Matthew Supert

I had an amazing ride this past Saturday with a group of friends. Celebrating one of the member's birthday we did a ride starting from Park Ridge going up into Wisconsin and seeing the Cave of the Mounds. It was a great route through Wisconsin country roads and the weather could not have been better in the low 80's. 

We took most of our morning ride up through Wisconsin and arrived at the Cave of the Mounds to check it out. It is a small cave located just west of Mt. Horeb. After getting there and seeing the price and how crowded the cave was we opted not to go in the cave itself. We enjoyed the grounds for about an hour before hopping back on the bikes for another ride before doing lunch at the Grumpy Troll.

The Grumpy Troll is pretty much as staple for lunch stops up in this area. It is a small brew pub that has all of your standard bar fare, including Wisconsin cheese. We left the area around 3:30 and made our way back home. 

I didn't get back in until close to 7:00. It was a long day. Close to 400 miles for me since I had to ride up from Bolingbrook. 

It was a beautiful day on Saturday and Megan suggested we get out of the house. One of the things I wanted to do this summer was to get our bikes into the city and bike around for lunch, so we ended up doing that. 

We took our bikes in and parked at a Park District parking lot next to La Rabida Children's hospital. The goal was to bike our way along the lake front trail north into the city. 

The problems though started immediately upon our arrival. Megan's bike had a flat tire on the rear wheel and we didn't have a spare with us. "No big deal", I though. We are in the city so there are bike shops every few blocks. I pulled out my phone and went off to find the nearest shop. My first stop was at the "Bike Clinic" which was just south of where we were. Unfortunately they were closed. There was a sign on their door written in Sharpie that they would not open until 1:00pm. Well off I went to the next stop on my Google search, which was Blackstone Bicycle Works. Getting there was not an easy task. Streets seemed to be closed all over the place and I was constantly re-routed try to find my way there. At one point I got stuck down a one way street that had a barrier curb erected in the middle of it. I had to back out of the street back onto the main road. 

I finally found my way to Blackstone, but at first I was not sure if I was at the right place. As I walked up all I saw were a few dozen bikes sitting outside what looked to be an abandoned building. A few moments later though someone came out to greet me and they took me round back to the main shop where I bought our tubes. Turned out the place was pretty cool and is a youth mentoring type of facility. 

Well, we finally got Megan's bike fixed and we were off and running and we soon made our first stop after that.

Hyde Park Records

Hyde Park Records was our first stop. It was a very "hole in the wall" sort of record store. They had a lot of rock and soul music, but not much else. I personally was in the mood to find some jazz or classical. Megan made a great find while going through their bins with

Reckless Records 

The Slurping Turtle

Not a record store, but our pit-stop for lunch we wanted to have Ramen and we hit up the Slurping Turtle which is north across the river. I had a basic Ramen Bowl and Megan ordered a sort of ramen cold salad, which was pretty good for such a hot day. 

Jazz Record Mart

Our final stop was at the Jazz Mart which is located near Illinois and State Street. If you are into jazz music this store is really cool. Almost entirely jazz it has a completely a different vibe than the other two stores. They have a nice selection of world music as well so if you want to go bin diving, I would highly recommend this place. 

My volume of books so far this year hasn't been really high, but that is probably because the majority of the books that I am reading seem to be in the 800+ page range. I have continued to work through the Malazan series and I am now on book #7 with Reaper's Gale. 

This book so far has been the hardest to get through and it is really a slog. I personally just don't have much of an interest in the story line that is happening in Lether and the characters really are not that interesting. I am close to 50% of the way through the book and we have finally be reintroduced to some of our Malazan favorites and I did get one new character called Beek, who seems like he will certainly turn into a great character in the future. 

I think after this book I will need to take a break from the Malazan series and catch up again on some of my Sci-Fi reading. I am really looking forward to reading Unstable Prototypes, which is the follow up to Joesph Lallo's Bypass Gemini. I also have on my radar to get back into the Entire of the Rose series. I read the first book in that series several years ago around 2001, and while I wasn't a fan of the main character, I did find the world very interesting.  

I would also like to read the follow up books to N.K. Jemison's Inheritance Trilogy. A Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was one of the best books I have read in the past few years and I really would like to see where that world goes as well. 

The summer tennis season ended this past week. I broke strings on two of my rackets and I figure that sort of sums up my season this summer so far. All of my matches were pretty close, but I couldn't pull any of them out. I finished 2-5 for the summer session and frustrated is the mildest term I would use. 

I can't quite say exactly what it is that has me not playing well. In fact I feel I am mostly playing good tennis, but it seems like I am either hitting winners or hitting unforced errors into the net. Perhaps it is a patience thing. Let's just hope the fall season plays a bit better. 

So I was playing a tennis match this evening and on the courts behind us a man with his son and his son's friends were also playing around, just hitting the ball. I saw that the guy fall at one point out of the corner of my eye. It appeared he broke his wrist, but it didn't seem like a big deal at the time. He was holding his wrist, but did show any major visible pain and he was walking around fine.

A couple of minutes later I hear one of the boys screaming and I turned around to see the man collapsed along the fence. I grabbed my water bottle and my towel and ran to him as fast as I could, as did most of the people on the courts. The first gate though was locked and I had to go the long way around, outside the courts. Another man playing basketball got to him right before I did and started CPR on him. He said that the man wasn't breathing, but I am unsure. The man was definitely not responsive.

His son, probably, 13-14 was sitting on the ground with his head on his knees just screaming. I went over to him and hugged him and tried to get him to walk with me away from the situation, but he wouldn't move. He was just frozen. A minute or two later the man was finally revived and I saw him sort of jerk back to consciousness.

He was very alert when he woke up and was trying to stand up almost immediately. He had no idea what had happened and was being argumentative with us. We kept trying to just keep him laying on the ground with his head propped up with my towel, sipping on some water. He eventually stood up and started walking around very wobbly, but talking about how he was fine and how he broke his wrist and needed to drive to the ER. I eventually had to stop him and look him dead in the eye and explain to him that he had just been unconscious for several minutes and that the man in the red shirt next to me had just performed CPR on him. It didn't seem like it was registering with him. His son was pleading with him to listen to us. He must have been in shock, because he kept playing with his broken wrist and showed no signs of pain.

The medics were there quick, probably within five minutes. They were talking him through various questions asking him his phone number, and address. I am guessing they were trying to determine his state of mind or find out if he had a stroke or something. His son was pleading with him to go in the ambulance. Eventually the police officer asked us all to step away and few minutes later they must have convinced the man to get on the stretcher and go in the ambulance.

Incredible.

So this past Sunday I rode up to the Harley-Davidson Museum  up in Milwaukee. This one isn't so much a ridelog as it is just a collection of photos from the museum. I basically just I-94 straight up from Chicago, but I used this as an excuse to have some more fun with my Olympus OM-1. On the whole most of the photos turned out pretty good. A few even turned out really well I dare say. 

Day five was our last day in the park and had us transferring up to the Tuolumne Meadows. I really wish I had spent some more time in this part of the park and to be honest it really was the feature of the High Sierra Mountains. I will plan a trip again in a few years to hit up this section of the park. 

Much of the meadows are still covered in snow through early July so this time of the year is the prime time to hit up the meadows. Their altitude is right around 8,600 feet. The high temperature was in the low sixties with a low in the low thirties at night. 

Since we only had half a day to spend in this part of the park we basically focused on tow areas. We hiked up the Lembert Dome to view the entire area and then went to check out the meadows themselves and hiked over to the Soda Springs and the Parsons Lodge, which was a lodge built by the Sierra Club for their meetings. 

Overall a satisfying hike, but I can see that there are some amazing day hikes in this area that I want to do in the future. 

Overall Yosemite was wonderful. A bit more crowded then I had hoped, but I did sort of go during the peak of tourist season though. 

You can see all of my photos over at Flickr

Day four had Megan and I splitting up. Her feet had given up on her so she did a photo walk with the Ansel Adams Gallery. I decided to do my big hike for day which included the Four Mile Trail (which isn't four biles), the Panorama Trail and then back down the John Muir Trail. I think my total distance was around 16 miles. 

The Four Mile Trail was surprisingly brutal on the way up. I was unprepared for the steep switchbacks on this trail and being that it was late in the week, but legs just didn't have a lot in them. On the trail though I met a lot of interesting people and ended up chatting with a group from South Carolina, Philadelphia and Wisconsin. Ironically the group from South Carolina had an extra permit for their Half Dome hike the next day and they offered it to me. Unfortunately, I was leaving the valley the next day and even if I wasn't I think my legs were too far gone to do the Half Dome. 

We actually finished off the evening by grabbing a nice chair and table at the lodge in Curry Village and playing some Hive while eating some huge ice cream sundaes. 

You can see all of my photos over at Flickr