Adventurelaus

Using bicycles to explore a city is awesome.  Recently I visited to large cities that have bike sharing services.  Being able to rent bikes at one place and drop them off at another place was great but we ended up with a lot of headaches that caused irritation and inconvenience. Berlin, Germany: Lidl Bikes  Berlin has many bicycle sharing companies.  I picked Lidl Bikes since they had the most bikes available throughout the town. These bikes aren't tethered to stations, instead you just park them (nearly) anywhere.  If you park them at certain hot spots you get a discount on your rental.  Finding and renting the bikes is easy through the app.  However, one account can only rent two bikes at a time.  This meant that my wife had to create an account as well for the whole family to checkout bikes. For some reason both accounts didn't work after we created them and linked them with our payment method.  It took forever to figure out what the...

It was about time to do another family bicycle tour and the Easter weekend was just perfect for that.  Most importantly the weather was great.  We decided to bike to Yellow Banks Park by Des Moines since the park sounded quite interesting and most of the ride will be on trails.  Now that the kids are bigger and commute daily to school regardless of wind and weather we decided not to take the tandems and instead let everyone ride their own bikes. We started from Slater instead from our house, because we wanted to trim down the mileage a little.  Doing so reduced the ride by 10 miles each day making it an easy 35 miles each way. As stated earlier, most of the ride is on the High Trestle Trail.  Through Ankeny it becomes the Gay Lead Wilson Trail connector and then the southern most part of the Gay Lead Wilson Trail itself.  Unfortunately the last 5 miles are on the road with no shoulders.  Two up hills and one down hill part going to the park added...

I recently completed an exercise study in which I did weight machines for a year.  That was a big achievement for me since I never sicked long with an exercise routine.  Although I do have to confess that working through that second part of the year was though since the routine became boring and the assigned weight was getting way to optimistic.  A chip key was programmed with weights "appropriate" for me but being able to leg press only 100lbs less than the exercise asked for becomes a downer.  I do see the value of a trainer that often checks up with you in person or setting your own weight program. Now that the year is over I have the opportunity to explore the exercises of one of the other study groups.  I'm quite well aware how the no-exercise works so naturally I'm doing four weeks of cardio.  I'm really glad I wasn't assigned to the cardio group (or the no-exercise group).  The couple of weeks I've been doing cardio have already b...