Dashed Yellow Line

Trip reports are the heart of this blog — multi-day rides with overnight stops, wrong turns that turn out right, and the occasional moment where the gas gauge becomes the most interesting part of the day. These are the rides I plan for weeks and the ones that come together in a day because someone sent a message saying “we should check out this road.” I ride with an insulin pump, a camera, and an irrational attachment to roads that don’t have cell service.

Twenty years of riding leaves you with more than miles — it leaves you with stories and lessons that don’t quite fit anywhere else. Road Stories are the pieces that live in between the mile markers — personal, sometimes unexpected, occasionally a little hard to categorize. Sometimes it’s a season changing, or an encounter that sticks with me for weeks, or a ride that starts as one thing and ends up being something else entirely.

Gear reviews here are based on actual miles, not press samples — most of what I write about I bought myself and lived with long enough to have an opinion worth sharing. If something held up through 10,000 miles of Sierra Nevada and coastal fog, I’ll say so. If it failed at the worst possible moment (and a few things have), I’ll say that too. The goal is to save you some money and some aggravation, not to fill a content calendar.