Pooh Bear's First ride

Well Pooh Bear, aka Dave Pontzer, made it in last evening and today was his first ride. He had his bike shipped out and arrive yesterday and even got it delivered right to our site. He went to put it together this morning, the only issue being that for some reason he complete removed his derailer when he packed his bike. Well he had recently replaced his shifters with sram x9's and had never replaced a cable on them before. The cable that was on the bike was frayed so he need to change it and after a brief search on the internet we determined that it was necessary to take the shifter pod apart to do this. The thing they dont tell you is you need to hold the bottom of the pod on or else everything kind of falls out, which happened here. We gave the bike shop a call and they said they would take a look at it. Unfortunately, despite White Pines's best efforts, all the kings men and all the kings horses could not put this humpty dumpty back together again. Pooh ended up putting a new shifter on and off we went. In the mean time some storm clouds formed up on the mountains complete with thunder and lightning. Luckily we were gonna ride a few mile down the ridge from there so off we went. It was Pooh's first ride at altitude so we decided to keep the rate of gain reasonable and left from The Canyons. I was able to stay in the middle chainring all the way up the climb to the mid mountain trail and Pooh Bear stayed right with me then took the lead on the second half so we didnt have to worry about him. We took a ride out the mid mountain and did an out and back

First some background on Dave's nickname. Dave is a tall guy, 6 foot 3 or so, and typical bike tops dont fit so well, and his shirts tended to ride up a bit and garnered the term "belly shirt." We also caught him on film licking the last smackerals of "fluff" out of the marshmellow fluff jar after making fluffer nutter sandwiches which reminded us of Pooh bear and the honey jar. Well Dave gave his "belly shirts" away but graced us with a view of his midriff today.
We headed up the ridge connector trail that goes from the mid mountain trail to the Wasatch Crest trail which we plan to use to for a long ride once the guys from Harrisburg make it in next weekend. All in all we did close to 20 miles an about 3000 feet of climbing.

We got back to camp, howie had grilled up the chicken last night that we never quite got around to cooking and eating, and had that on salads along with more of his world famous potatoes. tonights entertainment is the DVD "This is Spinal Tap" a classic that pooh bear had not seen.
I did the final cleaning of the bikes the boys and Paul were riding and "hung" them back up on the back wall of the garage for transport for the rest of the trip.
It also rained here at the campsite for the second day in a row, not nearly as hard as the day before, but enough to wet the towel I had left out to dry. And I found the bug spray this morning!! Pooh bear convinced me I should really change out my rear tire as it was not only worn big time but the bulge in the side wall was looking really ugly, so I put on the Nevegal that I had brought out for it. When I was looking around for the sealant, I managed to find the bug spray hiding right around the door from one of the under room storage areas. The Nevegal seemed to work just fine including a brief out of the saddle climb on some relatively loose tread, so I have my fingers crossed it continues to work well and holds up OK.