only 42 degrees.  At the end of the ride, Maddy still cooled herself off by sitting in every creek and pond she came across!

Yesterday was a beautiful fall day.  Mat and I headed out for a bike ride and as we started the climb it was nice and cool with a lovely mist.  We kept on climbing for about an hour or so (those w/ stronger thigh muscles have been known to do it in about 30 minutes) and we got to the trailhead for Greens Lick.  It had the most signs ever at the trailhead warning people about the difficulty of the trail.

As we started going down I felt like it was awesome!  Out in this area, the trails are so smooth and this did not disappoint.  It was so smooth and it had woop-di-dos and berms and it was really easy to get alot of speed.  I was enjoying myself so much that I went over some woop-di-dos and was getting a wee bit of air and kind of liking it.  So I let myself get more on each one and then realized I had ALOT of air and braked and landed.  I think I tried to ride it out because I recall thinking “oh, it’s gonna be okay, just straighten your tire” and wobbling and then going over the handlebars and rolling.  After sitting still a moment and realizing nothing was broken, I got up and looked down and saw I was bleeding.  I’m a wimp so really I just wanted to sit down and cry, but that wouldn’t help me.  So, I got my shaky self on the bike and rode down to where Mat was riding.  He asked if everything was okay since I was smiling brightly with tears in my eyes.  So I told him about my crash which amazingly enough didn’t crush the sunglasses in my pocket!

I regrouped for a minute and then we finished the trail. Which was awesome.  We got out and it seemed like such a short ride that we decided to ride back up to 5 points, which we had passed by earlier on the way to the Greens Lick trailhead.  We rode our bikes back up for another 45 minutes or an hour and then rode down another sweet trail.  It is so smooth out there.  I love it.  Maddy was pretty exhausted by the end of the day.  She was getting to the point where she was even letting me go in front of her!  Mat had a good time, too!

Yesterday we rode our bikes along the Laurel Creek to the French Broad river near Hot Springs, NC. It was a beautiful day. The trail is in the shade, so it is a nice place to be on a hot summer day AND there are loads of swimming holes. This is the second time this summer we’ve gone there. Biking down the trail made it to be a very quick trip! We checked out the remains of an old town, Runion, and then on our way back we stopped at a couple spots to take a swim. At our last spot we swam in, we jumped in and played around and noticed that some people were looking at something on the opposite side of the river.

One family, mentioned as they were walking by, that there was a big copperhead snake over there. They just wanted to let us know so that Maddy wouldn’t go mess with it. So, of course, we had to check out this snake. We swam across the river and looked at it sleeping down below the trail. It was pretty big. Then we decided to head on our way. So we went to gather our stuff to leave – and as I picked up my baseball hat I saw another copperhead just curled up about 2-4 inches from where my hat had been. My heart was racing and I backed up and said to Mat “umm, come check this out.”

The weather forecast did not look good for our Friday ride. There was a brief conversation of whether we should cancel or not since the forecast was “SEVERE WEATHER FORECAST” and the radar had it sitting right over where we were going to ride. As I was loading up the car w/ everything – we were going camping afterword – it downpoured on me and there was lots of lightning. But, we decided to make the call at the trailhead and when we got there it was dry…and it didn’t rain the whole time.

After our ride, we hiked to a shelter to sleep. We wanted to stay at the shelter so if it rained we would not have to stay in our individual tents. The weather was wonderful and we had a great time roasting marshmallows! We hiked out Saturday morning and went to breakfast at a delicious cafe in Black Mountain…we ate so much that when we got home we couldn’t really do anything we were too full.

We checked out the first Shindig on the Green for the summer. There were a ton of other people checking it out as well. There were tons of amazingly talented people there playing. We wanted to take out the camera because it is a fabulous opportunity to take photos, but the forecast was for rain. We had parked several blocks away and when it started feeling like a storm was gathering we told our friends good-bye and started walking. Well, we didn’t get very far before it downpoured on us. At first we were running in our flip-flops getting drenched and then we realized that it was pointless, we couldn’t possibly get any more wet than we all ready were.

Our rain barrels are happy and full now. Our garden is also loving the good soaking it has gotten the past several days. Before that we were having a dry spell. Mat took these nice pics of our flowers.