Earlier this year I wrote that I wasn’t going to buy a new gravel bike and was just going to ride the Midnight Special all year. Haha, I guess that didn’t work out the way I planned as I ended up replacing nearly every bike we own this summer. So, four new bikes for us this year, which can be viewed as a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you feel about bikes (or budgets).

I sold my road bike (Look 585), my Midnight Special, and both of our mountain bikes (Co-op DRT 2.1). To make up for those emotional losses I bought a Trek Checkpoint gravel bike and Trek Roscoe 8 hardtails for both Heidi and myself. I don’t have any plans to buy a new road bike and have just been using the Checkpoint for any road rides I do. I’m mainly just doing road stuff for fun/fitness (i.e., no group rides) and it’s been working well for that. As for the fourth bike, I picked up a Salsa Fargo and have been using that mainly for bikepacking.

Trek Checkpoint

Salsa Fargo

This refresh was long overdue as my beloved Look was nearly 20 years old and needed some work that was going to cost more than I wanted to spend on it. I don’t know exactly how many miles I put on it over those years, but I’m confident it was well over 50,000. So many training and club rides as well as centuries and double centuries. I spent so many hours on that thing it was kind of hard to see it go. But as they say, “Onwards and upwards….”

I was also sad to get rid of the Midnight Special, as I really liked that bike. I had mainly bought it for gravel riding, but for the type of gravel routes I do on a regular basis, it just wasn’t the right bike. The Checkpoint is so much lighter and has a lot better geometry, which is much more confidence-inspiring on the loose stuff. The Midnight Special was a bit of a deathtrap on steep gravel descents and there are plenty of those in the Boise foothills/mountains. Maybe someday I’ll splurge and get a steel road bike….

Our mountain bikes were seven years old, which I guess is getting up there in age. The real issue more than their age, though, was that they were 27.5+ and we really wanted more modern 29ers. So that’s what we got with the Roscoes, which have proven to be lots of fun so far.

I’ve been wanting a steel dropbar MTB for bikepacking for a while so when REI had the Fargo on sale this summer I decided to pull the trigger on that. The Salsa Fargo is kind of the OG dropbar MTB and it’s probably my favorite bike at the moment. I’m planning on writing more about my new bikepacking setup so I’ll save the details of that for my next post.

None of these are high-end bikes, which is how I prefer to roll these days. I mean, they’re all really solid bikes, but they aren’t terribly expensive/fancy. No carbon frames, no carbon wheels, no electronic shifting. I’m sure in the future I’ll buy a bike with electronic shifting, but I haven’t yet. Not spending a fortune for bikes is nice because, well, obviously it’s cheaper to refresh them when the time comes. Cheaper bikes also aren’t so “precious” that you’re afraid to actually use them. And after a few years when you do inevitably sell them for a loss the amount of money we’re talking about isn’t that great to cause much heartburn.

So a pretty big fail in the yearly plan, but not one I regret. We’ve already put them to good use and have a bunch of miles on all of them. Here’s to a lot more miles in the coming years.

Here’s a stage I did in the Audi quattro during a WRC club rally. I got first in the stage, which was a first for me. Sure, there were only six drivers, but a win’s a win, right? lol

Even though it can be really tricky to drive, I love this car, especially the sound. I’m also really digging the Metro 6R4, which is an unsung hero of the Group B monsters, but am struggling to keep it pointed in the right direction!

Formula 1 was a bit of a snooze fest last year and this year is shaping up to be the same. Red Bull/Max Verstappen is so much better than the rest of the field that the only way it’s an interesting race for the win is if Max crashes out or has some type of mechanical failure. If I were a Max/Red Bull fan this wouldn’t be so terrible, but I’m not and it’s been a bit grating to watch them dominate race after race.

My F1TV subscription is due to renew right after this weekend’s China race and I don’t think I’m going to do it. At least this year. Instead I think I’m going to get Peacock and start watching IndyCar, which I’ve never really followed before. I think the series is a lot more competitive and the races are more exciting. I’ve heard there are a lot of commercials during the coverage, which is a bummer. Conversely, the F1 coverage from F1TV is pretty amazing. You can watch all the practices and qualifying and there are a bunch of race weekend/pre-race shows, etc. And no commercials. But again, if the action is non-existent, it’s not that interesting.

I think I’m also going to give Rally.tv a shot for a month or two. I don’t think watching rallies live is all the interesting, but it might be. I really like watching the Red Bull highlights, but have never watched a full event. We’ll see how that goes.

So unless something crazy happens this weekend in China, I’m probably going to jump off the F1 ship for the greener pastures of IndyCar and WRC. I’ll definitely renew F1TV next year to watch Hamilton at Ferrari, though.

Ryan Gosling hosted SNL this past weekend and I thought he did a great job. I’m a sucker for SNL cast and guests breaking character and laughing and I don’t think there was a single sketch where Gosling and/or the cast weren’t on the verge of losing it. It seems like they were having a lot of fun, which of course made it a lot of fun to watch. That’s the point of SNL, right?

They created a follow-up video to the original Papyrus short, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It didn’t air during the show, but they posted that it would drop after the show. Perhaps not as funny as the first one (how could it be), but it’s still pretty clever. And Comic Sans again for the end logo? Font-nerdery at it’s finest. So happy they did this when they had Gosling available as the guest host.

Assetto Corsa Competizione (ACC) has a pretty amazing replay system. When you save a replay it stores all of the info in a special file format that gets played back when you view the replay. All the information from the race is stored in the file, not just for your car, but for all cars, which lets you switch to any car in the race and select different views, etc. And since the replays aren’t actual video files, each replay file takes very little storage.

Unfortunately WRC doesn’t have a replay system like ACC, which is a bummer because being able to save your runs and review them later (or make clips, etc.) would be nice. To be fair, WRC does have replays but once you exit the run you’ve just done, you can no longer access the replay. Also, the controls within the replay are not great. For example, you can fast-forward and rewind, but you can’t drag the slider to a specific part of the replay, which is really annoying if it’s a 15 or 20 minute drive as you have to wait for the replay to advance on 4x speed.

All that said, I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to record stages I run in some of the events I’m doing. Here’s a short example of what the “TV footage” camera view looks like. The switch to the overhead “drone view” is pretty cool. I just played the replay at the end of a stage and recorded a couple minutes of it. I’ll post what the in-car view looks like (i.e., what I see when driving) later on.