Ray's Awesomeness!

A recent road trip led me to find myself in the wonderfull city of Milwaukee with the intended purpose of checking out Ray's Indoor Bike Park.  The trip started on friday at noon with Rudy, Dave, Drew, and myself piling into Rudy's diesel Jetta wagon.  Sitting in the car for a sixteen hour round trip didn't sound too appealing, but I'm always up for a roadtrip if the intended destination is something adventurous like this.  The conversations were light in subject matter and stimulating to the immagination which made the time pass quite nicely. 

At 9:00, after being greatly dissapointed by a quick detour to Madison for a "Bike Expo" we pulled up to the hotel.  All of us were quite hungry for some real food so we drove arround until we found something that looked promising.....  It was a mistake of a choice since the service was terrible and we clearly didn't "belong" there but we were hungry and tired so we ate quickly and headed back to the hotel to rest up for what was to come.

We got to Ray's at 9:00 AM and quickly got to work exploring.

Some intermediate techincal stuff.

This is me on the awesome "pump track." 

Rudy chasing Dave on the pump track.

Some more intermediate techinacal stuff.

The words on the floor say it all....

Dave in the expert section.

Drew catching some air in the rhythm section.

We ended up riding there for 11 hours that saturday and it was amazing.  I used muscles that I don't normally push hard and as a result my entire body feels like it was tossed arround in a giant mixing bowl for hours.  The hot tub and beers after made everything feel better that night but the next day the four of us looked like a couple of 90 year olds.  We hobbled arround slowly and groaned whenever we had to get in and out of the car which was actually quite amusing.