The post about Stop #6 promised something creative this time out, and creative is what we got. With all the small-town shops checked off, it was time to step out into the Coffee Shops Without Walls category. On to the particulars:
1. where: Bethel Bike Trails, Desoto National Forest, just north of Biloxi MS
2. date: 11/10/2018
3. what: double helping of black Taster's Choice instant ("just payin' for my sins here on Earth")
4. ride details: a short excursion for coffee and lunch, tacked onto the end of a 24 mile MTB ride
5. mileage: 3.1 miles round-trip
After the Thursday and Friday rains, the first serious cold front of the year moved through leaving beautiful cool weather and wet but not quite soaked woods. It was a great day to be out there in the flat pineys of Desoto NF. After getting the main ride done, swapped Camelbak for the day pack, pre-loaded with coffee gear, lunch, backpacking stove, and – throwing in a twist – a shortwave radio. Here, have some pics, we'll come back to the rest in a minute:
Hm, for some reason those pics didn't stack around too easily this time. Ah well, you can see the main points anyway: a smokey day camp, trying to get wet twigs to burn; the little folding Ti stove and pot, slowly trying to boil water to re-hydrate lunch & coffee; lunch & coffee & shortwave radio (listening to WWL-AM New Orleans at the moment); stove ready to be folded up for storage.
I'd been wanting to try out some of this gear under real-world conditions for a while, and here was the chance. As a twig-burner, the Vargo stove did fine but it would've been much better if I could've found some dry wood. As it was, pine park and cones were about the best things available. The Osprey Talon 22 day pack, stuffed with nearly 15 pounds of gear and water, did great on the trail. I wasn't trying to go light this time out, rather I was trying to push the gear a little bit to see how it performed under load. As for the SW radio, it did well too, pulling in all kinds of stuff including a numbers station, some Spanish rap music, something in French, WTWW playing oldies, and a ham radio talk show. Also dialed over to one of the ham 20 meter band digital text watering holes and listened in on a Canadian talking with a guy in the U.S., using the iPhone as the decoding computer. So that was pretty cool.
All in all, it was a good day on the trail, and a good day to have coffee and try out some gear in the field. But in the end, I was tired after 27 miles of wet woodlands and hustled it home before mid-afternoon. And that's a good, slightly offbeat way to wrap up this year's Coffeeneuring Challenge. But there's no stopping this train now, I'm headed downtown on the CX bike in a bit for the after lunch cup.
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