Mountain Bike Bill, The Dirt on the Dirt

Tag: Hockey

Finishing up hockey in San Jose

What a fun time we had in San Jose.    The team played really well, but had one game were some team-wide hiccups cost them the game which ultimately ended their bid for the championship a little early.   The good news is they beat all the Canadian teams they faced 🙂    

Other really cool things happening were that both Will and his fellow teammate Dillon did exceptionally well in the “Sniper” skills competition against 44 of the top shooters in their age bracket.   Will made it into the final seven and Dillon went on to win the competition by throwing down some sick moves and making six goals in seven shots against some of the best goalies in his division.

Now that we had some extra time in our schedule we took advantage of it and headed down to Santa Cruz for some fun on the boardwalk.  

barfotron
This ride, which we now refer to as the Barf-O-Matic 5000, was a heck of a lot of fun for the boys.

zach
After the ride, things were not so much fun for Drew(left) and Will(right).  Zach (middle) did what any kid who did not get sick would do, laugh like hell at the others.   It was great!

We ended up making a long evening out of the boardwalk and did not get back to the hotel room until late.   The orginal plan was to get up early tomorrow and head back to Santa Cruz to do some riding.   We were both pooped so we decided to make a later start in the morning.

Hockey in San Jose

Okay here is a little non-MTB content for the blog.  My oldest son  (Will) and I are spending the better part of this week up in San Jose while Will’s hockey team, The San Diego Fear, compete in the North American Roller Hockey  Championships (NARCH).  The facility at the Silver Creek Sports complex is pretty impressive and is well suited to host the championships that includes over 400 teams in numerous age brackets from all over the Canada,  the US and Central America.  Will’s team is playing in the 12 and under Gold bracket against 22 other teams who made the cut through the regional qualifiers.

NARCH facility

The boys played their first game today and won against the Golden Ridge team from British Columbia so they are off to a good start.  

Game Play

After the game we did some tourist stuff and went down to Monterey for some sightseeing that included the Monterey Aquarium.

Fish Kisser

There is a bit of the MTB tie-in here.  Our plan is to take a couple – three days to get back home when we are all done with some camping and biking along the coast.  We have not decided yet, but Santa Cruz, Montana Del Oro and Mt Pinos are high on our list of camp/mtb stops.

SocalTrailRiders help out a fellow MTBer

Yesterday I attended what was a very cool ride that showed just how awesome our community of knobby tired freaks can be.    This was by far the largest group ride I had every been on.

Here are some of my pictures from the ride along with a few words. To get a bunch of words, read about The Ride from the perspective of all that were there as well as the BBQ afterwards that I could not stick around for.

The reason I could not stick around was I had to do some cool “Hockey Dad” stuff.  My oldest boy has been really doing well with the Hockey as of late.  He was asked to practice (In preparation for tryouts after the first of the year) with one of the really good tournment teams here in San Diego.  The level of play was a big step up for Will.  He looked a little overwhelmed for the first five minutes or so but settled down before realizing he had to dig deep to keep up with the pace.  It was the classic Big Fish in a little pond, does not look so big in a bigger pond thing.  Between the ride and watching my kid, I was proud to be a Mountain Bikers as well as Dad today.

-Bill