Seeing as how it’s December already, you may be wondering what happened to Coffeeneuring this year. Or not. Anyhoo, yes it did happen. Well the challenge definitely did. In fact it was the 13th season! For me it was a sorta. But it’s always fun seeing what other folks are up to. The variety of locations, beverages and treats were quite lovely.
Mary posted a roundup after two weeks, which included one of Paul Steele’s charming recap illustrations. I really enjoy those. There was another roundup at the beginning of November, and again with two days left. At the end of the challenge there was the patch design reveal! So fun!
For me, there was no particular theme this year. Unless being haphazard and scattered counts?
1: October 12, 2023 / 5.5 miles around the block from the cabin / jonesbike / soup outside!
2: October 15, 2023 / 14.6 miles from YouBet! Bike Shop in Nevada city / (semi-imploding) tandem / dcaf latte at Three Forks.
The original plan for this was to have our coffee/snacks stop midway through, but then one of the friends we were riding with had a pedal failure shortly after we left, so we went for the coffee/snacks first (super yummy, I did not get a picture) while waiting for a bike shop to open to address the pedal failure. New pedals installed we headed out on the ride. At maybe 3/4s of the way along the route our rear wheel started feeling and sounding not right. We shortcutted the rest of the route, gingerly riding the bike for a while, then walking after it seemed to be getting worse, and eventually getting a lift from one of our ride companions who’d ridden back to the start and come back in his truck. Quite the day. Oh, we found out later the hub was broken. Yeah, that would explain it…
3: October 21, 2023 / 2.5 miles to Tia Maria / yellowbike / dcaf latte and the breakfast concha sandwich of awesome
Must. have. breakfast. concha. sandwich. Perennial favorite/repeat from previous seasons.
4: October 29, 2023 / 4.4 miles little free libraries / Brompie / dcaf made and taken with.
Working on de-stuff-ifying. Brompie has a cavernous front bag that I filled up with books, then sprinkled around to a bunch of little free libraries, some that I’d been to before, others that were new to me. So proud of myself I did not pick up anything, arriving back home with an empty bag!
(no pictures) (maybe that was part of the non-completion this year – not that it’s a Huge Thing, but somehow the taking pictures or otherwise documenting kinda felt like it was… getting out the door was enough effort and I didn’t want to think about/do anything else than go on the bike ride)
5: November 4, 2023/ 32.7 miles from Cotati, see where the bikes took us ride / yellowbike / dcaf made and taken with
This was a fun heading out with no route and just making it up as we went ride. Some new to me bits, and some roads I hadn’t been on in a while.
And then … ? Life / weather / did do some other riding in the time frame but it wasn’t particularly coffeeneuring… but I wasn’t going for a trinket anyway (see de-stuff-ifying above) and one can ABC (Always Be Coffeeneuring.) And there’s always next year!
Church of Rotating Mass 