Story for The Last loop for 2016....

Knowing that this would be the last loop I would do for 2016, I hoped that the weather would cooperate with me. Friday the Wind was just blowing like mad and I didn't want to have to deal with the cold and the  Wind at the same time. So checking  the Weather Apps, like I always do before I head out, I saw that it was pretty calm if you call 3 mph calm, but still pretty cold at 24 F/-4 C & I knew that I was headed out to one of my favorite places to ride, Greenspring Valley and it would get a lot colder the further I went out.
Undaunted I got dresses, got some food in me and headed out into the cold. My other mission was to get a picture of the last Sunrise of 2016 while I was out there:
as you can see here it was mission accomplished. Now I could just press on and focus on keeping warm and putting the miles/km in. It was a pretty uneventful ride. The miles/ km flew by even if the air temperature never got that far above freezing. I checked my Garmin data and I found out that the lowest it dropped was 19 F/-7 C. That is when I found that my gel packs were pretty much solid and when I tried to take a drink that the nozzle on my bottle was blocked by ice and the water came out in small drips. I lucked out that I was almost home so thankfully it was not that big of an issue.
So after a little over 2 hours and 33 miles/ 53 km later I was done. My 181 st. ride in the books. So I finished out 2016 with 3,330 miles/5359 km and with 168,707 ft/51,421 m of elevation gain. All in all, it was a pretty good year of cycling for me for sure.