UNLESS YOU'RE A GLOBE-TROTTER who has the luxury of a mostly nomadic existence that enables you to follow the sun, or a fixed-in-place diehard year-rounder who looks at winter as merely an opportunity to dress more robustly and work on your ski-biking skills, most of us face that wintertime lull in our cycling calendar.  The bike (or bikes in many of our cases) stay nicely tucked in, safe and warm and dry, dreaming of the warmer summer days to come.  

Our gear gets sorted through on cold, blustery, wet days when we don't want to brave the elements but do want to engage with our passion in some manner.  Maintenance might get done, new accessories purchased and installed.  We think about possible new tours in faraway places and research them.  Unless your touring style is like that of Jeff Lee, for whom advance planning is anathema, maps are pored over, destinations and intermediate stops identified.

On days where the weather is acceptably mild (use your own personal definition of what constitutes "mild") we go for local rides.  Those may tend to follow long-familiar, well-trodden local routes or may be deliberate explorations of nooks and crannies in the local landscape that have somehow gone overlooked or unexplored in our daily existence.

In this journal I'll be writing about how these activities - dreaming, planning, maintaining, and actually riding from time to time - play out for me over the winter of 2022/2023.  The entries won't be exotic tales from far-off lands.  They'll be largely prosaic, detailing small rides and other ephemera I may want to remember in years to come.  As much as anything else, they are an easy outlet through which I can keep my personal focus on cycling and, I hope, maintain a healthy and renewed enthusiasm for something I once loved but allowed to languish in recent years.

There won't be a new entry every day; indeed, there may be weeks-long gaps between one entry and the next.  (For instance, January 2023 will have little content added because I'll be away and doing other non-cycling things for most of the month.)  Although the journal carries an End Date, there's no "date-certain" completion date since that is dependent on what the weather does, and when.  The end date will be updated each time I add an entry, to prevent the journal as a whole from showing up in the "Currently On the Road" listing since, by definition, I'm not really "on the road" and away from home.

With all of that said, it will please me greatly if you choose to read these scribblings, and even more if you choose to leave comments and share your thoughts.