Rear View 2022: Fall And Beginning Of Winter

Hello! it's time again to review the year on Guitar Ted Productions. The "Rear View" has been a staple of the blog since almost the very beginning. This year there will be five Rear View posts looking back on Winter's End, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter's Beginning. I'll also have a post looking ahead at 2023 near the end of the month. Enjoy the look back and thanks for reading Guitar Ted Productions!

October: I started out the month doing a bit of camp stove testing which led to a great little ride where I stopped and made myself some coffee. I hadn't done anything like that in probably ten years or more, and it was fun. I may have to reprise that during Winter from the platform of a fat bike. 

Riding was sparse. The schedule hadn't changed and it was supposed to have done that in August, which would have opened up the possibility of using a couple other weekdays as options for longer rides. 

When I did get out I was testing/reviewing something for RidingGravel.com, so it wasn't all just for fun, besides that coffee ride and a Fall ride which I do every year to see the Fall colors in the Green Belt. They weren't that great this year, but elsewhere in the community Fall colors were spectacular for 2022. Go figure...

Coffee with a view. I'll try to do more of this in the future.

Podcasting with N.Y. Roll kept on being done and we were using his home to podcast from, which worked out well enough. Later in the month I started looking for a new light unit for the Ti Mukluk and I ended up with a new Schmidt Edelux II which I sourced from Angry Catfish in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

November: Well, due to sickness at the end of the month, a turn for the worse in weather mid-month, and the aforementioned scheduling issues, I got even less riding in than ever. The work on bicycles kind of took up some of that time I would have otherwise been riding. I got the light all buttoned up for the Ti Mukluk and later in the month I did a refresh on the Gen I Fargo. Otherwise it was all work, rest, and hardly any play for me. It made for a not-very-exciting month, in terms of riding, for the blog. I did manage to get out of town once early in the month during our first bout with snow to gather bikes from WeCycle in Ames for the Cedar Valley Bicycle Collective. Again, more podcasting was done with N.Y. Roll at his home. 

A day out....finally! This was the last day of decent weather and the first day I felt well enough to ride in December.

December: The month of November ended, as told already, and the beginning of December kicked off with me having a pretty bad head cold. It was one of those deals that kept me off the bike for a good three weeks, at least as far as any adventuring was concerned. I did continue to commute by bicycle to work and back. I put on another Cold Weather Clinic at the Collective the second week of the month. I got a couple good podcast recordings up, so the new production/distribution scheme is working well so far. Finally, around the middle of the month I felt well enough to get a last ride out in the country done before Winter roared in and shut everything down for the last two weeks of the month. 

The set-up for Winter on the Blackborow DS.

In fact we reached "Deep Winter" a bit early with a big storm that sent temperatures plummeting to well below zero for over 48 hours. That hasn't happened in a while! And now it is headed to the 40's and rain? What a year in weather!

Blog Stuff: I did get a lot of good reactions from posts I wrote during this time period. I did a "How-To" for rear derailleur adjustments. I also wrote a couple of opinion pieces, on gravel racing, of course, that were well received. I shared my cold weather riding tips which was a thing prompted by a cold weather riding clinic I did in November for the Cedar Valley Bicycle Collective. News was posted about the nominations for the next class of the Gravel Cycling Hall of Fame, which was opened for the month of November. 

I announced another Virtual Turkey Burn Ride challenge which, due to that aforementioned wicked head cold, I could not participate in! But I did get one submission from Spain, which blew me away. But only two people submitted ride reports, which kind of was a disappointment. Of course, the year closed out with all of this End Of Year nonsense! Don't worry. I'll be back on track in January again. 

GT holding Erik Mathy's camera in Emporia, KS Image by Karen Jarchow

One Final Look Back...... As I was doing all of this "End of Year" stuff I came across my post about traveling down to the induction ceremonies for the Gravel Cycling Hall of Fame. Besides all of that being such a strange experience, the following quote made me think: 

 "What a crazy day! What a crazy life! What would the evening bring? Well, I was ready to get on with the thing, so I jumped up and headed out on my own two feet. All the time being alone there. It just felt really weird. Did anyone really care? I felt a little bit like this was going to be kind of a bummer ride."

 This made me think about how none of the things I do - or that anyone does - in Life mean squat without people to share it with. Had no one interacted with me that evening, it would have really been a depressing evening, I mean- who really cares about a hall of fame for gravel and whether or not I am in it?

What matters then? That we have relationships with each other. That we show we care about those people we have relationships with. It matters how we all get along and encourage each other. That happened that night in Emporia, thankfully, and I came away with a full heart.

And I need to thank all of you. Those of you that come back again and again to read this blog. I thank you and encourage you today. Without the feedback and responses I get from you dear readers, this would seem like something that didn't matter, this blog. And it doesn't, but the relationships and the ways we have connected here do mean a lot. 

Thanks for reading.

Merry Christmas!

Guitar Ted

Next Saturday: A Look Forward