Many years ago when I began riding to work in cold weather, I noticed that The Mule had developed an annoying ticking sound. The sound seemed to begin whenever I was pedaling hard. Did the bike have a bad ball bearing? Was some part of the bike too tightly or too loosely attached? Seeking the source of this annoyance, I checked my pedals and cranks and seat post and saddle and all sorts of things to no avail.

I let a couple of bike shop mechanics look the bike over. They were just as stumped as I was. One cold day as I was climbing up the final hill to the office I happened to look down and there was the culprit. My winter jacket had a draw cord around the waist. The ends of this cord had aglets, the little plastic thingies that go over the tips of shoelaces. When I pedaled hard, the ends of the draw cord would swing and the aglets would hit the top tube of my bike making that ticking sound.

The other day I came upon another mystery. I had The Mule on a workstand. The shifting on the rear cassette was sloppy. I had to constantly tweak the shifter to get the chain to settle on a cog. (One solution to this is to take the shifter out or index mode and revert to old fashioned friction shifting, but I digress.) The bike was angled down about 30 degrees so that I could fiddle with the dial adjuster that changes the tension on the shifter cable.

About two weeks ago, I had a Minimoto v-brake installed on my rear wheel. I was fed up with my old v-brake what simply would not stay in proper adjustment, causing one or both brake pads to rub on the rim of the rear wheel. Let me tell you, riding across Kansas with a rubbing brake as I did in 2019 and 2022 will ruin your whole week. When I picked the bike up at the bike shop, I spun the rear wheel. No rub! Finally.

So there I was tweaking the barrel adjuster on my gears when I noticed a sound from the rear wheel. It sure sounded like a rubbing brake pad. Sure enough, after only a week or so, my new, expensive rear brake was out of adjustment. Damn.

I was about to adjust the brakes when I decided to get the big rear saddle bag, a Caradice Nelson Longflap, out of my way. I took the bag off. Just before putting wrench to brake, I spun the rear wheel again. No rub!

I looked at the bag. I looked at the brake. Then it dawned on me. The wide, heavy bag was contacting the brake cable and causing it to actuate slightly which pushed one of the pads just barely onto the rim. Rather than adjust the brake, I swapped the Nelson Longflap with the smaller Carradice bag on Little Nellie. The smaller bag clears the brake cable. Problem solved. (Little Nellie’s smaller wheels mean its brake cable is much lower, allowing for plenty of clearance with the Longflap.)

I don’t use a big saddlebag on tours but I do put my tent and assorted other goodies on my rear rack. I suspect these may have been contacting the brake cable. In any case, the adjustment mechanism on the old brake was so beat up that I needed a new one anyway so I am not regretting the Minimoto purchase.

Sometimes it really is not about the bike.

Butt Bills

About a week ago I received a bill from an anesthesiologist. It said I owed a $55 co-pay for services rendered. Hmmm. I looked at the date of service. It was from my colonoscopy last December. This was my fourth separate bill for this procedure. One for the doctor who did the deed. One for the lab that processed my biopsy. One for a mysterious facilities fee. And this one.

I thought maybe this was a hoax because so much time had passed. I checked my insurance company website and, sure enough, there was the explanation of benefits. I paid it without complaint. It seems kind of ironic that a procedure that involves getting something shoved up my ass would result in bills that felt the same way.

Vaccines

Yesterday, I was signing up for a flu shot appointment online. The webpage asked me if I wanted to get the new RSV vaccine. I had seen articles online that said the shot can cost as between $150 and $300. I said yes but before scheduling the appointment I decided to check to see if my health insurance would cover it. The last thing I wanted to have happen would be to get a big bill months from now for the shot. I called my insurance company and asked what my financial responsibility would be. The agent had no clue. So I checked the website. Nothing. (Even a basic search of RSV came up empty.) Then I used the insurance app on my phone. Nothing. An hour of my life down the drain.

So as a last resort I went to my pharmacy, waited in line another 20 minutes, and asked the pharmacy clerk. This particular clerk never has impressed me with her knowledge. She looked up my information and told me that my flu shot was covered. I asked her when that was since I had had a Covid booster in August. Perhaps I had a forgotten about a flu shot at that time. She was referring to my 2022 flu shot.

Now what does my 2022 flu shot have to do with anything? She told me it was paid by Medicare. I informed her that I only have Medicare Part A, which covers hospitalization expenses. She said, “That’s who we billed.” Flu shots are covered by private insurance under the Affordable Care Act. She clearly had no idea what she was talking about. I thanked her for her time and left.

It turns out that there is some question about the safety and efficacy of having the flu and RSV shots at the same time. I think I’ll go get my flu shot somewhere else and ask about RSV there.

Competent IRS Help

Today, I needed to check with the Internal Revenue Service to see if I had an estimated tax payment scheduled. I went to the IRS website and tried to log in but the system didn’t recognize my userid and password. Hmmm.

The website told me that I had to use a new system to create a new, more secure access to my account. This system involved me uploading photos of my drivers license, front and back, as well as providing the usual personal information. I went through the process and the system told me it could not verify my identity. So I tried again. Same result. I tried a third time, this time orienting my license photo in landscape mode. No dice. (My guess is that one of two things tripped up the system. The Department of Motor Vehicles of Virginia has listed my first and middle names as my first name. So my license doesn’t match my tax records. Another possibility is that the phone service I was using was under my wife’s name.)

The IRS website has an option of doing a video conference with a human. So I selected that option. After 15 or 20 minutes of waiting, an agent came on the screen and told me to turn on my computer camera and microphone. Alas, my microphone doesn’t work. She figured out that I was struggling and told me to switch to my cellphone.

This worked. I could see and hear each other.

What she needed to do was to verify my first and middle name (she corrected my records) and to see me hold up my license and passport. This allowed her to verify my identity. She was efficient and pleasant. Once we switched to my phone, the whole process took less than five minutes. All that money spent on new IRS personnel apparently has its benefits.

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.

It was a light rain. The kind that makes roads surprisingly slick. As I came down the Mount Vernon Trail from Alexandria I could see that traffic was backed up on both sides of the adjacent George Washington Memorial Parkway.

This could only mean one thing.

After a mile I came to the intersection between the Parkway and Belle View Boulevard. There was a three-car crash.

The public has been begging the Parkway to redesign this intersection because of the high incidence of crashes. A few years ago rather than putting in a traffic signal or a roundabout, they put down some paint, some flex posts, and some stop signs making the intersection practically incomprehensible to drivers.

Parkway management is concerned about retaining the park-like ambiance of the Parkway. I could be wrong but smashed up cars don’t seem to be consistent with that concept.

What’s even more alarming is the fact that pedestrians and bicyclists have to negotiate this intersection without any protection. Paint, flex posts, and stops signs are not enough. We need an overpass.

Product Testing and Wildlife Spotting

The other day I rode 24 miles to Bethesda, Maryland to pick up the touring bike shoes that I had ordered. They look like everyday street shoes but are a bit stiffer in the sole to avoid pedaling fatigue.

I put them on and rode east 13 miles to drop some old tubes off at a friend’s house in Hyattsville. The Google routed me back and forth across the Beltway. At one point I stopped to check my bearings on my phone. I heard a rustle in the greenery next to me on the side of the road. I looked over and there was a deer about three feet away, staring at me. I stared back. The deer didn’t flinch it just turned its head and started munching on some vines. Deer take lunch breaks. Who knew?

(This wildlife close encounter follows one I had earlier in the week near home. Three wild turkeys, an adult and two young-uns, were ambling about in a yard. In 34 years, I’ve never seen a turkey in this area. Weird.)

The ride to Hyattsville was surprisingly enjoyable for this section of car-happy Maryland. I ended up taking Sligo Creek Parkway about seven miles. Shade. Stream. Hardly any cars. Not too shabby.

After I dropped the tubes off and googled a route to home, I discovered that my friend lives a quarter mile from the route of the annual Cider Ride. In five minutes, I was on autopilot. I arrived home after 58 miles.

The ride was part of a 100-mile test of the new rear wheel on The Mule. As far as I can tell, the wheel performed fine. I am still getting used to the sexy buzzing sound that the new rear hub makes when I glide.

The shoes worked fine but after a subsequent 30-mile ride my neuroma pain came back. I decided to try loosening the laces across the bridge of the foot. Today I rode 30 miles and haven’t had a pain recurrence. Knock wood and cross my toes.

Bagging All 50 States – The Event

The 50 States Ride is starting to take shape. I signed up and have three other people riding with me. I expect that by the day of the event next month, I’ll be riding with several more victims…I mean, participants. This will be my 15th time. (This year is the 20th 50 States Ride.) It is suspected that I have ridden it as a paying customer more than anyone else. (There are a few people who have volunteered as course marshals that may have done it more.)

Bagging All 50 States – The Real Ones

I am almost over my post-tour recovery. The physical part is done. (I gained back 10 pounds.) The mental part is the hard part. I have to forget about the hassle of arranging lodging every night and staying in sketchy motels, the brutal climbs, the rain, the mud, the grime, the nasty hike over the Paw Paw tunnel, etc. I’m sure I’ll get my mojo back in a few more weeks.

There are 12 more states for me to conquer – 13 if you count Kentucky which I have only ridden a mile in. I am contemplating using the Natchez Trace to pick off Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama. With a little wandering I could add Louisiana, Arkansas and Kentucky to the total. Amazingly there is a website that provides specifics about places to stay and camp all along the Trace.

Another possibility would combine South Dakota and Nebraska. This would involve Adventure Cycling’s new Parks, Peaks, and Prairies route. Highlights would include the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, the Mickelson Trail, Devil’s Tower and, well, something or other in Nebraska.

A couple of other ideas involve the southwest and south. I could take Route 66 from Santa Monica to northern Arizona. There I’d take a side trip to see the Grand Canyon. After a bit more Arizona rock gawking, I would head across New Mexico, the Texas panhandle, Oklahoma, and, if I haven’t already done so, Arkansas. Alternatively, I could do the Adventure Cycling Southern Tier Route from San Diego to Mississippi then ride the Natchez Trace as described above.

The idea here would be to string together multiple states while keeping the tour length manageable. If I could pick off all these I could put Little Nellie in its suitcase and fly to Alaska for the big finish.

Logistics are troublesome. As is my advancing age. Then you have to factor in climate change. And lions and tigers and bears…

Somedays things just seem to be going great until they’re not.

Take my shoe shopping trip this week for example.

I have EEEE feet. It’s a source of life-long hassle. Back in the day, you could go to a shoe store and a old salesman would measure your feet then fetch some shoeboxes from the back room which was lined from floor to ceiling with shoes of every size and width. Then along came the internet and killed all the shoe stores. (Don’t even get me started about book stores, music stores, telephones that you could communicate clearly with.)

I don’t use clipless pedals so I am always on the lookout for bike shoes with a flat bottom and a wide toe box. Twenty years ago a company called Lake made such a thing. Of course, once I realized how much I like their shoe, they stopped making it. I should have learned from my running buddy Tom. When he found a running shoe he liked, he’d buy ten pairs. (Tom ran 70 to 90 mile per week in support of a bodacious ice cream habit.)

My Lake shoes fell apart but just in the nick of time Shimano started making shoes to my liking. Over the course of a few years, I bought three pairs. They are all a bit different because Shimano can’t leave good enough alone. My orange pair died a hero on my 2019 tour. My black pair, the oldest, is on its last legs. My green pair, which I wear most often because they are only five years old, is starting to die.

I googled touring bike shoes and found a bike shop in Bethesda, Maryland that has a Shimano mountain bike shoe in my size. A day later, I hopped on Bike Nellie bound for Terrapin Cycles, some 23 miles from home.

It was a beautiful day, the day after a nasty storm, when the humidity broke and temperatures moderated. Ahhh. I reached the bike shop and tried on the shoes. They were pretty good. A bit tight. Stiff. The soles had a cut out for clipless pedals. My three Shimano shoes all have a rubber patch that covers this cut out. Not this pair. I was about to settle for second best when the sales person told me that his boss had a different model that I might like.

Boss was wearing them. They had flat bottoms and a wide forefoot. He got online and found that Shimano was selling them at half price to make way for next year’s model. He ordered me a pair. I’ll be riding back up next week to try them on. Toes crossed.

A few minutes later I was waiting for my food order at a local eatery when I noticed that I had an email response from the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA). I had tried to sign up for the 50 States Ride in September but WABA had failed to send me the code for a $10 discount for members. The email contained the code.

Good weather. The prospect of new shoes. A $10 discount. Life is good.

I took off on Big Nellie going downhill with a tailwind. Seriously. Life is good.

There I am having a splendid day when I feel a hot sensation on the back of my right hand. There was yellow-ish spot on the back of my black glove.. Apparently a bird had decided to shit on me. I pulled over to clean off my glove when I realized the bird had conducted a left-to-right strafing run. I had yellow-ish bird shit on my shorts and t-shirt.

Roseanne Rosannadanna was right. It’s always something.

And another thing…

A couple of days later I was doing some basic maintenance on my bikes. I had bought some cheap plastic fenders for Little Nellie and put them aside after I had difficulty mounting the rear one. Today I managed to put it on with very little difficulty.

Since I was doing maintenance anyway, I fixed a problem with the front brake. It was making a strange noise when I applied the brake. It turns out I have cartridge brakes on this bike. The pads slide into a metal holder and are secured in place by a metal pin. The pins on both brake pads had slipped out, causing one of them to contact the sidewall of the tire whenever I braked. A push from the flat side of a screwdriver fixed the problem.

Next up was chain cleaning and lubing. I did this to three bikes, the last one being my CrossCheck. I noticed the front tire was low on air. I had filled it only a few days ago. I refilled it and noticed that the pin inside the tube valve was bent causing a leak. I took the tire off and pulled a new tube out of the bag on the rear rack. The tube had a puncture. I pulled the patch kit out of the bag. The glue in the patch kit had dried.

I have a bag full of old tubes that I had patched. Every one of the tubes had a Schrader valve which is too wide for the hole in the rim of the CrossCheck.

So I found a tube with a presta valve in The Mule’s saddle bag and used that. Of course, I put the tire on backwards and had to re-mount the tire. After losing skin from both thumbs, I finally got the tire back on.

It’s time to go shopping for tubes and patch kits.

Anybody need a 700×35 Schrader valve tube? I have a few.

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I have four bikes. I try to rotate using them so I don’t wear them all out at once. This keeps riding fresher and spreads my maintenance cost over the course of a year or more. Lately I’ve been failing at this pretty badly at this.

In the last couple of weeks all four of my bikes have hit a 1,000-mile milestone. The Mule hit 73,000 miles on July 29. My Crosscheck hit 27,000 miles on July 31. Little Nellie hit 24,000 miles on August 5. And yesterday Big Nellie hit 49,000 miles. I seem to be averaging between 2,000 and 3,000 miles a year on each bike.

I have 27,000 miles to go before reaching 200,000 miles. This doesn’t include the Raleigh Gran Prix I rode for 13 years and my Trek 12,00 that I rode for another ten or so. Nor does it include all the miles on the Trek and Big Nellie on the resistance trainer in the winter time.

Still, I think it would be pretty cool if I could pull off the 200,000 mile trick. One complicating factor is that I need to be able to replace my odometers as they die. Finding new computers into which I can enter the miles from expired bike computers is getting harder to do as the bike consumers of the world transition to GPS devices that cost a fortune. (Call me crazy but I object to paying more for a bike computer than I did for my bike. )

Allowing for engine depreciation, I figure I can pull this 200,000 mile rabbit out of my hat in about four years or so.

Riding

July was an eventful month. I finished my 2023 bike tour with a mad dash from Pittsburgh to DC. The last week included a day of slogging through mud on the C&O canal and pushing my bike up and over the Paw Paw tunnel detour. The next day I ran into my friend Kevin in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. In a way these two days summarized the entire 2,600+ mile ramble through the northeastern US. Ups and downs.

Shortly after arriving home, my son arrived from Thailand. We hadn’t seen him in four years. We went for bike rides and took in a baseball game. He had an interesting take on the pitch clock in baseball. He doesn’t like it because it takes time away from the social aspect of attending a game. Go figure. He’s currently doing a motorcycle tour of Romania. (And you think my bicycle tours are insane!)

I cracked 1,000 miles – 1,105.5 to be exact – for third consecutive month. The Mule crossed 73,000 miles in the process. The Crosscheck crossed 27,000 miles on the last day of the month (with a 70-mile assist from my son). Two bikes and 100,000 miles. Dang.

I took The Mule in for post ride TLC and the mechanic found the rear hub to be damaged. As luck would have it the replacement part is no longer available so I’m replacing it with a bomb proof sealed bearing hub. I should have done this before the tour but I know I would have blanched at the expense. In any case, the only thing I’m planning to do to The Mule this winter is to upgrade the rear brake.

The month ended with a ride to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in DC. The flowers were well past peak but there were still a few gems to appreciate.

Viewing

I attended two baseball games at Nationals Park. I discovered at one game that Row N Section 204 is nicely shaded shaded area, good to know for those sunny, day games. My son and I sat 20 rows back from the Nationals dugout and I caught him a t-shirt during a between-innings toss.

I watched two Marvel productions. Ant-Man and The Wasp Quantumania was incomprehensible nonsense. Whatever happened to simple good guys vs bad guys stories? Secret Invasion was a Marvel mini-series echoing the darkness of Andor. Lots of ruthless killing with little warning. Bad guys who look like good guys. And a scene stolen straight out of the recent Luther movie: Nick Fury gets his mojo back by changing into his old clothes. Best thing about the series: Olivia Colman playing the head of MI6 (M anyone?) with ruthless charm. She can do anything.

By far the best thing I watched was Oppenheimer. Intense. The Oscars won’t take long next year. They’ll just wheel the awards on stage and tell the cast and crew to come and get their bling. Actor (Cillian Murphy), Supporting Actor (Robert Downey, Jr.), Director, Screenplay, Editing, Score. Picture.

Reading

Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin is a nonfiction account that uses paleontology and genetics to demonstrate how humans, fish, and other animals are sprung from the same stuff. A bit like an overly long National Geographic article. It’s amazing how far genetics has come since the double helix was discovered in the early 1950s.

I have edited my blog posts from my 2023 bike tour and put them on journal form on Cycleblaze.com. Did all my typos and autocorrects drive you mad when you read my posts. Well, I think I’ve corrected them all. Okay, I probably missed a few and made a few new goofs. Also, I am aware that the title images on Cycleblaze are not right side up. I have no idea why this happened but the website administrator is working on a solution.

Anyway, relive the excitement of me slogging up hills in the rain for six weeks if you wish.