It’s been two weeks since I took a day off my bikes so, despite today’s perfect weather, I’m chilling. Here’s a recap of some recent excursions.

September 1: I rode Little Nellie to the Nationals game against the Cubs. Things went downhill right after Bill Nye, the science guy, announced “PLAY BALL”. The Nats lost 14 to 1 but the ride was nice.

September 2, Labor Day: I read about a shop on Capitol Hill that sells the best Italian sub in the area. I lit out on The Mule in search of sammie perfection. Sadly, the shop was closed for the holiday. Not to waste a day in the city, I rode a few miles north to Dave’s ghost bike at the corner of Florida and 12th Street NE. The bike marks were Dave was killed by the driver of a stolen van in 2019. When I arrived the bike wasn’t there. As I moved closer I saw that it had been moved a bit up the street during a sidewalk renovation project. Ironically, the city removed the protected bike lanes on Florida during the work. Next, I rode Florida across town to Meridian Hill Park in Adams Morgan. The park was filled with people relaxing in the gorgeous sunny weather. This not being Sunday, the noisy drum circle was not playing. Yay, for quiet in the city! I rode home via Rock Creek Park and the Mount Vernon Trail.

September 3: I once had a book called the Washington Area Bicyclists Atlas. It contained a few dozen cues sheets and maps of rides in and around DC. In photocopying the rides, I destroyed the binding and the book fell apart. I did keep the cue sheets and maps from a few rides. The Mule and I did the 56-mile Pedaling the Piedmont ride. The ride starts in Marshall, Virginia and heads ten miles south on windy country roads. The route turns north for a 20-mile leg along the base of the Blue Ridge on Hume Road. I stopped at a country store for lunch, an amazing, thick club sandwich. I made my way back to the start via Naked Mountain, a rather difficult five-mile climb, and around Sky Meadows State Park on bust US 17. The last few miles were through Rectortown on a stupifyingly pretty country road. The new, lower-geared cassette on The Mule passed the hill test. This was my first ride wearing a vest since May.

September 4: The Mule and did a 32-mile recovery ride in the neighborhoods near home. We finished at the Safeway near home where I received my 2025 flu shot.

September 5: Another easy 30-mile local ride on The Mule followed by re-seeding an area of the back yard lawn that was fried during the summer’s multiple heat waves. I topped the day off with my latest Covid-19 shot.

September 6: The shot or maybe some Diet Coke at 7 p.m. ruined my sleep. I rode The Mule in a mental fog 15 miles to Friday Coffee Club in DC. Sleepless rides aren’t very fun but I got my 30 miles in for the day.

September 7: The Mule and I rode the Virginia Hunt Country ride from the Atlas. This one is to north of the Piedmont ride through The Plains and Middleburg. Although there were clear skies at home, a storm front passed through the ride area about 40 miles to the west. A helpful clerk at gas station convenience store in The Plains gave me a garbage bag that I converted into a makeshift rain vest. Worked like a charm. The Mule and I endured cool rain for two hours and were rewarded by two hours of weather bliss and a tailwind for the last half of the 45-mile jaunt.

September 8: I mowed the lawn and dug up a tree stump in the morning, expecting to take the day off from riding, but Beth at Bikes at Vienna contacted me to say that The Tank was ready for pick up from its annual maintenance at the B@V bike spa. I took the bike out for a test ride to check out its new smaller chainring and wider cassette, giving me, according to Beth, a low gear that was more than 16 percent lower than before. (From 40 inches to 27 inches for you gear heads.) The test ride on the Washington and Old Dominion trail ended up being a 30-miler, with the second half being wind aided. The lower gears will definitely be a real help to my back and knees.

It’s dark when I awaken now. The heat is backing off with the daylight. (With the exception of a 100-degree day on August 28.) The local school district cruelly sends kids back to school on August 19. I don’t think I ever started school before Labor Day. What’s worse is my birthday falls in the middle of August. I grew to dread it because there were only a couple of weeks left to summer vacation.

Around the time I turned 10 both my grandmothers and my godmother died in August and September. Ten-year olds don’t understand death, except for what they tell you in church. I spent several weeks bewildered by it all.

Relatives were giving me gifts at my paternal grandmother’s house before the wake. It was doubly weird since they had bought gifts, in an obviously distracted, perfunctory way, for a much younger kid. As I opened each gift, I “Thank you” while my brain was saying, “What am I supposed to do with this stuff?”

It was around this age that I got fat. Back to school shopping meant new clothing. My size was Husky. Really.

As for these days, I am now 69. Lord knows how that happened. My 68th and 69th years were the ones where my body decided that I was old. Bike touring became much harder. Going forward, I’ll have to modify my daily touring routine. No more 70-mile days in the mountains. Or on level ground, for that matter. During my 2022 tour to the Oregon coast, I encountered a man riding east somewhere near the Oregon/Idaho border. He was 70. He said that when you are young bike touring is fun; when you are 70, it’s work. Truth.

Bicycling

Despite my weary flesh, I still managed to bang out a 1,014-mile month. This was helped greatly by the fact that I did not take the last week of August off to help my daughter move in Connecticut. We hired movers for the big stuff. My days of lugging furniture down three flights of stairs are over. I stayed home and chopped roots and dug dirt for several days instead. I think my days of rootchopping are over too.

I did three rides of 60 miles or more. I took three zero day. I ended the month with 7,000.5 miles under my wheels. I’m on track for another 10,000-mile year.

Watching

Olympics: My wife doesn’t care much for sports but when the Olympics are on TV she becomes obsessed. I find them boring except for the truly exceptional athletes like Biles and Ledecky.

Movie: Hit Man – Netflix movie directed by Richard Linklater. Basically a star vehicle for Glen Powell, the leading man du jour. A funny, clever movie. Alas, Powell ain’t no Brad Pitt.

Baseball: The Nationals, fresh off another sell-off of talented veterans, played to their talent level. They have three or four very good young players – Garcia, Abrams, Wood, and Young – and a ton of talented young pitchers. At the end of the month they added Dylan Crews who seems like the real deal. Now all they needs is a veteran who can show them how to win. This could take a couple of years.

Bike Touring Video: The near-real-time video account of Mat Ryder’s cross country ride fascinated me. This is partly because he covers, in reverse, much of the 1,000+ miles of the TransAmerica Trail that I rode in 2022.

Reading

The Demon of Unrest is Erik Larson’s latest. It is an intimate look at the people involved in the attack on Fort Sumter that kicked off the Civil War. If you think of the United States as a single entity, you’ll find it interesting how culturally and politically different antebellum South Carolina was. And they were fixing for a fight for years.

Going Infinite by Michael Lewis chronicles the improbable rise and bewildering fall of Sam Bankman-Fried. SBF is one odd duck with no capacity for appreciating risk aversion. That fact, combined with the complete lack of financial controls in the crypto businesses he spawned, led to a financial catastrophe when the crypto bubble (temporarily) burst a couple of years ago. If high functioning autistic genius and the exciting world of financial controls excite you, this book is for you. Zzzzz.

I stumbled across this list of touring dos and donts on YouTube. It’s short and worth the time if you are new to touring, bikepacking or conventional.

A couple of caveats. Before you start, use a sewing tape (the kind that rolls up small) and measure your saddle height, distance from your saddle to your handlebars, and saddle set back. This will allow you to quickly replicate your set up in case a “helpful” bike mechanic moves things around.

Secondly, always bring at least two pairs of shorts and make sure you wash or rinse the pair you rode in each night. I bring a pair of synthetic underwear shorts in case both my bike shorts are out of commission.

Finally, I am a member of Warmshowers. Like the video people, I am an introvert and somewhat uncomfortable about using it. Warmshowers is an interesting service but can be unreliable. The app and website are glitchy. Potential hosts don’t always respond in a timely way. Also, be prepared for hosts that have, um, interesting ways of life. I once stayed with a person whose culture obsessed about the persecution of his protestant ancestors by the Catholic church in the middle ages. (Dude, my ancestors are Irish Catholics. Cry me a river.) Another time I noticed my host’s bookshelves held several volumes on polyamory. In the morning, I rolled over in bed and discovered a sex toy under the covers. No lie. (I escaped with my monogamy intact.)

This is a short post about two very unrelated topics.

Pedaling

Have you ever wondered what riding across the United States is like? You can save yourself a whole lot of pedaling by watching the videos of Mat Ryder as he rides from west to east. As of today, he has posted four “episodes’ each describing several days of riding. He’s an excellent commentator and videographer.

In between action shots, he talks to the camera, giving a spot-on description of each day’s travels and travails. Yes, there are plenty of miseries along the way but his camera captures so much of the beauty of his route. You can almost feel his relief as he reclines in a mountain river on a 100+ degree day. So far, he’s ridden the TransAm Trail from Astoria, Oregon to Hamilton. Montana, the reverse of the route I took in 2022.

He even uses a drone for some truly beautiful views from on high. (Sorry. These views are not visible to earthbound riders.) How the heck he does this is beyond me. He must spend an hour every day setting up shots of him riding past the camera and such.

Here’s Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdYErlkO2_g

The others are easily found on his YouTube page. Thanks to the folks at Bikes at Vienna for bringing this video series to my attention.

Paranoia

Today I became convinced that this blog had been hacked and that I was being stalked, online and in real life. As you may know, a few days ago as I was riding home on my recumbent, a stranger, a man in shorts walking a dog, called out to me by name. Of course, I know people read my blog but it’s quite unsettling for someone to know my first name as I don’t use it online very often.

Well, today I was finishing a ride about a mile from home. As I turned onto a street, I noticed a man in shorts walking on the sidewalk in my direction. He called out to me and used the word “husky”. I didn’t hear anything else he said but it immediately upset me.

Was this the same man as before?

Over the weekend I visited with an old friend in DC, about 18 miles from home. She was with her Siberian husky. I didn’t mention it to anyone outside my home so it seemed extremely improbable that the walker was referring to her dog.

A few days ago I drafted a blog post that briefly mentioned that the size of clothes for overweight boys in the 1960s was “husky”. Draft posts are not supposed to be visible to the public, so you can see that I was quite concerned. Had the walker hacked my blog?

I searched all over the WordPress site for information about security, privacy, and draft posts to no avail. I googled the topic and everything I found said that draft posts are not visible to the public.

I was totally puzzled until my daughter, a recent law school graduate, walked into the room.

“What shirt were you wearing on your ride?”

“The U Conn School of Law shirt you gave me.”

She laughed. U Conn’s sports teams are called the Huskies.

Derp.

I took The Mule to Bikes at Vienna for some TLC in late July. Among other repairs, the bike came back with new tires, a new chain, and a new cassette. The tires are 700 x 35 Schwalbe Marathons. They are not as flat resistant as the touring tires I normally use, but they roll much easier. My cassette has a tweak too. The big cog is now two teeth bigger, affording me a better climbing gear. It works well with the derailleur.

I took the bike out for a test ride on the W&OD Trail, starting in Vienna and ending in Purcellville some 33 miles away. I deliberately came to a stop at the bottom of a short, steep climb to test the new low gear. Thumbs up!

When I picked up The Mule, I dropped off The Tank, my Surly CrossCheck. The Tank and my back and neck were getting along fine until the saddle bolt snapped last week. I try to position the saddle the same on both bikes in terms of three dimensions: height, for/aft position, and tilt. I think I messed something up during the saddle repair. My last few rides made my back and neck grumpy. Once I get it back from the shop, I’ll get out the tape measure and replicate the saddle dimensions on The Mule.

The 66-mile jaunt came the day after a two-fer. I rode 30 miles on The Tank then mowed the lawn. The weather cooperated nicely but my back was not particularly happy about the mowing. Idiot that I am I did a second two-fer last Friday. I rode 30 miles round trip to Friday Coffee Club in DC on Little Nellie, my wee wheeled Bike Friday. Then I dealt with the remains of a stump that we had a tree service grind up.

The tree died from heat stress and carpenter ants. The stump grinders did a good job, but the pile of mulch mixed with dirt was quite big. In order to use that area of the yard, I had to remove the mess. It took me over three hours to dig it all up and move it to an inconspicuous place in the back yard. By the time I was done, I was bent over at a 45 degree angle. Over the next couple of days my hamstrings tightened. Owie.

Next week I go to Connecticut to help my daughter move. I think I’ll abstain from riding a bike that day, just sayin’.

Speaking of Friday Coffee Club, we were greeted by a very welcome surprise. Felkerino, co-founder of our weekly confab, arrived by bike. It was his first time riding since he was clobbered by a hit-and-run pick up driver more than eight months ago. We gave him a well-deserved round of applause.

During the last heat wave I discovered to my utter frustration that a couple of water fountains on the Mount Vernon Trail were turned off. Last week I rode by the fountain nearest my house and found a brand new water fountain with a built in bottle filler and doggy dish.

Of course, there is never good news without bad news on the trail. During a big storm last week a tree toppled straight across the brand new bridge over Dyke Marsh. Fortunately the decking survived but the side rails were pretty much vaporized.

Oh, and this happened.

Today the heat returned because it’s August, it’s DC, and the planet is melting. So I went for a 63-mile ride.

I drank enough to make my tummy slosh. I stopped for a real lunch. I did all the right things but with 10 miles to go I was gassed.

I stopped at a trailside water fountain, filled a water bottle, and dumped its contents on my head. Twice.

The ride was an out and back affair, mostly on trails. Home to Potomac Yard to Georgetown to Bethesda to Rock Creek Park to Garrett Park Road. Then I turned around and rode through the shade in Rock Creek Park to the Lincoln Memorial, crossed the Potomac, and took the Mount Vernon Trail home.

On the C&O I spotted a great blue heron and a downy egret. I took a picture of the latter. I think he was smiling for me.

On the way back near Kensington, Maryland I spotted a very cool carving of a tall tree stump.

Other than melting the ride home was uneventful until my saddle went bung.

I had been noticing some side to side play in my saddle over the past week. I tightened the seat post but that didn’t fix things. Then I tightened the leather on the saddle no change.

About eight miles from home I heard a POP and my saddle and its fixing hardware went off the back. As it turns out there is a single bolt that holds the saddle to the bike and allows for/aft adjustments and tilting adjustments. The bolt broke from metal fatigue. (You carry my butt for 30,000 miles and you’ll break too.)

I gathered all the parts and put my saddle in my pannier. I managed to ride the bike while sitting on the trunk bag on top of my rear rack. I was all stretched out and moving rather slowly but I managed to ride it to Big Wheel Bikes in Old Town.

Diego and his father (the shop owner, I think) helped me out. Dad is redesigning the shop. In the process he had just donated a bunch of random spare parts to a local bike co-op. Among the parts was mostly likely the bolt I needed. He managed to find an old saddle with a bolt that worked and we had my bike back on the road in no time.

This is the kind of bizarro mechanical failure that typically occurs in try the middle of nowhere on a solo bike tour. I’m lucky my bolt broke when it did.

Time to return to drinking all the liquids in the house. Is Guinness an electrolyte replacement drink?

We suffered through three heat waves here in the mid-Atlantic. Thank you, Willis Carrier for your clever invention.

Our home has been infiltrated by some tiny black flying bugs. They are numerous and annoying. Worse, though, are the two palmetto bugs we’ve had to slay. They look like enormous cockroaches. They crawl up the drywall. When you dislodge them the fly awkwardly for a few feet before crashing to the floor. Ayy! Very dramatic. Fortunately they have proven easy to kill. They don’t seem to be propagating, knock wood.

Watching

The Acolyte – This miniseries is the latest installment of the Star Wars franchise. Had it not been for the fact that my sister-in-law designed the costumes, I might have stopped watching after the first episode. The costumes were impressive. Alas, the show didn’t do a thing for me.

Sherlock – Who could resist Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson. This series (14 episodes, I think) is, but for one episode, set in modern London. Andrew Scott plays Moriarty like a cross between the Joker and Hannibal Lecter. What a contrast with his “Hot Priest’ in Fleabag. The series is uneven. Just as it starts to get formulaic after a few episodes, the stories become somewhat surreal.

Sports

Baseball – I attended one game amid the heat wave and had a most uncomfortable time sitting in the sun. I watched several games on TV but frankly this team is reverting to 2023 form. The Nats showed great promise a month ago but have succumbed to the grind of the long season, exposing their lack of depth and experience. They began to trade away good players to further stock their minor league system.

Olympics – We watched Olympics every night. The announcers suck. And, frankly, I don’t much care what happens except for Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles.

Reading

Table for Two by Amor Towles. I do more riding and napping than reading these days. Of course, you can’t go wrong with Amor Towles. His latest is a series of entertaining short stories and a novella. The latter is a note-perfect noir tale of blackmail in Hollywood in the 1930s.

Riding

My bike tour fiasco and the heat waves have undercut my biking mojo. I spent quite a few days riding Big Nellie, my recumbent, only to find that it exacerbated the nerve pain from my spinal stenosis. Still I managed to break the 51,000 mile threshold. Before going bent, I rode The Mule past the 76,000 mile mark. Last week I took it to the shop for some overdue TLC. They are going to put a different cassette on it that will make hills less challenging.

I tweaked the saddle positions on The Mule and The Tank. With The Mule under the knife, I rode the Tank for several days in a row expecting it to wreck my neck. Somehow the tweaks seemed to have lessened the neck issue. In the last week of the month, I rode The Tank, 40, 40, 81, 30, 50, and 38 miles on consecutive days. And to think I was on the verge of selling this bike.

The riding surge on The Tank combined with a botched blood donation (they could only get 1/5th of a bag out of me), boosted my miles for the month to 1000.5 miles.

I finished July at 5,991.5 miles, my lowest mileage at this time of year since 2021 at the end of the pandemic.

Unless I change my mind I’ve decided not to do the Natchez Trace this October. Way too much driving. I have a wedding in Massachusetts the weekend before. I’d have to drive about 20 hours there and back, then drive over 10 to Nashville a couple of days later, then ride to 10 hours to Natchez. Maybe next year.

The third heat wave finally ended and was followed by a day of heavy rain. Me, being a bear of little brain, did a 36-mile ride on The Tank. For about 20 miles I was dry. For the rest, not so much. The rain, as it often does, caused a stinging sensation in my eyes. So there I was pedaling along without being able to see in a driving rain. I survived. It was actually pretty comfortable in a t-shirt and shorts.

Today, I took Big Nellie out for its final ride in a while. The whole point of riding a recumbent, at least for most people, is to avoid pain in the neck and back. Alas, my stupid spinal stenosis makes riding Big Nellie somewhat uncomfortable. When I get off, my lower back aches. Life isn’t fair. I’m old. Yeah, well. Just for the heck of it, I installed my underseat rack. I don’t know if I will ever use it.

After my bike tour, I used some REI gear tape to cover the holes in my panniers. About half the repairs failed.

I must say that Big Nellie has been getting a ton of attention from bystanders recently. Ten years ago, before the days of e-bikes and scooters, recumbents were more common. Not anymore. So I get a lot of “Cool bike!” remarks as I spin my way through the local streets.

Oddly, a few days ago, I was riding Big Nellie about a mile and a half from home when someone yelled. “Hi, John.” I learned long ago to ignore anyone who calls my name out in a public space. John is such a common name that “Hey John” is nearly synonymous with “Hey you.”

Uncharacteristically, I did a u-turn to find out who called my name. It was a 30-something young man walking a dog to the front door of a house. He was wearing camo shorts and a short sleeved shirt that showed off a big tattoo on the upper half of his left arm. He had close cropped dark brown hair with a similarly close cropped mustache and beard. I didn’t recognize him so I asked, “Do I know you?” He responded, “I see you riding your bike all the time.” Not really an answer. How did he know my name? I asked him his name. “Art.”

I don’t know anyone named Art. I didn’t recognize him. I know I have my problems with name/face recognition, but this encounter was unsettling. I bid him good day and pedaled off. File this encounter under “Gives me the creeps.”

My fall riding schedule is starting to come together. I have signed up for my 16th 50 States Ride. The posse count is already up to nine or ten people with Chris, Michael, Kevin, Sara, Domitille, and, perhaps, Timothee in the fold. A few rookies are also coming. What fools these mortals be.

I am considering signing up for an Adventure Cycling van supported ride on the Natchez Trace in October. The price (over $3,300) and the camping-only aspect are off-putting, so I am hemming and hawing.

Meanwhile my bikes, The Mule and Little Nellie, are in need of some TLC. Big Nellie seems to be bullet proof. It has a chain that will not die. I am still on the fence about what to do with The Tank. Sell it? Re-configure it as a flat-handlebar bike?

I entered three bike giveaways this year. I lost all three. Scar was right. Life’s not fair, is it?

We are a couple of days into our third heat wave of the summer. It was 100 degrees or thereabouts today. Tomorrow will be, in the words (or letters) of 1970s and 1980s Boston weatherman Dick Albert, MOTS – more of the same.

It’s been so hot that everything has stopped growing. An old maple tree in our front yard has even jumped its mortal coil. Yesterday I mowed the lawn for the first time in over four weeks. This hasn’t happened in the 35 years we have lived here. Of course, it was brutally hot and humid; for the first half hour or so my heart rate was at a gallop even though I was moving very slowly. I took some breaks and drank some water and my heart rate came down from field mouse to sedentary suburban human. By the time I finished the task, my clothes were soaked in sweat. I could have gotten away with a few more days without mowing but I didn’t want to use up a lovely 90-degree day later in the week doing yard work.

Today, I took Big Nellie for a spin. I decided to stay near home and did my perimeter ride. The route takes me on suburban streets in a big circle, staying off the Mount Vernon Trail and never crossing US 1, the highway border to the west. Big Nellie dashed from the shade of one tree to the next for 33 miles. I intended to ride 40 but I ran out of water. I had planned on re-filling my water bottles at a fountain on the Mount Vernon Trail but our crackerjack National Park Service turned off the fountain. They even capped the doggy spigot. Monsters!

Like any sane person, I mostly have been staying indoors. I finished reading Amor Towles’s latest, Table for Two. It’s a collection of his short stories combined with a noir-ish novella. As with all his books, I liked it so much I was tempted to re-read it. Instead I went out and acquired a copy of Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, which is about Charleston SC at the start of the Civil War. I’d be 100 pages into the book if not for watching way too much television.

My wife and I are dutifully watching the latest Star Wars mini-series, The Acolyte, a who-done-it. It’s better than some of the other Star Wars series (e. g., The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Ahsoka) but not in the same league as the two Andor series. (Disclosure: my sister-in-law did the costume design for The Acolyte. The costumes are better than the plot.)

My daughter alerted us to the fact that the British series Sherlock is now streaming on Hulu. Benedict Cumberbatch plays the lead in a manner that recalls an Asperger-afflicted Mr. Spock on speed. Dr. Watson is played by Martin Freeman. (Bilbo Baggins to you Hobbit fans.) He’s nowhere near as bumbling as Nigel Bruce’s Watson. He steals many scenes with his reactions. The kicker is that Moriarty is played by Andrew Scott, who is wonderfully evil and utterly different from his Fleabag roll of the Hot Priest. (If you haven’t seen Fleabag, shame on you.)

Of course, I am also keeping track of my Washington Nationals. I went to one game a couple of weeks ago. The temperature in the stands was in the high 90s. Ugh. I have decided to wait a few weeks before returning to Half Street. Otherwise, I’ve been watching them on TV and, after signs of surprising competence, they have regressed to the mean, I’m afraid. They are a far cry from the glory days of Soto, Scherzer, Strasburg, Rendon, Turner and the rest. Fortunately, they appear to be loaded with young talent, which should start to pay dividends in the next few years. When I get bored, I check out the Orioles who are loaded with young talent and about three years ahead of Washington in their re-build.

I’ve also been poking around the interwebs for bike and music content. My two go-tos for bike touring how-tos are Bike Touring Mike and Sheelagh Daly on You Tube. For more adventurous content, you can check out Ryan van Duser. And for info about riding in the DC area and other bikey things, check out Rise and Shine Bicycling.

For music info, I’ve been watching Rick Beato and The Guitar Trooper for a while. Recently, I discovered Fathom. Beato’s lists are entertaining. (Best rock drum solos, Best bass guitar riff, etc., Best piano intro, and so forth), Fathom analyses songs, making interesting observations (And Your Bird Can Sing has guitar chord progressions that mimic a Mozart piano concerto, Who knew?) about the choices that artists make. The Guitar Trooper provides lists of trivia about songs. All three tend to focus a bit on The Beatles but they get into other bands as well. Beato apparently works with grunge and metal bands, as he seems to get off on guitar solos.

Tomorrow promises to be 102 degrees. I plan on riding. I’ll bring extra water.