Beyond the Northeast: Tokai Forest, Cape Town, South Africa

Like Andy, when my wife gets to travel someplace nice, I jump at the opportunity to tag along. So when work took her to Africa this past April we made plans to tack on a vacation in Cape Town, South Africa.

A week in an exotic locale with my wife is a rare luxury, and one normally spent doing things as a couple. However, as it has been her lifelong dream to dunk herself in a cage in great-white-shark-infested waters, it has been my dream for at least as long to avoid stomach-churning boat rides and proffering my body as shark chum. So when she announced the intent to spend one day of the vacation at sea I began searching for the perfect Cape Town mountain bike guide.

Well, I found him. A fortuitous internet search led me to Dan Dobinson and his bicycle touring company, iRide Africa. I made plans to join a ride Dan was leading in Tokai Forest, an arboretum just outside of Cape Town. Giddy with excitement for the chance to ride on another continent, I packed my bike shoes and shorts alongside sandals and swimsuit and boarded a long, long plane ride to the southern tip of Africa.

Map of Tokai trails from the iRideAfrica website

An April Doubleheader In the Kingdom

Sometimes April brings a rare opportunity to enjoy my two favorite sports: skiing and mountain biking.  You would expect that a day where you could mix the two would lead to mediocre conditions for both.  Typically the best you could hope for would be some turns on corn snow followed by a slog on some muddy singletrack.  But last weekend provided an unbelievable opportunity to enjoy both sports at their best.

Strength in Numbers Trailer

Here's the trailer for "Strength in Numbers" a mountain biking movie coming to a theater near you this Summer.

In fact, if you live in the Boston area the movie premieres at 8PM on May 16, 2012 at the Jerry Remy Sports Bar on Boylston Street.

If you're looking for your 15 seconds of fame, be sure to upload a 15 second clip to Vimeo and follow the instructions on the event website for your footage to be included on the big screen.

New Zealand Stoke: A Flowy Singletrack Video

Do you like flowy singletrack as much as I do?  Well then, here's a short (3 minute) promo by Tim Pierce of Justin Leov on the Deans Bank trail in Lake Wanaka, New Zealand.  Enjoy!

Nor'Easter San Diego: "The Long Way" (Big Laguna & Noble Canyon, CA)

If I knew where I was going I never would have made it here.

Imagine for a moment, a mountain biking trail that runs up the Mt. Washington auto road in New Hampshire, across the Presidential ridge and then winds slowly down into the Gulf of Slides, crossing various spines and ravines all the way down to Pinkham Notch:  a four thousand foot, eleven mile descent on pure singletrack.

This is roughly equivalent to what is lurking in the Laguna Mountains of southern California.

Nor'Easter San Diego: Mission Trails & Lessons In Mud

This is right about the time I started to wonder if I needed to carry the bike back to the parking lot.

I followed the wife this week to a conference in the beautiful city of San Diego in sunny Southern California.  While she's been busy learning the latest on workplace wellness programs, I've been busy learning the lessons only mountain biking in a strange land can bring.  Foremost of those lessons is that mud is not the same everywhere you go.