Month: February 2021

Jabberwocky

Aside from the Kmart blue light special, there are few advantages to being old. One of them is qualifying for the COVID vaccine a few weeks before younger folks Today I had my first shot of the Pfizer vaccine. Didn’t hurt at all. No side effects yet but it may be hard to tell since I only had four hours of sleep last night.

My next shot is in three weeks. I’ll be immune for the first home stand of the baseball season.

I was wearing a Nats t-shirt and a bicycling themed mask. Proper dress is required.

A Fistful of Advil

Some 21 years ago I did my first bike tour, a ride from my house in northern Virginia to Hanover Junction, Pennsylvania. It was a bit of a train wreck. In 2003, I decided to try again. Stuff happened. This journal was originally posted on Crazyguyonabike.com. I re-created it so that it would reside on the same website as my newer tour journals. It was interesting for me to see how touring has changed in the last couple of decades.

Check it out at

https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/advil/

Off the Road but Busy with Bikes

I have taken some time off the bike. True winter has arrived and I find riding 30 miles in this cold air not to my liking. For the last few days, I’ve been creating journals of the blog posts from my recent bike tours to a new-ish website called CycleBlaze.com. So far I have finished with my 2015. 2016, and 2017 bike tours.

I spent four or five hours today working on my big 2018 cross country tour. Creating these journals is not simply a cut-and-paste job. For the 2018 journal, for example, I had to write a few new entries describing my experience with pulmonary embolisms during the preceding winter. As I move the blog posts over to the journal, I re-read each one and make appropriate editorial changes.

I’m about halfway through. I keep discovering things and places that I had forgotten. I didn’t remember North Dakota being hilly, or noticing the gradual increase in elevation beginning in Illinois. Or eating lunch in a thrift shop in a small town in North Dakota.

I hope to have the journal finished by early next week. Then I’ll tackle the 2019 tour to San Francisco.

Once my first few journals went up on Cycleblaze, I was contacted by the person behind CrazyGuyonaBike where I had posted three journals about 15 years ago. He asked me to take the old journals off his site because he regards CycleBlaze as “hostile” to him. I took them off and will likely post them on CycleBlaze. Time will tell.

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In other news, I received an email from the state health department. They are currently scheduling people who signed up on January 18 for covid-19 vaccination shots. They also confirmed that according to their records I signed up on that date. My jab should happen soon.

No Wrong Plan – A Bike Journal

Today is a rest day at the Rootchopper Institute so I decided to take the blog entries for my 2016 bike tour from Pittsburgh to DC and put them on a bike tour journal site called Cycleblaze The process took me a few hours, partly because I am unfamiliar with the website but also because I had to figure our a way to cut and paste from this site to that one. (I used Google Docs as an intermediary which simplified things immensely.)

So check it out at

https://www.cycleblaze.com/journals/gap/