(By Felix)
Oof another blog post, so annoying it's the second time in a week! Of course it has been a biking day otherwise my attitude would be devilish. And the next few days to come may contain some beautiful dirt jumping. Though today, in pietarsaari (jakobstad), my research lead me to some flattish trails.
Our waking of the day lead us leaving the house at a meandering midday. Not too great though it for sure left enough time for biking. Our first challenge was taking our broken up bikes out the back, then heading off to the bike shop called a misleading VM sport. Only doing bikes I wonder why they bothered with the name. My front brake hose had a kink in it so wasn't working a bit. The original fixing price was 45 quid including a new brake hose. In the end it was all just a bleed leaving my brake very inconsistent in the lever strokes. Something that would devastate me later in the day with sometimes it not working if you grab it hard enough.
While waiting for this to be fixed me and my dad headed off to the skatepark for a little jib. Features included a box jump out of the miniramp, a box, a thingy in the middle thing, a kicker and my favourite feature being a quarter pipe to a landing. I also progressed my rotations and doing a 180 wheelie. 45 minutes in we ended up bored so went off to VM sport. With the bike 'fixed’ we could go off to the apparently flat trails.
Starting off behind an athletics stadium we ended up lost around 10 minutes in to the stated 20k loop. We had to go back and forth up flat, rooty, and definitely rocky paths our demise was being 3k off the found route my dad discovered online. That would mean going down a sketchy boggy trail down a incredibly rocky and full of slabs and boulders of it. This time we did not bother heading back the way we came. We got onto a smallish road that then lead us back on to the trail. By then our stomachs were proper dead. I forgot to mention but on and unrideable section I tried to ride I did end up over the bars in an adrenaline rush situation. All because of my bloody front brake getting shocked. My handlebars were bent sideways but I find that normal for my freakishly 'robust’ stem.
Back on track our trail would lead us to the beach overlooking the Baltic sea between Sweden and Finland. Not much of a big lunch due to a 15 quid bill for my brake (not worth it but I guess an occasional brake is better than no brake). The next thing we tried to do was find a cafe but with little money to spare we just carried on the roads back to jakobstad. A more direct route this time but an overall 10k over 15 mins was tiring. For sure much less than the usual I'd be seeing if we followed the path. When we arrived back at the car my dad checked his tracker and it said 30k! Much more than the original route and we didn't stick to the original which only went 20k.
I suggested having another jib at the skatepark although schoolwork was due that day so the rest of my evening happened in the accomodation. Much to my disappointment we had to head down to the beach but I took some shots. It was a bit late at 9:30 so much of my resting evening time happened. Not enough time to recover from 4 hours of navigating and hard riding. Hopefully in the next place I will visit an amazing dirt jump spot with pretty good slopestyle jumps just like the one my friend Henry used to have. Now hopefully I won't have to another blog in two days time as I'm doing cycling, oh well!
Published on Friday 22 June 2018
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