No mountains for me this Spring. It all has to be about preparing for France, where I am going to spend 30 days biking from the Atlantic coast to the Belgian border and back this summer. So this weekend I did back-to-back 50 mile rides through the sagebrush steppe where I live. I suppose this landscape has a certain desolate beauty to it, but spending a few hours biking through it while a cold wind-driven drizzle falls is, well, just a little grim. I keep imagining that this is France, and there's an exquisite chateau just waiting over the next hilltop. But it's always just more bleak, gray sagebrush lands rolling away to the horizon. Did I say no mountains for me? Well, maybe a couple. Gotta break up this monotony somehow.