I’m happy to say that the 0.3.9 version of QGIS’ “Table Manager” Plugin by Borys Jurgiel now allows you to change a shapefile schema without having to save the output to a new file!

You can install the plugin via the Plugin Installer – look for “Table Manager.” Once it’s installed, find it under “Plugins > Table > Table Manager.” It’ll operate on the feature you have selected in the legend, and open up a simple window that looks like this:

Table Manager

You can then reorder columns, rename columns, insert columns, clone (copy) columns, change data types, and delete columns! To be fair, you could do all of this before. The difference is that now you can just hit “Save” down at the bottom, and carry on! Before, you would have to “Save As,” browse to a folder, and create a whole new file. Then add this new file to your map, theme it appropriately, and remove the old layer. Annoying. Now, it’s a super simple one-step process!

A nice touch is that the old .dbf file is archived in case of a mishap. The archive is stored alongside the rest of the shapefile, but has the extension .dbf~

Thanks Borys!

Now, if only this was built in to the “Properties > Fields” tab! ;)

Monday morning was warm again, but not super hot, with a misty rain that left the roads wet. Matt and I were up for one final ride before leaving, so we kitted up and rolled out the gravel road from the cabin back to the pavement. We then went down to Jeffersonville, so we could say we officially started the ride at the bottom of the climb :)

We repeated the climb up Smuggler’s Notch that we did the first day. Despite the miles and elevation gain I’d put in my legs the last few days, I was feeling quite good, and was no longer intimidated by the mountains. We had a solid ride up, and reveled in the scenery and pain. Outstanding! At the top, I debated continuing down the other side, but the wet roads and lack of confidence on the tight switchback made me unsure. Matt decided he didn’t want to do another climb, and since I was on the fence, decided not to descend alone. We turned around and started to fly down. However, near the start of the descent, Matt pulled over, so naturally I followed suit to see what was up. He had a ‘knocking’ sound on every rotation of his rear wheel, and it was a bit disconcerting, especially at those speeds! We looked it over, but couldn’t see anything obviously wrong, so decided to continue! Closer to the bottom of the descent, Matt had a bit of a scare as some idiot driver turned left in front of him as he was descending at 80+km/hr. He had to slow, but not too much, and luckily stayed in control. What inspired the driver to turn when he could have waited a few more seconds and had the entire road is beyond me. Sometimes, drivers need to realize how easily they can kill cyclists! I was far enough behind the action to get a good view, but didn’t have to slow.

We rode back to the cabin, but then decided to check out the rest of the resort and cabins that we hadn’t seen yet. Of the roads at the resort are all gravel… and you know what that means! The final little descent, just several hundred meters from our own cabin, I got a flat. And since I decided not to bother changing it just then (we were heading home after all…) I shouldered the bike to walk it in the last few hundred meters. Of course somewhere in that time I managed to step in dog shit, which packed into my cleat and vent holes in the bottom of my shoe sole. Nice! What a way to end the trip! (I will use the ‘never a dull moment’ excuse to make that one into a positive!)

Overall, Monday’s ride was short, but great! 32.54 km in 1:18:31. We climbed 673m, at an average speed of 18.26km/hr on an average gradient of 5%, with a max of 11%. After the ride, we cleaned up, packed up, and headed back to Perth. It was a fairly uneventful trip back, and we were all exhausted!

Over the course of the entire trip, we managed to get in 245.44km of riding over 9.5hours. Total climbing was 3875m! For all of us, the trip contained the biggest, steepest, and longest climbs we’d ever done. A great learning experience and a whole lot of fun! Personally, it was the best riding experience I’ve ever had, and I’m fairly certain the other guys would agree! Naturally, plans are already being discussed for TdB 2012!

Control Rendering Order

You’ll see that it is split into two panes, with one called “Layers” and one called “Layer order.”  Each now has a checkbox to “Control rendering order”

Essentially, the new functionality allows you to decouple the way layers are organized in the legend (“Layers” pane) from the order they are rendered (drawn) on the canvas (controlled via the “Layer order” pane.) This is really nice if you have complex maps with many layers and groups in the legend!

It still seems a bit buggy, but considering it just came out in last night’s nightly build, I’m not surprised! I’m looking forward to seeing this mature!

Installation:

EasyPrint is written by Stefan Ziegler, who we all owe a big thanks! You can install the plugin from the “Fetch Python Plugins” menu. If you don’t see it there, you may need to add the CatAIS Repository. To do so, go to “Plugins > Fetch Python Plugins” and click the “Repositories” tab. At the bottom, click “Add 3rd party repositories,” then “OK.” Then switch back to the “Plugins” tab, and type”EasyPrint” in the search. You should have one result, which you should select before clicking “Install plugin.”

EasyPrint in the Plugin Installer

Once the plugin is installed, you can enable it under the “Plugins > Manage Plugins” menu if it is not already enabled. If the install was successful, you can access “EasyPrint” in your plugins menu, or via the toolbar icon that looks like this:

EasyPrint Icon

If you already have the plugin installed, you may want to see if there’s an updated version–the new version seems to increase stability quite a bit!

Functionality:

EasyPrint has several functions. When you click the icon, you’ll get a three-tabbed interface that looks like this:

EasyPrint GUI

The first tab, “SimpleMap” allows you to create a one-page map, very similar to the standard QGIS Composer window. It uses layouts that come with EasyPrint or one that you can customize (more about that later.) In fact, this option even opens the EasyPrint layout in the composer window. To me, this tab seems unneccessary, because this process is more difficult than using the standard composer. Thus, I don’t see a real need for the SimpleMap option at all, except that it lets you quickly turn on or off things like the grid, copyright, etc. via checkbox rather than adding or removing them from a layout. However, it’s important to note that the next two tabs will use some of the settings from this first tab, so make sure you note them and set them appropriately.

Where EasyPrint really shines is in the ability to automate the creation of multi-page map books, rather than just simple maps. The second tab, “Mapbook by grid” allows you to print one page per ’tile’ based on a grid it will create. Make sure to set the scale you want your maps to be created at by choosing it on the first tab. EasyPrint will use the extent of the layer you choose under “Map layer” when creating the grid. I found this a bit confusing, and it took me a while to figure it out. You can also tell EasyPrint if you want to print all grid tiles (Regular Grid,) or only tiles that actually contain features on your chosen map layer (Regular Grid w/o empty grids option). If you select the ‘w/o empty grid’ option, EasyPrint will check if there is a feature present in “Map Layer” you have selected, and if so, create a page for that map tile. If not, it will skip it and move to the next tile. Once you’ve set these options appropriately, hit “Create.” You’ll see a new layer called “Mapbook Grid” appear in the layer legend as EasyPrint creates the grid. Note that this is where EasyPrint often crashes for me, throwing a fun Python Error. Save your work before hitting ‘Create’ and just try try it again. It almost always works the second time! Once the grid is created, it’s as simple as selecting any of the optional parameters, and telling EasyPrint where to export your file(s). Then hit “OK” and wait for your .pdf(s) to be created!

Here’s a quick example of a mapbook created using the “Regular Grid” function. Note that tile 2.1 is empty, and would have been skipped if I had selected “Regular Grid w/o empty grid”)

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

Page 6

Page 7

The third tab, “Mapbook by feature” is the one that drew me to the tool in the first place. It works similarly to the “Mapbook by Grid” tab, but rather than creating tiles at a fixed scale in a grid pattern, it creates a sheet for each individual feature in a layer. The scale will vary based on the size of the feature, and you can set the amount of ‘buffer’ space around each feature to give some context to each map. You can also choose attributes from the table to use as titles and subtitles, and these will change on every page. Sweet!

Here’s an example of the same dataset shown above, but using the “Mapbook by feature” tab this time. Note that it only creates a page for each of the three features, and the scale varies depending on the feature size. Also note the titles, which change on each page based on data in the attribute table. In my case, they are the very useful (“One,” “Two,” and “Three”) Pretty slick!

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Layouts:

By default, EasyPrint comes with three layouts. Unfortunately, they are not very useful for anyone except the person who created them! Thus, you’ll very likely want to create and use your own. Because this post is getting long, and because I’m still playing with the layout customization, I will leave that topic for a new post! It’s (unfortunately) not a super user friendly process, so I’ll try to break it down in the next post. Stay tuned! (If you want to get started earlier than that, take a poke at layouts.xml in your \user\.qgis\python\plugins\easyprint\layouts\ folder!)

Conclusion:

This is a fantastic plugin! Despite crashing occasionally (save your Project often!) it does a great job when it works.

My wish list for this one is pretty short right now. Basically, I’d love to see this map book creation functionality built into the core Composer window in QGIS, or at the very least have the EasyPrint plugin extended to include support for templates created via the composer. Some modifications to ‘intuitiveness’ (like not using settings from the first tab on subsequent tabs) would be nice, but not critical. It all works once you get the hang of it!

Sunday morning, we took the quick drive from the cabin down to a car pool parking lot on the 104 near Cambridge. It was hot again, so we slathered on the sunscreen and loaded up with water. The ride started off with some excitement–very shortly after we left, we came across a ‘playful’ pitbull puppy. The owners were in their front yard raking or something, and the dog was off-leash. He immediately came after us–just a puppy, but still a pit bull! He wasn’t sure what to make of cyclists, so we were very cautious. He kept coming, baring teeth and heading for the heels as we pedaled. At one point, I even came to a stop and put my hand out to calm him down, but he only growled and backed off a bit, unsure. The owners, naturally, were not very smart, yelling “Scooter, come back” and “Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you”  Of course, they weren’t being  chased by a pit bull with bared teeth, so…

We eventually got by the dog without injury and got our nerves settled. This happened just in time for a vicious (short but steep) climb. It gained 127m in 3.62km, for an average grade of 7% and a max of 12%. The downhill was nasty–twisty and turny, with some sections where road construction had left loose gravel on the road. To add to the excitement, Luke got stung by a bee on the descent, and casually mentioned that his sister has major allergic reactions, and that he “wasn’t sure” if he did or not (luckily he didn’t!) Also, the wind had started to pick up–the forecasted thunderstorm appeared to be on its way! Since the sky was looking very dark and the wind was very strong, we made a call to take cover–you never know what can happen in that kind of weather! The forecast had even called for inch-and-a-half hail, and flash flooding, so we didn’t want to take a chance. Luckily, there was a farm close by, so we went there. After knocking on the door and getting no answer, we decided to just wait out the storm in front of the garage. The wind really picked up, and the rain started. It was wild!  The owners of the farm drove up part-way through our stay, and looked at us quizzically.  However, after explaining the situation, they gave us the OK to wait out the storm in the garage. Luckily the hail never did come, and the storm blew by almost as quickly as it formed. We were back on the road again!

The route took us to Fairfield, where we stopped for a chat. It was decided that Luke, Shawn and Trent would take the road through Fairfield and across to the 108, while Matt and I would go further north, turning at Sheldon and cutting across to the 108 there. We split, planning to meet up at the cars at the end of the ride.  Matt and I absolutely flew to Sheldon–the road was almost all downhill, and there was no traffic to speak of. Amazing! Matt and I stopped at a general store in Sheldon and filled up on Gatorade. It was pretty damn hot and humid!

Typical Scenery North of Jeffersonville

The road across to the 108 was also very low traffic and nice–until it turned to gravel! We had not expected the gravel, and weren’t sure how long it would last. It was a bit rough, with some loose sections that were not ideal for skinny tires. We made it through, with some ‘back woods’ moments as we went by some trailers with cars up on blocks out front. Quite the place to be out in spandex and ‘ballet shoes!’ Once we hit the 108, we were back on pavement, and expecting a steady climb all the way back to the car (since the ride so far had been largely downhill.) Oddly enough, this was not the case, and the 108 had very few significant climbs. Unfortunately, however, the surface was not ideal–rough, with cracks and holes everywhere!

As Matt and I rode by a gas station, we noticed bikes leaning up against the wall–it was the guys! We quickly pulled in to the store. Turns out their route also had gravel (more than ours even) and Shawn had split a sidewall on a sharp piece. It took them some time to fix, and he was taking it easy since it was booted. Not nice! We went in the store for some water and a washroom key, and it turned out to be the coldest store in the universe. The air conditioning was cranked so cold that I could barely stand it long enough to get the key and get out! FREEZING!

We rode the rest of the way back as a group, and the road surface got worse as we went. I’ve never seen cracks like it in Ontario or even in Quebec–it was much worse than any road I’ve ridden, to the point of being very unsafe. Fortunately, we made it back without further incident! We ended up the day with a total of 82.2km in 3:02:44 (for an average of 26.91km/hr) and a gain of 942m.

Post ride, we went back to our favourite Vermont Liquor Depot in Jeffersonville to fill up on beer for the evening. While there, we asked a local their recommendation for pizza, and the pointed us the way to a local Jeffersonville shop, so Trent and Shawn went to put in an order. Beer and pizza in hand, we went back to the cabin to chill and eat. Then things got crazy–the second round of thunderstorms rolled in, and the mountains literally disappeared before our eyes as we watched the sheets of rain moving across the valley towards us. Storms in the mountains are intense!

Beer & Pizza

Again, the storm passed pretty quickly and we resumed our beer and pizza. Luke was leaving to head back to Perth, so we said our goodbyes as he packed up. Then, just as Luke was leaving, the third round of storms rolled in. We hoped it would make it down the partly washed-out road from the cabin with no problems!  The porch sitting/pizza eating quickly turned into a scramble for shelter as the rain started hammering down again and the wind threatened to blow all of our hanging clothes away. Then, the power went out! This storm too passed quickly, but the power remained out save for a short blink to give us hope.

Beers for the day included one that turned out to be either my favourite or second favourite of the entire trip – Long Trail Double Bag. There was also a couple of the Trout River Chocolate Oatmeal Stout quaffed, and very much enjoyed. Shawn had the Shock Top Raspberry Wheat which turned out to be one of his favourites of the trip.

The night’s entertainment included a surprise award ceremony that Trent had created–modeled after the jerseys of the Tour de France. However, rather than jerseys, the awards were these guys:

The 2011 Tour de Brew Awards!

For the first time in history, the ‘yellow jersey’ was awarded to two people–both Matt and Shawn shared the honours. I took home the polka dots, Luke the Best Young Rider, and Trent the Green. I’m not sure what the little elephant was even for, or who won it…perhaps the guys can refresh my memory?

Part VI will be coming soon and will likely finish off the story of the 2011 Tour de Brew – stay tuned!

As an example, I created a random sample dataset with some fictitious data. It contained three points, and the attribute table looked like this:

Attribute Table

To create a diagram symbol, go to the properties for the layer in question, and click the “Diagrams” tab at the top, then check off “Display Diagrams” and set Diagram type to “Pie Chart.” You can also use “Text Diagram” but that’s another post!

You can set either a fixed size, or scale the size of the charts to an attribute value range. This is useful if you are wanting to use the size of the symbol to indicate a value, and the ‘slices’ to indicate percentages. In my case, I set the size to ’23′ and set it to scale between 0 and 30mm. This is arbitrary in my case, but you can play with it using your own data to see what works best for you.

At the bottom under “Attributes,” select each attribute you want to form a ‘slice’ of the pie, and click the ‘+’ on the right. Then select the next value, and click ‘+.’  Repeat until you are finished adding all values. In my case, I added attributes A, B, C, and D. I didn’t want to use the ID, so I left it out. You can set individual colours for each ‘slice’ here by double clicking the colour in the table. Here’s what my settings looked like:

Pie Chart Settings

and here’s here what the final product looks like:

Final Result

This is already a great tool, and with a few more enhancements, it will be a fantastic tool! What enhancements you wonder? A couple that immediately come to mind are the ability to label ‘slices’ with either their attribute value, or their percentage, and the ability to remove all borders (in the above example, ‘Pen Width’ is set to 0, but it still shows a border. Weird.)

What features would you like to see?

Cyclocross is the fastest growing discipline in cycling, with popularity skyrocketing worldwide. Specialized cyclocross bikes (think of a road bike with mountain bike tires) are used as racers ride on grassy fields, dismount their bikes and carry them over barriers, run up steep, short hills and ride through sand pits or mud depending upon conditions!

Races are very spectator friendly, presenting many opportunities to see the action up close and personal!

The racing in Perth will occur on Sunday, November 6 at Conlon Farm Recreation Complex. Come on out to cheer on some of the best racers in Canada (including current and former National and Provincial champions!)  Races start at 9am (for U17 and younger, Women, Masters B Men and older & Novices) with the second race starting at 10:45am (Elite Men, Masters A Men & Junior Men.)

For more information on the races, go to www.cyclocross.org, or call race organizer Bob Woods at 613-256-1874.  Or, just make your way to Conlon Farm on Sunday, November 6! If you’re interested in racing yourself, see the website for registration details.

Post Appalachian Gap, we headed to the ‘big city’ for a tour of the Magic Hat Brewery in Burlington. Right away, we noticed that the place was jammed. We could barely find a parking spot, and there was a BBQ going on outside the door! We finally got parked, and made our way into the ‘gift shop’ portion of the brewery. The place was packed with people! There’s a long bar across one whole side of the room, and all of the beers they brew at Magic Hat are on tap for free sample. Amazing! Trent commented that he’s never seen a brewery so busy, and he’s been on tours of breweries and distilleries all around the world! Magic Hat is definitely doing something right in the marketing and ‘company culture’ department!

Because the place was so busy, we decided to make our way to the front of the line for the next free tour (they go hourly) and avoid the rush at the bar. The tour was interesting, although we didn’t get to check out the actual production floor–we only saw it from above, where the tour concluded on a balcony overlooking the floor. It’s not quite what I would expect from a ‘micro’ brewery–their line puts out 400 bottles/minute, and 50-60 kegs/hour. That’s a lot of beer! Obviously not on the same level as a Molson or Labatt, but still more than a ‘micro’ in my opinion.

Post-tour, we headed back to the bar to test, taste and sample. #9, Circus Boy, Single Chair, Hi.P.A., Blind Faith, Humble Patience; oh my! I don’t recall specifics on any of the beers, except for #9 which I stocked up on before we left the state. It’s a beautiful, slightly apricot-tinted ‘not-quite-pale’ ale that I quite enjoyed! The rest of the beers were good, but none really made much of an impression on me. Of course, without more time to sit and enjoy each (in a larger than sample size quantity…) it’s hard to say for sure! I’d be more than willing to give any of them another try of course :)

Post-tour, we headed to box-mall hell to grab some Thai take out, and then back to the cabin for dinner and more beer. A selection of the nights samplings:

The selection for the night

The Blackbeary Wheat from Long Trail was one of my favourites of the trip. The Peak Organics was popular all around, and we tried several different varieties. I still think that their Maple Oat was the best of the trip, although the Double Bag is a very close second (possibly first, depending on my mood at the time…)

The beer, hot tub, games and sleep wrapped up another successful, busy day, both on the bike and off. The morning would bring a ‘north of Jeffersonville’ route to mix things up, and to give the legs a rest from the big hills. The story of that ride will be coming up next!

In a previous post (QGIS Trace Edit Tool) I discussed how to use QGIS’ trace edit plugin to create a polygon adjacent to an existing polygon while ensuring that it is topologically correct. With a bit more experimentation, I’ve found a better and easier way to perform the same task, using QGIS’ built-in topological editing functions. It’s easy and super convenient!

The key is that you’ll need to go to Settings > Snapping Options and enable the “Avoid Int.”  checkbox. (The mouseover reads “Avoid intersections of new polygons” and the checkbox doesn’t appear for lines or points, since it doesn’t apply.)

Enable "Avoid Intersections"

You can then digitize a polygon beside existing polygons, and have the new feature ‘clipped’ to the boundary. This is faster than using the trace edit plugin like I mentioned before, and it also ensures that no vertices are missed! Fantastic! How about we walk through an example? Pretend we had these existing features:

Existing Features

Now, let us pretend we want to draw a polygon that fills in the hole in the middle. We could simply set our snapping options, zoom way in, and try to snap to every vertex using the standard edit tool. Or, we could use the trace edit tool, and ‘trace’ around the boundary while holding the Ctrl key. OR, we could set the “Avoid intersection” option as shown above, and just quickly sketch in the boundary like so:

New feature boundary

The red feature above is what I drew in. No need to go carefully, or try to snap to anything. Just roughly sketch in the area I want. Topology rules take care of the rest, clipping the feature to the existing boundary when I finish my sketch. The final product looks like this:

Finished Product

Voila! It’s just that easy! I quickly (not precisely at all) drew in the rough shape required, and ended up with a perfectly topologically correct feature that follows the existing boundary exactly. No need to snap or trace anything! Sweet!

For those keeping track, I’m still working on documenting our trip to Vermont for “Tour de Brew 2011.” Check out the rest of the story here.

I left off talking about our hike up Mt. Mansfield, and our encounter with momma moose and her baby. I realized I had failed to mention our Friday night dinner at The Shed, where we had a decent meal, and their ‘ski of beer’ – a sampler of six of their own beers served on an old wooden ski. Pretty cool!

Ski of Beer* Not my photo - thanks to HomeBrew Guru for this shot

We were not super impressed with the beer itself, although they seemed to get better the further down the ski we got. I’m not sure if the later beers were actually better beers, or if our judgement was perhaps clouded? The stout was quite nice, as was their seasonal which I believe was an Irish Red. Either way, this was the least impressive Vermont beer we had the whole trip.

Saturday was to be a big day. We were going to meet up with Luke and Allan (Luke’s brother-in-law) for a ride up the Appalachian Gap. I was a bit worried, but after our success on Smuggler’s Notch, I was no longer scared of the big mountains. I knew it was all doable!  We drove to Richmond, were we met Luke and Allan. Luke had driven all night to arrive at his sister’s place, and was now ready to join us for some rides (and beer!)

The ride out of Richmond was painful. It was nothing compared to the Notch, but still a big climb for us! The first 3.2 km gained 95m, averaging 6% with a max of 10%,.  The legs were not used to this kind of effort, especially after what they had been through the day before, and were protesting the ride this morning! Luckily, the next 2km was downhill, and gave us a bit of a rest and recovery so the legs could warm up. This was good, as I started to feel strong again, and was all I needed to be ready for the climb! Of course, the climb came soon enough, as km 6 to km 29 was all uphill!

Oddly enough, we started meeting folks on the side of the road who were cheering for us:

“Good job guys!”

“Way to go, keep it up!”

We thought that perhaps the locals were just really friendly to cyclists here…however, we then started to see signs along the road:  “Bike race Saturday.” Hmm…  Soon, we rolled past a feed zone – people ready to hand us bottles and everything. Gee.. I wonder. Could we be on the course during The Green Mountain Stage Race? Turns out that yes, yes we were. Shortly after the feed zone, I heard Luke announce “Riders back” – we were about to be passed by some racers! Two riders came by us. Slowly. One guy was clearly banged up from a crash, and we were certain they were off the back of the group. Good–we didn’t really want to be on the road when the peloton came by!

Despite our painfully slow pace, the guys that passed us didn’t get too far ahead. In fact, they were catching another lone rider, and we then passed two of them again. At this point, I had to stop, as I thought my cleat was coming loose. We stopped and I checked my cleat (it was fine…weird…) and the racers passed us again. However, we saddled back up, and very shortly were caught up to them again. Wow.. these guys must be shattered, since we were only averaging 27km/hr or so, and there were racing even slower than that.

We got to the main turnoff where the ‘real climb’ begins, (about 24km from Richmond) and the racers went right, while we went left. The racers didn’t seem sure where to go, and almost followed us. I guess it looked like we knew what we were doing! I loudly announced “We are not in the race, and do not know where the course goes. Please follow us at your own risk.” I hope they went the right way!

I say that the ‘real climb’ started at km 24, which is true. However, kilometers 6 through 24 gain 234m, with an average grade of 3% and a max of 8%. Not exactly flat!

The “real climb’ up Appalachian Gap begins at Gore Rd. and 17, and from there climbs a total of 340m in 4.34km. This gives an average of 8%, with a max of 18% near the top. Yes, 18%! Oh, and there’s no reprieve. The total downhill in this whole stretch? Zero (yes, 0) meters. None.

Our little group got smashed apart pretty quickly. Soon it was Allan and I, with Matt just behind me. Then, Allan opened a gap on me, and I couldn’t close it. I settled into my own pace, rather than trying to match Allan tapping away on his compact crank. At one point, the road leveled off a bit, and I actually went sur la plaque (see here) just to mix it up. It actually felt good. Oh boy. “I think I like these big climbs” I thought to myself, as I powered up 100m or so in the big ring. Then, back to the 39, and keep on trucking. I noticed that as I approached the top (where it was exactly, I wasn’t sure, I just knew it couldn’t go up forever…) I was closing in on Allan again. We then hit the last 600m or so; what Allan had called “The Wall” in our chats about the ride. This last 600m averages 11%, and is where that fun little 18% pitch I told you about also resides. Lovely! It took me (literally) 3 minutes to go 600m. Three minutes!  That’s an average speed of 12.3km/hr. Ouch. However, I made it! And I had closed the gap to Allan down to only 10 or 20m by the line. Nice!

At the top of "App Gap" (l-r: Allan, Shawn, Me, Trent, Matt, Luke)

The rest of the guys had their own epic battles on the way up. Matty, followed by Trent, followed by Shawn. We took some photos, then decided to split. Allan, Trent and Shawn went back the way we came up, and Matt, Luke and I headed for a bit of a longer ride, descending down the opposite side of the Gap. This was super fun, but again made my poor descending skills evident.  Max speed was 73.47km/hr for me, while the others were much faster, opening a huge gap on me on the descent. The descent itself was about 14km long (!), and dropped 507m with an average grade of -5%, and a max (minimum?) of -13%. Some of the switchbacks were super fun, and on one the left hand shoulder was a full lane wide, with lots of visibility. I took the whole thing, and ended up on on the left side edge of the left shoulder–basically 3 full lanes from the right side of the road, and just flying! I do not recommend this of course, but…it’s a calculated risk! Obviously this is insane if there is no visibility!

Yes, we came from down there!

Our route back to Richmond took us from 17, onto the 100 into Waterbury. Our original plan (pre-flooding) was to make The Alchemist a starring role in the brew portion of Tour de Brew. However, the flooding hit it hard, and it was closed for business during our trip. Riding through Waterbury was an experience. Matt flatted just before we got out of town (no doubt on some of the debris from the flooding) so we had a chance to see the damage in some detail.  It looked like a war zone! Dumpsters lining the streets, the entire community out pitching in to clean up… entire houses full of drywall, insulation, and worldly possessions piled up in moldy heaps at the ends of driveways. People wearing dust masks while walking down the street. Not a good scene! However, it was great to see people pitching in and working together to clean up the community! And good news for beer lovers–it looks like The Alchemist is rebuilding to be bigger and better than ever, so perhaps it will have a starring role in Tour de Brew 2012!

The Alchemist cleaning up post-Irene

The remainder of our ride took us on 2 back to Richmond, where we met the guys at On The Rise Bakery for some great grub and yes, even beer. Epic mountain passes, and beer on tap at the bakery?!? Am I in heaven? I had a half-pint of Switchback Ale, which I enjoyed greatly! Although, even a Bug Light probably would have tasted good after the ride we’d just finished! While at the bakery, we firmed up plans for our afternoon–a tour of the Magic Hat Brewery. Oh ya! That will be Part IV of the story!

Our epic Appalachian Gap ride ended up with 83.58km in a total of 3:06:04 for an average speed of 26.95km/hr. Our total climb over the entire ride was 1134m, with an average grade of 4% and a max of 18%! Nice!

Elevation/Speed/HR Graph (click for full image)

Stay tuned for Part IV, where I’ll talk about Magic Hat! That reminds me… I think I still have a #9 in the fridge!