This week marks 6 months living full time in our RV!
My late shift was on Tuesday this week so I used the beautiful morning sunshine to shoot a video. After meeting a few new riders on the trail I decided that a good informational video to make would be my 10 tips for new riders, I geared some of my topics towards tips specifically for female riders but most were for everyone. I also had time to upload our instructional video on how we swapped our bathroom faucet.
I was able to edit the 10 tips video the next day after work. I'm getting much faster but it still takes quite a bit of time to edit a 10-15 minute video. I guess about 3 hours of editing goes into each non-biking video. Videos of us riding take many more hours to edit. This is usually due to the fact that we ride for several hours and try to film the whole trail to bring you the best parts. We've looked into our viewing data on YouTube and found that a 15 minute riding video does best. That means that sometimes we are squeezing 3-7 hours of riding into 15 minutes! It takes a lot of time and consideration to choose how to tell that story best in only 15 minutes.
This week we helped guide a friend and neighbor on his journey to buying his first bike. We talked about what type of riding he wants to do, what is most important to him, and what is his current skill level. After some discussion and checking out a few different brands, he found a Trek, Yeti, and Orbea that he liked. The models we found were capable of the type of riding he is interested in and in the price range that he has set for himself. It was a fun evening.
Saturday morning we packed up the bikes and took them to another local bike shop as we still haven't heard back from the first one on whether the parts upgrades we planned would work on our frames. We were able to talk to a bike tech at the shop and he informed us that while the parts would fit on our bikes, our frames were not designed to handle what we've been trying to ride outside of Texas. Our bikes are built for the local trails that we've raised them on and beyond that, we are maxing them out and likely to break the frame pivots by putting on more capable parts and riding more demanding trails. Our decision was made for us. Trail bikes belong on the trail and not the whole mountain. It is time for all mountain bikes. This was both sad and exciting news for us. We were hoping to add more capable components and ride these bikes for another 2 years or so. This plan would work if we planned to stay in Texas but we have a goal to ride trails in every state and other states have mountains. So new bikes it is!
Sunday we rode and filmed Arbor Hills trails in Plano, TX. We had ridden the off-road trail here once before and we started riding on the concrete trails here when we were new to biking about 4 years ago. The off-road trail is 2.2 miles of tight, blind turns with punchy, rooted climbs and a few tight tree gates. We also rode and filmed 1 round on the concrete trails for those who are not ready for off-road trails yet. We will be putting those videos out as well but we still have more of Colorado to show you!
For now it looks like we are back to researching bikes to see which will be best for us and the riding that we will be doing around this beautiful country. We will see you here next week!
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