A year ago today Susan, me and our friend Rachel had a weekender in Death Valley and they accompanied me on a day-hike in the Panamint Range to the 10,000-foot mark and then sent me on my way up the rest of the trail to the 11,049-foot summit of Telescope Peak. Breaking campe the next day I rang in my 42nd — or as my friend Mark would call it “the 13th anniversary of my 29th” — by going the other way in the form of an exhilirating 17-mile downhill ride from our campsite at 8,300 feet to the floor of the Panamint Valley.
 
Photoset of that weekend here on Flickr.Â
Seeing as we’re but a week or so returned from our awesome European vacation, on this eve of the 14th anniversary of my 29th no activities so monumental or unique are on tap. Instead I’m going to put an end today to my three-plus weeks out of the saddle and bike over to the Los Angeles National Cemetery and back before mom comes over this afternoon and we fire up the grill and share the rough DVD/slideshow Susan and I created featuring some 1,600 images from the trip. It has the potential to be a home movie from hell but mom’s expressed a desire to see what we saw so we’ll see how durable that desire is.
To really get the gears turning back in the right direction again tomorrow will be a good day for the This Is My Life Ride that I charted out last October.
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