Lost my CA riding, now PA

[mdeeds71]

I need some help...I just left the meca of norther CA, for the hills of eastern PA in the Easton, Allentown area. I am looking to ride and race next season, and in need to find someone with knowledge of the area. I can sure use any help you out there may have.

Also looking for a good shop that has selection/wrenchers. I am willing to drive to NJ for this.....

I may even let whoever borrow my Hors for a ride or two.... :D
http://forums.thepaceline.net/showthread.php?t=16379&highlight=Hors

Thanks in advance.

Mark

[saab2000]

Hey Mike!

How is CAL??? We just lost an RFP bid for flying for Midwest to Skywest. No bitterness here..... :crap:

Anyway, last spring I checked out the Allentown area. It looks great. Tom Kellogg (Spectrum) knows the way around there and can show you the way. In the end I did not move there for a number of reasons, but from a cycling perspective it looked very very good.

You should do nicely there. Lots of very good riders and good rides. I am still halfway tempted if I end up in PHL after the upgrade.

Drop me a line. We should talk soon about careers...... :D

[BoulderGeek]

If I lived in Allentown, I'd get a track bike and start doing the training races at Trexlertown velodrome.

Get some rollers, too. It's gonna rain a lot.

PA has lots of good country riding. I'm a native of Lancaster.

Don't eat the scrapple or shoo-fly pie, though.

[mdeeds71]

SAAB,

I am definetly treated different by the same gate agents :banana:

So far only saw Guatamale City in the 757...Have Honolulu in the 767-400 on the 22nd (an 11 hour flight :rolleyes: )

[gt6267a]

drop me a PM with your email address. i grew up in allentown and a little while ago a friend asked for a quick write up of places to eat and things to do in the area. i'll send that to you.

there is some great riding and ok hills to climb. make sure to hit the velodrome in trexlertown. whether you ride there or not, friday night races are fun and the place is a great cycling resource.

[BURCH]

Call these guys. A good buddy of mine from College raced for them for a little while. They are in/near Philly, but may be able to help out.

http://guysbicycles.com/index.cfm

[Ray]

Lehigh Valley Wheelmen are the local club:

http://www.enter.net/~lehighwheelmen/

I don't know a lot about them but they run an awesome fall century (Gap Gallup) and there's some beautiful country up there. Tom Kellogg is also a great resource and a great guy but if you're not careful you're gonna end up with a Spectrum under your butt :)

And don't listen to Boulder Geek - it doesn't rain that much around here. Maybe relative to his part of Colorado it does (their precip is all frozen after all!), but I've lived a lot of places and I don't consider the rain around here to be an issue at all. Particularly relative to Nor Cal.

-Ray

[BoulderGeek]

Lehigh Valley Wheelmen are the local club:

http://www.enter.net/~lehighwheelmen/

I don't know a lot about them but they run an awesome fall century (Gap Gallup) and there's some beautiful country up there. Tom Kellogg is also a great resource and a great guy but if you're not careful you're gonna end up with a Spectrum under your butt :)

And don't listen to Boulder Geek - it doesn't rain that much around here. Maybe relative to his part of Colorado it does (their precip is all frozen after all!), but I've lived a lot of places and I don't consider the rain around here to be an issue at all. Particularly relative to Nor Cal.

-Ray

All I can refer to is the 21 years I spent living in Lancaster. It rained all the freaking time from September to May.

One of the reasons I love living in COlorado now. I'd much ratehr mountain bike in dry snow than road bike in the rain. Did enough of that for several lifetimes.

Maybe Allentown is in an arid desert belt I never heard of. :confused:

[Ray]

All I can refer to is the 21 years I spent living in Lancaster. It rained all the freaking time from September to May.

One of the reasons I love living in COlorado now. I'd much ratehr mountain bike in dry snow than road bike in the rain. Did enough of that for several lifetimes.

Maybe Allentown is in an arid desert belt I never heard of. :confused:
It's all what you're used to. You lived for 21 years in a fairly, but far from extrordinarily, wet area. Now you live in an extrordinarily dry area. I've lived in Tucson AZ, Olympia WA, Baltimore MD, Telluride CO, Seattle WA, and the SE Pennsylvania area (precip isn't really much different between Lancaster, Philly, and Allentown). Tucson was incredibly dry. Olympia was incredibly wet. Telluride was incredibly snowy for several months of the year. Seattle got less rain than the Philly area but it seemed like it rained all the time, lightly, while here it rains hard but not that often so I don't think of it as a particularly rainy area.

Given your two points of reference, the Philly area is very rainy in comparison. Given a broader set of reference points, the Philly area seems pretty normal to me and I don't consider the rain an issue at all. Sometimes it rains for a day or two and sometimes it rains several days in a week, but there are long stretches (even between Sept and May) where it doesn't or doesn't more than very occasionally. Which makes it a non-issue most of the time to me. When I lived in the Northwest, seemingly constant rain was a fact of life that you had to adapt to or you'd hate the area.

Living in the Philly area, I rarely ride in the rain and I rode over 5,000 miles without doing many long rides this year. In some parts of the country, that would be tough to pull off unless you were willing to ride in the rain a lot more than I am.

Anyway, not saying you're wrong, just that your point of reference makes this area seem like its more rainy than it might to a lot of folks who have lived other places.

-Ray