1001.7.

Whoo-hoo! Now you will stop hearing about me being this or that number of miles short of 1000. Next, it'll be 1500 - and I hope to make the second 1000 significantly faster than 11 months.

Takes a lot of effort to ride again after being away from it for even a short time. But the actual ride was relaively easy, and I even sprinted quite a bit of the last few miles in the highest gear.

My new backpack has a built-in water thingie, whereby I can easily drink while riding (rather than stopping or slowing to grab a water-bottle from its little cage, pulling open the nozzle thing, drinking, closing the nozzle thing, and returning the bottle to its cage...). This Kelty pack was free, for test-driving a Nissan XTerra. It's narrower than the other pack, but has more compartments, and little mesh caches all over the outside. Seems to work pretty well.

To the showers. More later.

Still 15 short of 1000...

Married now, and back from another glorious week in the desert. Write-up for the vacation will eventually appear over there somewhere --->.

Weird how it can take days to get into expando-o vacation mode, but only a matter of minutes to fall out of it and back into compress-o work mode...