Saturday July 15, 2006 Pete and I did a breakfast ride and joining us again was Pete’s cousin Mark.  Mark had done a short ride with us the night before and he must have had a good time because he joined us for this breakfast ride which we planned to be a nice medium length ride.  This would be Mark’s second ride with us this weekend.  

Pete’s son Paul’s graduation party was taking place later this day, so Pete and Mark wanted to get back reasonably early.  I’m sure they wanted to get back and give Elaine a hand with the last minute details for the party.  

I rode over to Pete’s house and met the guys at 7:30 am to get an early start.  We took our regular route to the Greek Island for breakfast.  Pete told Mark the story about the Rocky style eggs.  We all had the breakfast special with Pete and I getting our regular diet coke to drink and Mark had a cup of coffee.  We had a good time at breakfast.   

Once we were done eating we had to decide where to ride next.  Pete and Mark wanted to get in a few more miles, but they didn’t want to get too far from home so that they could get back relatively early.  I suggested we just hop over to Oakland University (OU) and ride around the campus for a little while.  The grounds at OU are quite large so you can get in a few miles including some good hills and still be close to home when done.  There is also some nice scenery around OU.  Shortly after entering OU we took the main rode around to the entrance of Meadowbrook and rode down the heavily tree lined drive up to the mansion.  We rode around back of the mansion and out the side next to the very large white canopy type tent they keep set up for parties during the summer.  It looked like someone had rented the place for a wedding later in the day because a few things were set up and there were people around just starting to set up a few more wedding decorations.  We rode past the golf course, the soccer dome and we also rode around a few of the main school buildings.  There weren’t many people out walking around campus this time of day on a Saturday, especially during summer.  We rode up a couple nice hills during our time at OU.  I think Pete was trying to give Mark an appreciation of the hills that we typically ride.  Mark did a nice job of keeping up and he appeared to be enjoying this ride as well.      

We also were riding at a nice pace this day which also allowed us to get in a decent amount of miles rather quickly.  With the recent increase in our average speed with all our rides lately I have noticed that our overall club average for all our rides combined has slowly started to creep up.   

Once we were done with our riding at OU the three of us exited the campus and headed back toward home.  We took a fairly direct route and with OU being so close we got home in plenty of time for Pete and Mark to get their chores for the party done. 

I went back over to Pete’s house later that evening for the party, which was a good time.   

Following are the statistics from this ride, 24.5 miles total, 24.5 max mph, 1 hour and 6 minutes time on bikes and 11.6 average mph.   
David Lindquist