Outdoor gear advertisers & spammers

I am absolutely amazed at the number of comments that this blog attracts from people wanting to advertise their company or product, written in a manner that they are deemed “spam.”  So, for all of you out there who want me to advertise your products on this blog or on my website, I’m going to offer you a solution.

I’m not even being sarcastic, this is sincere.  IF you are a legitimate vendor with a real business, and not someone trying to make a quick buck off of unsuspecting buyers, I want you to send me some very specific information.  Part of it is also requiring that you speak English and are capable of reading this post, which may not be particularly fair in some people’s eyes, but I think it is entirely fair since that’s the language I speak & write, and the language that this blog is written in.

I want your website, a list of your products/brands carried, and a brief paragraph telling me why I should want to list you on my lists of websites and vendors.  If you have something unique, tell me about it.  If you offer a unique service, I’d love to hear about that too.  If you are the owner of a website, and would like me to link to your website because of the information that you could offer to readers of this blog, send me that email!  If you have a product that you would like us to review, that is a possibility too, but send the email first.  We don’t want you to waste money sending us a product that doesn’t fit the type of camping and outdoor activities that we participate in and advocate for others.  (Examples are things like mountain climbing gear-we are a bit short on mountains on the Mississippi Delta, and I don’t have any immediate plans to schedule a mountain trip at this point.)  We do a lot of different things, and while we don’t go mountain climbing, I am supposed to learn the basics of rappelling this year.  Yeah, imagine that…a fat middle aged woman hanging upside down off of a cliff…it ain’t pretty, folks! Especially if it scares me enough (I’m deathly afraid of heights) that I end up peeing my pants…upside down.  That’s one outdoor adventure that doesn’t sound appealing, to be honest, but…I agreed to it, and I’m going to go through with it.  I figure its safer than free climbing on a rock face, and I’ve tried that too.  I will not, and I repeat that one more time, I will NOT agree to bungee jump.  No way, no how, and I’ll freely admit in public that I’m too chicken to try it.  There is NOTHING appealing about bungee jumping to me!  That also goes for sky diving.  I may have a sister who loves it, but I have sense.  I cannot see any good reason to deliberately jump out of a perfectly good airplane for the “fun” of it.  I have friends who have done it, for fun and/or for military training.  I’m not a soldier, I’m too old and too fat.  No thank you…I like the ground under my feet!

See now that I’ve digressed enough that any insincere spam type person has given up, I’m going to give my email address.  Make SURE you put “Get Ready GO blog” in the subject line to prevent ending up in THAT spam folder too!  The email address you can send this letter to is (take out the spaces, you know the routine) giascott (at symbol) gmail dot com.

In the meantime, all you spammers out there, you may as well give it up.  You get deleted, that’s all.  If you can’t be bothered with reading a whole entry and following directions, I can’t be bothered with your spam comments, plain and simple.

Nuts on bikes

I mentioned my current bike kick to my mother, and I thought she was going to have a seizure, she started laughing so hard.  She seriously thought I was joking, and then decided it was about the nuttiest idea she’d ever heard.  Greg, on the other hand, seems to merely not hear anything said on the topic much, I think its the settings on his selective hearing.  My mother, on the other hand, could see me driving as a nomad, crisscrossing the country, but not on a bicycle.  I guess fat middle aged women are not supposed to get wild hairs to do crazy things like take up bicycling in a neurotic manner.

Now I’m not saying that I’m embarking on my cross country trip on a specific date, or even that I am in fact going to do THAT.  My goal is much smaller.  I am going to buy a bike, start riding it around town, then venture out on trails while camping this summer and during the early fall.  Come late fall/early winter, I want to do a bike camping trip.  I would like to do a 100 mile circuit over a 3 day trip, but am most likely going to need to cut it down to a 2 day trip that I can manage on a regular weekend.  That will require more than being able to merely do miles on the bike comfortably, I will also have to accomplish the logistics of carrying everything needed for the trip on the bike.  I have a backpack, but I’m not real sure about wearing that all day while pedaling a bike.  Simplest solution would be figure out a way to strap the backpack to a rack on the back of the bike.  The second major issue will be the dogs.  Red Dog, while she could have easily paced a moderate speed on a bike when she was young and in shape, is not going to be able to do so at this point in her life.  Neither is Sissy.  It is apparent that a trailer is essential for them to ride part or all day.  In addition, Red weighs in at 65 lbs., and the less expensive trailers are rated for 50 lbs.  The dogs also will not be able to ride together, as they are never allowed near each other–I can’t afford the vet bills for that again!

We also have not dealt with Greg and the bike issue as of yet.  His intention is to buy the cheapest used bike he can find.  Nothing will deter him from that so I’m not going to argue about it.  He is the one who will be riding it and that is his prerogative.  I wouldn’t want him pushing me into or out of my bike choice, and he needs the same courtesy, even if I may be privately convinced he’s not making a good choice.  He might get lucky and find a decent bike.  It’s happened before!

In Greg’s case though, since Sissy has claimed him as her person, he can put his backpack on the trailer with Sissy-she weighs in at a mere 25 lbs.  He’ll also get the tent and water.  At this point, I don’t intend to replace our camping tent with one geared for bike camping, we’ll use either my old Quest tent or the much heavier but easy to set up First-Up tent.  Oh and Sissy’s crate…that will add another 10 lbs to Sissy’s traveling weight, but it’s essential for her.

So that leaves choosing trailers and then choosing our initial location for our biking adventure that will allow us to do a circuit and return to our parked vehicle (or pickup point, if we get someone to drop us off.)  We will need a campground at our initial point, allowing us to start our adventure immediately on Saturday morning, and then another campground for our Saturday evening destination, one that preferably leaves us with a second route for our return, rather than just turning around and going back.  If we are to be picked up, we’d have a lot more flexibility in that choice too.

So that’s where I’m at…as my instincts are saying I’m going to be happier in the long term with a Lamborghini Leggenda rather than a Giant Sedona St.  I haven’t found it in my price range, and I’ve got some concerns that its not well suited to the multipurpose kind of riding I have in mind.

Information and bicycle buying

Sometimes, it seems that we are being drowned in information.  Too many choices, too much information, it all can get quite overwhelming as we try and make the “best” decision.

I had just about decided firmly that I was going to become the proud owner of a Lamborghini Leggenda bicycle as my initial foray into the cyclist’s world, not that it was THE best bike for what I want to do, but rather that it was going to offer me the things I needed at the price I could afford as a starter bike.  What are the specs?  It has the larger 700 cm tires, 21 speeds, the physical form of a hybrid bike, and a size that was considered appropriate for someone of my height.

Then, the Giant Sedona St. women’s comfort bike was recommended, although it’s price tag at the local cycle shop is too high for my budget.  It is possible that I may find it at a more affordable price online.  I haven’t really started pricing yet.  It has the more common 26″ wheels, 7 speeds, a similar form, and looks like a slightly stripped down version of the Lamborghini.  The components, which I’m not all that familiar with, appear to be very similar, at least in name brand or description.

So it’s boiling down to the wheels, the price, and the number of speeds on the individual bikes.  Comfort bikes typically are 7 speeds, whereas the hybrid bike seems to typically have 21.  Why?  From what I have gathered in my research the past few weeks, the hybrid’s additional speeds are useful and important when climbing hills.  New Orleans isn’t exactly long on hills, but…and here’s the clincher…the areas I frequently go camping in, and that I am interested in doing some bicycling in…are hilly.  Not huge hills, but they are hills.

Lacking experience in this arena, its almost like a gambling episode.  If I shoot for the affordable Lamborghini, will I regret it in six months?  Or, if I find this Giant Sedona St. bike, will I regret that purchase in six months when I end up pushing the bike up each and every hill when I’m out on a camping route?

Right now, I’m remembering the simplicity of my childhood in a small town.  Bicycles were sold at the hardware store, and came in kid size and grown up size, boy and girl.  My first “grown up” bike was a brown Huffy 3 speed, assembled by the mechanics that worked for my dad in his Ford garage.  My sister had one that was virtually identical (she is 3 years younger, but was taller than me by the time I was 11.)   The very first ten speed I ever road was a bike owned by my younger step brother, and he was so much taller than me (he was 12, I was almost 18) that I stood on the curb, put one foot on the pedal, pushed off, and swung up over the seat…I could barely touch the pedals at the bottom of the downstroke!  To get off, I simply jumped off, and ran alongside the bike until I brought it to a halt.  Hardly a safe maneuver!  We never wore helmets, and we often rode double or triple, with someone perched on the handlebars–against the rules but we did it anyhow.  Our standing joke was “Look, Ma! No hands!  Look, Ma!  No teeth!”  My brown Huffy had replaced an old English multispeed bike, an ancient ancestor of what would be the ten speed craze of the 70s.  It had met its demise as I rode hell bent for leather down a hill in front of the Presbyterian church.  I turned around to see where our dog was…and hit a parked car.  Bike went over the car entirely, and I slid up the trunk, over the roof, and was hanging over the windshield

Amazingly, I really wasn’t hurt.  I had a wide assortment of bruises, a serious fat lip, and a couple of minor gashes.  The bike, on the other hand, had made impact on a sturdy early 1970’s sedan’s bumper…

It was sad.  I dragged its remains home, and was bicycle-less for months, until the Huffy arrived as a Christmas present.  Now had it been the Huffy that hit that car, I’m not sure that there would have been any more damage than a dent in the car’s bumper–it was that heavy.  Pedaling it was serious work, but I rode it for years, and sometimes a Saturday would find a few of us on our version of a “long distance” ride, as we headed out into the country, making a ten mile loop and usually making it home before midday.  After all, the swimming pool opened at 1 pm!