This Thanksgiving I woke up at 6:45am so I could put on all my cold weather bike gear and leave the house by 7:30 on my bike. I was headed to Summit Bicycles to go meet up with a bunch of other mountain bikers for the annual Los Gatos Turkey Ride. That may not be its official name, but the idea is that everyone meets up at 8am to go ride up Kennedy Trail, which has its trail head located half way across Kennedy road in Los Gatos. The trail is a large fire road that is quite steep in some areas, but big enough to allow many bikers to ride at the same time. I was very surprised to see that there were several hundred people at Summit Bicycles so early in the morning, and they were kind enough to have the shop open for business until the ride started, and they provided free breakfast rolls and coffee.

The ride started at 8:15 or so and it took me 1:15 to climb 3000′ to the top in about 7 miles. The very last section of the ride, just before the peak where the party was had a 24% incline and was brutal. This was the first time (out of about 8 attempts) that I’ve actually ridden all the way to to the top without having something go wrong on that section of the hill. That incline is steep enough that a single rock, a chain issue, or anything out of the ordinary will completely throw you off balance and its too steep to start again. At the top, there were turkeys, beer, someone actually hauled a keg up on a bike trailer. Someone carried up an entire cooked pig to share, and there was no shortage of brownies, cookies, and other good thanksgiving food to be shared. Next year i’ll have to bring some food to share. I dont know if I’ll go as far as to carry a trailer on my bike, but we’ll see.

Here is a little video clip from my digital camera.
This was such a fun ride that I will for sure participate next year. I hope that I can get more of my friends to come with me as it would make a huge difference once we were at the top. The whole ride from my house was about 20 miles and the whole trip was about 4 hours long, and I was home in time for thanksgiving with the family, or I would have been if we had plans this year. My mom got sick at the last minute so we had a very low key day.here is a link to the message boards where everyone who participates talks. http://forums.mtbr.com/showthread.php?t=359615

Thursday morning I woke up sick and called in to work accordingly. After about an hour and a half my medicine started to really kick in and I was able to do some work from home. I ended up driving out to a client as well for like 4 hours to install a much delayed T1 line. Friday morning my alarm didn’t wake me up, and I was much sicker than the day before. I stayed in bed all day, slept and watched like 5 movies, I don’t even remember now what they were though. Friday evening I started to feel a little better, and I took Jennifer out at 12 midnight for her birthday downtown Los Gatos. We went to C.B. Hannigans, which was pretty dead, then met up with her 2 other friends Brian and Austin and went to Mountain Charlie’s. I didn’t get to drink because I was sick, and was planning on taking Jennifer home when we were done. Mountain Charlie’s was kinda cool, it was smaller than I expected, and they had an $8 cover charge, but there were tons of people and most of them were dancing. After I dropped Jennifer off at home, I went and picked up LGJeff from a party in Los Gatos, and we just drove around for a little bit, stopped by Safeway since I was extremely hungry, and I made it home and to bed around 3am.

Saturday morning I was still sick, but nothing like Friday morning. After getting home late i slept in until about 12:30 and really didn’t do anything all day until Jess showed up later in the afternoon. We went shopping at BestBuy to get my mom’s mothers day present. Then we went out to eat at chili’s, I had a large margarita and too much food. After dinner we went to the mall to get sunglasses. I found a pair that I like and need but decided to wait for the next paycheck to buy it. $145 I don’t need to spend right now. We rushed from the mall back to my house to get ready to go out. We were meeting up with Jennifer and some of her friends to celebrate her 21st birthday. Before we left the house, Jess and I split a diet coke with 3 shots of vodka each to get warmed up and save a little money from the bars. My brother dropped us off downtown San Jose at a bar called the Britannia Arms Pub where we met up with Jennifer and her friends. We sat there for a while and rung up about $120 on the tab between the nine of us before deciding to go to the next bar. We found ourselves a few blocks down Santa Clara street at a place called ‘Toons’. They had a sign on the street advertising $1 drinks, so it was a winner. We played several games of team pool and had lots of drinks, and started to dance a bit. Personally, by this point I had already consumed 8 shots of vodka (mixed in various things) and two redbull vodka’s. The price was right and the drinks were good. After a while at that bar we wandered around looking for San Jose bar and grill but there were tons of people outside and we didn’t want to wait. We ended up asking some guy where we should go, and he took us around the block to this other bar that was quite nice. Actually I don’t know about the bar that much, it was long and skinny, and I was very drunk by the time we got there. That bar was all about dancing. I danced the whole time I was there except for the last 2o mins or so, when I was just too drunk to stand up by myself. I had 3 corona’s there and that was a bad call on my part. I was gone by the time the evening was over. I called my dad to come pick me up, problem was, there were so many cops downtown, that he couldn’t get to where I was to pick me up. I ended up walking completely shit-faced from 2nd and Santa Clara St. downtown San Jose to the arena. Don’t know how I made it that far, but I did.

Sunday wasn’t such a good day. My stomach hurt all day and I didn’t want to eat. I drank about 3.5 liters of water and finally felt more hydrated around 9pm. Jess and I hung out at Starbucks for several hours and then went home to sleep. I had work on Monday and she has two job interviews.