Riding
Without going anywhere in particular I managed to ride 1000.5 miles this month. It was my fourth 1000-mile month in a row, and undoubtedly the last of 2023. Near the end of the month I passed 8,000 miles for the year.
I did three rides of more than 50 miles. The first one was on Little Nellie in Dorchester County, Maryland on the Eastern Shore. The second was a 51-miler on Big Nellie in Talbot County, Maryland, also on the Eastern Shore. The third was a 58-mile combo of shopping, errand running, and product testing. I rode to Terrapin Bicycles in Bethesda to buy some touring shoes (at half price). After putting on the new shoes, I rode east about 13 miles and dropped off some old tubes at my friend Charmaine’s place in Hyattsville, Maryland. Then I rode home. This was also a test of the new rear wheel I had Beth at Bikes at Vienna build for The Mule. The shoes are a little tight but the wheel seems fine.
I dropped off The Mule for Beth to take a look at the wheel now that I’ve ridden over 100 miles on it. She’s also going to install a new rear brake, a Paul Minimoto, which, hopefully, will solve my brake rub problems. (At about $180, it had better!)
I finished the month at 8,192.5 miles for the year, a little over half of that was on The Mule. The rest was split more or less evenly among my other three bikes.
Watching
I watched a ton of baseball games, two of them in person. The Washington Nationals have turned into a competitive and entertaining team.
I saw one movie: Guardians of the Galaxy III. It was lame.
I began watching the new Star Wars mini series, Ahsoka. It was lamer.
Reading
American Ramble by Neil King Junior is the author’s account of his hike from Capitol Hill to Manhattan. Along the way he checked out various obscure points of American history. Some of his route overlapped with my 2023 bike tour. It took me a while to get into this one but, in the end, I quite enjoyed it. His approach to treks is to research historical places on the route to find interesting things to investigate. Mine is pretty much the opposite: I ride with little knowledge of what I am getting myself into, leaving interesting things to serendipity.
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann is the true tale of the Osage murders of the 1920s. Members of the Osage tribe had been relocated to a small, seemingly worthless section of Oklahoma northwest of Tulsa. As it turned out, the Osage owned the mineral rights to the land and happened to find themselves sitting on a vast sea of oil. They became among the wealthiest people in the country. A cabal of white folks began systematically acquiring the oil rights by marrying them and killing them. Anyone who got in the way of the cabal was killed. This all occurred around the time of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Oklahomans of the 1920s have a lot to answer for.
Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane is the fictional tale of a race murder set in South Boston at the start of the forced school desegregation crisis in 1974. Lehane absolutely nails working class Irish American family life and language, in general, and the culture of Southie. Every aspect of life in Southie is run by a mobster based on the infamous Whitey Bulger. The people of 1970s South Boston would probably have felt at home in northeastern Oklahoma in the 1920s.
Other
My odometer flipped to 68. I gained ten pounds, mostly by eating crap and drinking beer. I gave blood as penance for my dietary sins.