This weekend Felkerino and I went for our first bike ride of any significance since PBP; it was a grand total of 15 miles. Hey, not every ride can be epic, ok? Our legs felt good, yet we enjoyed taking it easy and tooling around.

Since holiday weekends also set up well for project bikes, Felkerino put in some time laboring on my Velo Orange  mixte and lo’, it looks fantastic! See for yourself!

We raided parts from other bikes, primarily a Novara Randonnee that I took out of circulation, to build up this baby. Felkerino then added VO fenders, bars, and saddle. He also affixed a Nitto stem and a Marks rack from out of the parts box.

I put on my lovely Berthoud front bag and moved the Acorn bag off of my Dahon Hon Solo to the VO in order to have some additional carrying capacity. I know Felkerino plans to do a longer post about the buildup so I’ll let you know when that happens.

Did I mention that holiday weekends also are great times for meeting up with friends? Our post-PBP/VO test ride/coffee outing took us over to Union Station, where we met up with our friends from the Severna Park Peloton. They were doing an 80-mile ride from Annapolis, Maryland to D.C.

Mike B. has a writeup of the full ride over on his blog, Chesapeake Sailor, and Felkerino has more pics of our Labor Day rendezvous with them on his flickr page.

SPP is so welcoming and fun. I love the Severna Park Peloton! Did you also notice that my Mixte matches their club colors?

We brunched, then rode a ways back with the group until we worried we would be like Hansel and Gretel and forget our way back home, u-turned, went out for more coffee, and scooted on home.

New bike built up with love by Felkerino in the Dining Room Bike Shop, meeting with friends, Monday off… life treated me pretty well this past weekend. Hope you all had enjoyable weekends, too!