Riding, Riding and Riding

Wed night.
Mountain bike ride, of course I have not ridden true off road in about 3 years, so this is gonna be fun. The day was dry, I borrowed a Yakima Team Bike - Kona King ($3000 full suspension, lightweight bike). Loaded up the bikes on the car, drove to the woods, where you are not allowed to ride bikes, waited till nightfall so no one would catch us - Headlights on. Of course 5 mins before starting to ride, it starts to rain, and it's been rainy the past few days... hence lots of mud.
We rode for about 3 hours, 2 1/2 in the dark, going only by electronic headlights...kinda scary when you are riding narrow trail through woods, really fast!

Kona - "The King"
Sweet Bike with post ride dirt!

As you can see - Pretty Dirty!
The Team Yak

Thursday
Lunch ride, road. Dry all morning, roll out, team ride, fast pace for an hour, several hills, then oh guess what, it starts raining for a minute, the hail, we climbed about 1000ft and the hail was in your face on the descents... not awesome.

Other than that, everything else is

Found a place

So after a while of hunting, calling, trolling craigslist and spending many days looking at crappy places (the rental market is slow here) I finally decided on a place.
Turns out it was the first place a looked at. I got this lead from a friend for someone looking for a housemate / flatemate.
The location is perfect, good neighborhood access to a lot of things. It's basically a small house and I have 3 rooms upstairs to myself, share a bathroom, share a kitchen. The place gets good light, has North and South facing windows. The guy has washer and dryer in basement with storage space. There is also a grassy backyard with a gas grill... nice!

The house is about 16miles from where I work... thus it's gonna be a long and hilly morning cycle to work! Turns out he works about 4 miles from me, so some days we can ride share.
I spoke with the house owner for a long time and he's a few years older than me, maybe 35, but he seems very normal, rational and he's big into climbing.

Now I just have to arrange to get all my stuff moved from Chicago!

Life in the Beaverton

Well i'm still here, in an extended stay hotel in Beaverton. I was going to take some pictures to post here, but if you google the words "Beaverton Suburb Strip Mall Boring" you will get a whole host of true images. I guess people with families and single people wanting cheap rent far from the city live here. It's not bad, it's just like any suburb, no character and you have to drive everywhere.Apartment complexes and large single family houses. the open roads are good to ride on though!

Apartment searching is poor, not a lot of things are interesting me at the moment. I have seen a few places so most don't fit. I'm really thinking of living in the Hawthorn area, its pretty popular and a little grungy, has a lot of character. Most ofthe propertys are homes which are small single family or small homes which have been split into 2 or 3 apartments, very residential, urban, neigbourhood. There is an opportunity of a house share just off of 40th and Hawthorne, which is a cool area near the Bagdad Theatre and Pub (shown below) ...link here

Work is going well, 2nd week , just getting used to the routine and getting back into the world of meetings and companys, much different than working for yourself for sure. My legs have been so tired this week from so much riding and not being used to riding hills and longer distances. But if I live over on the East side it's going to be a 38mile a day bike ride round trip! should keep me fit.

Enough for now.