Author: Rootchopper
A Moving (and Mowing) Experience
The Move
The day finally came when we moved our daughter’s belongings to her apartment in West Hartford, about a mile away from the law school she’ll be attending. We didn’t know the apartment number or the access code to the building until a couple of days before we left so the prelude to the move has been a bit more stressful than expected. We also learned that her apartment is on the 3rd floor of a building without an elevator. What fun.
My wife and daughter loaded the 10-foot rental truck and the back of my wife’s Subaru Outback on Friday afternoon. I was spared this part of the work because my wife is the jenga ninja when it comes to packing stuff into cars and trucks. The truck was only about 1/2 to 1/3rd full, but everything was covered in furniture pads and jammed together so as to be stable in transit.
Just before 7 am on Saturday, I took off in the truck bound for Connecticut. My wife and daughter followed in the Outback about an hour later.
I was anxious about the drive, not having driven a truck of any sort since I moved to the DC area decades ago. No worries. Everything went smoothly for 40 miles when the tire pressure warning light came on. No bueno. I pulled into a truck stop and visually inspected the tires. They looked normal. I topped off the gas tank and hit the road. The idiot light came on and went off, probably a bad sensor. I checked again in Delaware then forgot about it.
I had to drive I-95 most of the way to Hartford because the rental contract penalized rather severely for extra mileage. Also, many of the alternative routes were for passenger cars only.
I was cooking with gas until I made it through the toll booths at the GW Bridge into New York City. That’s when I encountered a 60-mile traffic jam. Deep breaths. After two hours of stopping and going, I lucked out. The last 60 miles all the way to Hartford were uneventful. The Google, however, guided me to the address of my daughter’s apartment in Hartford. Luckily the actual destination in West Hartford was only a couple of miles distant.
After a little over 7 hours I arrived. Having had nothing but snacks to eat since leaving home, but wanting to avoid driving the truck, I skipped lunch and started to unload. Having parked about 100 feet from the door, I was pretty pleased to have packed a hand truck from home. This allowed me to shuttle batches of small items to the base of the stairs. I then carried the items up the 5 half-flights to her apartment. Over and over and over. Bicycle legs and lungs for the win.
I had made the last-second decision not to wear hiking boots for the move. Instead I pulled some old Hoka running shoes that my doctor had recommended to mitigate stenosis pain. With their absurdly thick midsole, they feel like pillows. They worked amazingly well. I didn’t have the slightest bit of back trouble during the move.
The building is old but her one-bedroom apartment has an updated kitchenette and bathroom. And the place is huge. After making 20 or so trips up and down the stairs I barely put a dent in filling the place.
I was pretty gassed by the time my wife and daughter showed up and we began the process of moving the heavy stuff. We had one full-sized mattress, the pieces to a platform bed (it disassembles), two book cases, a table, a heavy box or two, and five boxes for a yet-to-be assembled Ikea dresser. We made relatively fast work of things and in a couple of hours finished getting it all upstairs. At this point we were all exhausted.
My level of exhaustion was close to that from my ride across Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California in 2019. My body had nothing left. I was doubled over in fatigue.
We took the truck to our assigned drop off facility, 11 miles away in Manchester. It was closed. My daughter tried to follow the website instructions to do an after-hours drop off but was stymied by the software. I tried on my phone and scored a generational triumph as I managed to get the software to work. After 20 minutes of cussing, answering questions, and taking photos that would have made Officer OB proud, we bid the monster farewell and left for our hotel, sore and utterly knackered
After showering we drove to a pizza place in downtown Hartford and had a wonderfully greasy pepperoni pie. We would have eaten anything to be honest but it was staggeringly good.
Desert was cheesecake and Advil.
On Sunday we drove to the Quaker Diner in West Hartford and hoovered us a fine breakfast. Then we made a Target run and went back to the apartment for more fun with assembling the dresser and setting things up. The dresser turned out to be your basic Ikea disaster. Two pieces were damaged in the process so they would make the trip back to home for replacement.
After a few hours we needed more shelving paper so I returned to Target and searched for lunch. Whole Foods was a fail. The bagel shop next door was a fail. Finally, I settled for a Subway a mile from the apartment. It was staffed by two young men who were either stoned or had the IQs of zoo animals. They messed up the order twice. I played supervisor and they finally got it together.
After eating we finished setting things up and with the two broken dresser panels in hand we left the apartment at 6 pm. An apartment this big needs a sofa so it was off to some furniture stores. At the second store we found a sectional sofa that would make it through the narrow doors of the building. It will be delivered thank god.
At 7 pm. we hit the road for home. In the rain. Near Southport our journey slowed to a crawl again. This time for about 45 miles. At least we were in the Outback on the truck-free Merritt Parkway. Once into Westchester County the traffic abated. Still, the old parkways of this area of New York can be nerve wracking, especially in the dark and in the rain. We lucked out and drove across the Bronx and onto and across the GW Bridge without the slightest back up. The rest of the drive home involved minimal traffic delays even in the mixing bowl in Delaware. We made it home before 1 am. Suffice it to say, traffic from Newark to DC moved well above the posted speed.
I was a zombie from driving. Despite taking two Advil PMs I couldn’t fall asleep. I finally conked out around 3:30. After five hours I woke up. Groggy and sore everywhere. It may just be that moving is a young man’s game.
I ate breakfast then, naturally, went for a bike ride. I was so out of it that I actually became disoriented riding on familiar neighborhood streets. Three separate times I literally had no idea where I was. Somehow I managed to ride 30 miles without colliding with a tree. It’s a wonder that I found my way back home, I showered and slept for three hours. Dead to the world.
The Mow
You don’t really feel the pain of an extraordinary physical effort until the second day afterwards. Tuesday morning came and everything hurt. Now I could have taken a nap but I am after all a few spokes shy of a wheel. I decided that it would be a great idea to do some yard work in stifling heat and humidity. Perhaps the move damaged my brain.
I began by building up a sweat by trimming some bushes in the yard. Then I mowed my crabgrass and zoysia lawn that had grown incredibly dense in less than two weeks. The lawn was so thick that the mower bogged down several times. I was not having fun.
After trimming and blowing, I spread weed and feed on the lawn. This will confuse the lawn because it’s mostly weeds. (Do we grow or die? What does this jerk want? Let’s give him more crabgrass.) By the time I was done, my clothes and skin were covered in sweat and weed and feed. They don’t show you this on the TV ads for do it yourself lawn care.
After a quick shower and lunch I realized that my body needed more abuse so I went back outside for a bike ride. I was no longer groggy but my legs felt like lead, Normally I loosen up within a couple of miles of riding but on this day it took me 15 miles before my legs had any pop to them at all. With the heat index well over 100 degrees F, I rode another 15 miles. Along the way I downed four large bottles of water. My tummy was sloshing the whole way.
Years ago we visited some friends at their townhouse in Maryland. They had a new deck. I asked if they built it themselves. One of them replied, “Oh no. That’s why God invented money.”
Someday I’ll get religion.
Baseball, Bike Shop, and an Invisible Totem Pole
The other night I went to the baseball game at Nationals Park with my daughter. She drove to the Metro; I rode my bike. On my way to the park I spotted three women approaching from the north on the Mount Vernon Trail. As we passed, the lead woman, who was wearing reflective sunglasses that obscured her face, looked startled, and smiled. Hmmm? It turned out to be my friend Emilia, who is back on the bike after a medical crisis. Seeing her, and her reaction when she recognized me, made my day.
The game was fun even thought the home team lost. Typically we try to go to games when there is no rain or sauna (DC summers, don’t you know) in the forecast. The weather on this night was perfect. The only sour note was an ongoing verbal scrum between a Nats fan seated in front of us and some Phillies fans off to our left. The Nats fan just wouldn’t quit carping at them and she really spoiled the end of the game for us. (They say you can complain to an usher but she was obviously pals with the usher who was standing nearby witnessing the entire thing.) No more Section 319 for me, even at $12 a seat. (For the record, we paid more to see the Class AA Hartford Yard Goats earlier in the summer.)
After the game I rode home in the dark. The Nationals traded away most of their star players last week so attendance was understandably low. That meant that post-game car traffic was light which made the first two miles of the ride not nearly as stressful as usual.
Once I got to the Jefferson Memorial it was all trails, mostly the Mount Vernon Trail, for five miles to Old Town Alexandria. After a mile through Old Town, I was back on the MVT for another five or six miles. Lacking street lights, the MVT makes for an interesting riding experience. I just follow the big white ball made by my headlight. There were no critters to deal with on this ride home but I’ve seen deer and bunnies (their bouncing eyes at least) in the past.
Today, I drove Big Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent, back to Bikes at Vienna for some follow up work. It’s getting a stem riser which we hope will make the steering more like it was before the fork broke. Dr. Beth is on the case. She’s going to replace the front brake pads because the old ones are causing much noise and vibration. On the whole, I am quite happy that the bike is working so well.
As for Beth, she is recovering from a nasty crash on her recumbent. After a few days wearing a full leg splint, she has transitioned to a rather sturdy looking knee brace. She’s using a folding wheelchair to get around the shop, stylin’ in her bike shop cap. It was good to see her doing so well. I am sure she’ll be back to her old self in a couple of weeks.
After dropping off the bike I rode my CrossCheck into DC to see a totem pole that was recently shipped her from the Pacific Northwest. My friend Joe Flood posted a picture of a bird’s head from the pole which was awaiting assembly and had been placed in pieces in a park near the Interior Department. We are having a rare nice-summer-weather wave hereabouts so the ride to DC into a headwind was delightful. On the way I rode past Belle Haven Country Club. Along the roadside I spotted seven errant golf balls. Rich people suck at golf, apparently. I picked up five and left two that were hard to get to.
All the way to DC the sky was filled with puffy white clouds and an unusual amount of haze, no doubt from the wildfires out west. The weather and the ride were so pleasant that I didn’t even mind dealing with tourists who were wandering around the Lincoln Memorial like they were stoned.
I rode around and around the neighborhood near the nearby Interior Department passing the Federal Reserve, the State Department, the Institute of Peace, the American Pharmacists Association, the Pan American Health Association, the General Services Administration, as well as the headquarters of both the American Red Cross and Daughters of the American Revolution. Yeah, this is DC. Alas, there was no totem pole. Nor were there any totem pole pieces. The parks interspersed throughout the area were occupied by a few dozen tents housing homeless people. I thought about asking them if they had stashed the totem pole pieces in their tents then thought better of it. Maybe the totem pole is invisible.
Having failed to find the totem pole I rode past the White House. Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the president’s house has been milled and will soon receive some fresh pavement. Maybe then they can take away the remaining “bike rack” security barriers so that people can see the White House properly.
I rode down the 15th Street cycletrack to head back home. Police had stopped traffic near the entrance to the Ellipse (and the south side of the White House complex) to allow a motorcade to come through. There must have been a dozen huge black SUVs, one with a film camera and camera person on the roof. There was no way to tell if the vehicles carried real politicos or actors.
Before heading home, I took a spin around Hains Point. It’s 3 1/2 miles down to the point and back with hardly any traffic. On the return from the point I picked up a sixth golf ball that had been sent amiss by a duffer on the East Potomac Park course. Near the tennis courts, I passed up a tennis ball on the side of the road. Although I rode by some basketball courts later, I didn’t find any stray basketballs.
Once past the Jefferson Memorial, I had a tailwind all the way home. Just before reaching my house, I spotted a bicyclist coming my way in the middle of our quiet side street. He was riding along side a runner. As I passed them I could see that the runner was a teenaged girl in a serious running outfit. She was cruising and had perfect form. This kid obviously has talent! I yelled, “You’re flying!” as I rode by and she and the rider, who must have been her proud papa, gave me a big smile.
I added the golf balls to the bag of balls in my shed. I haven’t counted them in a while but I would guess there are 50 or 60 balls in the bag. Anybody want a dozen?
Step by Step, Inch by Inch – July
July is the month here in DC when your body learns how to embrace the three Hs: hazy, hot, and humid. I didn’t do any monster rides this month but I was consistent. I rode 27 out of 31 days, with two 60-mile rides. The rest of the rides were between 28 and 41 miles. Day in. Day out.
I rode all four bikes. Big Nellie returned to the fold after a near catastrophic fork failure. Sadly, the bike appears to be jinxed as Beth, the mechanic who worked on the bike, crashed her recumbent just a few days after I picked mine up at Bikes@Vienna. Luckily, she didn’t break any bones but soft tissue injuries aren’t any fun and I wish her a speedy recovery.
I started the month riding 125 miles on The Mule until it hit 62,000 miles on the odometer. I switched to my CrossCheck for another 598.5 miles. When Big Nellie returned I rode it for 239.5 miles. Despite needing a new cassette and a longer stem, I’m pretty happy with how it rides. My last bit of riding was a 3-mile ride to and from the auto mechanic on Little Nellie, my Bike Friday.
I rode to one ballgame, one happy hour, and two coffee get togethers. I have to admit that I am so used to not socializing that interacting with people feels awkward.
I did quite a lot of riding considering I had a cold for the entire month. It wasn’t Covid, just sinuses going haywire.
So that makes 957 miles for the month. I am now only 69 miles short of a 10,000-mile pace. There’s blood in the water for this mile’s shark.
I’ve ridden 5,579 miles this year.
August is sure to be a challenging month as it will involve moving my daughter to law school which will cost me a handful of riding days. Hopefully, I won’t mess up my back in the process.
When I wasn’t riding I read three books. The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton was Groundhog Day meets Agatha Christie. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir was an entertaining follow up to The Martian, though not nearly as good. Turtles All the Way Down by John Green (who wrote The Fault in Our Stars) is a young adult novel set in Indianapolis. I greatly enjoyed it. (Haven’t read a book of his I didn’t like.)
I also did some TV watching. I saw about 20 Nationals games before they collapsed in a heap and were blown up at the trade deadline. I watched the Loki series which I found disappointing, except for Owen Wilson’s performance. McCartney 1-2-3 was an entertaining 6-part conversation between Paul McCartney and Rick Rubin. It’s a must for any Beatles fan even if you’ve heard most of the anecdotes (which I had).
The rain has stopped. Time to go for a bike ride.
Crashes
My blogging buddy Brittany asked me a question about crashing on a recumbent versus a standard bike. It got me to thinking.
When I crashed on Big Nellie, my recumbent, I was rolling and turning toward a slight downhill to my left. I hit a root heave, a bump perpendicular to my line of travel. The impact of wheel on root caused my fork to break. The handlebars just sort of disengaged and the wheel turned all the way around to the left. The bike and me crashed to the right side.
Crashing on a recumbent is usually much less painful than on a standard bike, primarily because you have a much shorter distance to fall. When people crash on a standard bike, their instinct is to stick their arm out to brace themselves. This often results in a broken collarbone.
On a recumbent you’re usually on the ground before you can react. Sometimes recumbent riders react by putting their foot down. This is a bad idea. The downside to such recumbent crashes is something called leg suck. If one of your feet comes off the pedal, and you’re moving fast, your foot will be drawn (or sucked) under the bike. This can result in a rather abrupt broken leg. I’ve had my foot slip of the pedal at speed. It hit the ground with such force that it was very hard to avoid leg suck. I had to lift my foot straight up until the bike slowed. It was scary.
Sometimes you can tell you’re about to crash. On a standard bike you want to take the impact on the outside of your upper arm and roll when you hit the ground. Bicycle racers practice this. Me, not so much.
On a recumbent, you want to ride the crash out. Just keep your feet on the pedals and your hands on the handlebars and, Just before contact with the ground, stick your butt cheek out to absorb the force of the crash. I’ve done this a few times and it works amazingly well. When the fork broke this summer, however, I was on the ground so fast I couldn’t react.
I have had a fork break once before. I had taken my trusty old 1978 Raleigh Grand Prix out for a ride in Arlington VA. This bike had survived innumerable crashes and road salt from six New England winters. I rode it down a hill to the Potomac River, then, a while later, rode back up the hill. At the top, something felt odd about the steering so I stopped. Then I heard a CLANG! My right fork blade just fell off onto the pavement! I am very fortunate this didn’t happen going down that hill.
An odd feeling is typical of steel tubing. It gets squishy before it fails. A friend was riding a tour on the Natchez Trace when his bike felt funny. He stopped and noticed that his top tube had broken, metal fatigue caused by a crash. Eek. Unlike steel, aluminum tubing just snaps without warning. It can ruin your whole day.
Frame and fork breaks are pretty rare, thankfully. A more common cause of a crash is low tire pressure. I was riding home from work one day and started to turn onto a bike trail. In an instant, I found myself on the ground and in a world of hurt. My front tire had gone flat and, as I turned, my rim made contact with the pavement and I went down. Hard. Flat back tires are not so traumatic. Usually your back wheel starts to fishtail. This happened to me on the Mount Vernon Trail while riding Big Nellie. The back end started to wobble so I just started to glide and went straight off the trail onto a grassy area. I didn’t even tip over. Just a nice controlled stop. We all should be so lucky when we crash.
Check your tires before you ride. Every time.
Strange Digression: Long ago I interned at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regional office in San Francisco. I took an articulated bus home to my place in Berkeley one night. I sat in the rear of the bus, beyond the center hinge. We were on the old Oakland-Bay Bridge when the back end of the bus started to swing violently from side to side. My mind flashed to Def Con One: EARTHQUAKE!
Seeing as how the bay was waaaay dooown theeere, the other passengers, who, unlike me, almost certainly knew what an earthquake felt like, freaked out and yelled at the driver to slow down. The next day at the office I mentioned this episode to the staff, one of whom was an expert on tires. He said that the cause of the swaying was probably underinflated rear tires.
Hockey Tape, Duct Tape, Carbon Fiber and Beth
About a month ago, Big Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent, broke. Literally. The front fork broke off. While I was riding.
This was not fun.
Easy Racers, the manufacturer, has apparently gone out of business. Long before that happened, they put out a recall on the fork on my bike. My fork had something like 30,000 miles on it. What me worry? Doh.
With little hope of success, I conducted a nationwide search for a replacement fork. After a few recumbent bike shops sent me regrets, I had just about given up hope when Peter Stull from Bicycle Man shop in Alfred NY told me he had just what I needed. To be sure that it would work, I had Peter talk directly to Tim Fricker, owner of my somewhat (23-miles away) local recumbent shop, Bikes at Vienna. They determined that the fork would work on my bike but I’d have to replace the headset and the stem. I took Big Nellie out to Vienna and dropped it off.
After the usual delays due to summer backlogs, pandemic supply chain problems, and such, repairs began. Beth, who like Tim and me owns an Easy Racers recumbent, worked on my bike. In addition to replacing the fork, I asked her to replace my chains (it’s a long bike) and the cassette. I also figured I might as well replace the grip shifters that were in very rough shape. For the last year or so, the rubber grippy part was worn off. I’d “fixed” them with hockey tape.
During her work, Beth discovered that my bike needed a whole bunch of other repairs. (Deferred maintenance is my middle name.) The middle chainring was bent. (How I could do this without bending the other two chainrings is a wonder.) One of the crank arms was also bent. My plastic rear fender mount was cracked. (How they could have an obscure part like this lying around is beyond me.) She replaced all three.
Beth also noticed that the brakes worked very poorly (don’t need them if you crash, is my motto) and that all the cables and housings needed to be replaced. I think they were all over 10 years old. Maintenance? Moi? Mais non!
Lastly, Beth could not get my 20-year-old bike computer to work. Considering the fact that it was literally held together with duct tape, I wasn’t surprised. I’ve been searching for a replacement for ages. Sure enough, the store had one in stock.
Before I went out to Vienna to pick up the bike, Beth advised me that it would take an hour to dial in the set up on the bike. The set up on Tour Easys is complicated. As it turned out, she needed to cut the grips on the shifters, replace my bar end mirror, adjust a limit screw on the front derailler, and tweak the handlebar position.
The handlebars need to be a bit higher to allow the bar ends to clear my knees and for my hands to be a bit closer to my body. Beth put in an order for a stem riser that will solve the problem.
I think we could have done what we needed to get done in 20 minutes but as the 43 emails suggest, Beth is rather loquacious. (In this regard and in physical appearance, she very much reminds me of my friend Klarence.) We talked up a storm about our bikes and bike touring. She wants to ride to Key West. I said, “No Way So Hey!” I also told her about my Erie Canal tour which I did on Big Nellie.
With bike repaired and new friend of the wheel acquired, I headed home.
Today, I took Big Nellie out for a test ride.
Sweet!
It needs a few more tweaks. There is an odd intermittent noise from the drivetrain that may have something to do with the cassette. When you replace a worn chain, you should also replace the cassette but, thanks to pandemic supply chain delays, a new cassette was not available. The noise may just be an issue of links and cog teeth meshing improperly. No worries.
The last time I rode this bike I crashed so my steering was a bit tentative. The new handlebar position isn’t terrible but I am looking forward to a more compact steering posture.
The quality of bike computers is generally lousy these days, but the replacement computer seems to be working fine. I’ll keep an eye on this one. (Beth, mindful of my ego, keyed in the mileage – over 45,000 – from my old computer.) I am pretty sure the wheel size is on the generous side but that’s something I can deal with.
My plastic fenders, with duct tape extensions, are all about keeping my bike and me dry. They are ugly. Beth wanted to replace them.
I declined but in the course of the email conversation she learned that I had stashed in my shed an Easy Racers carbon fiber front fender. Beth owns a Ti Rush, the titanium version of my bike, that retailed for 2 and a half times the price of my bike. It is a thing of beauty and weighs nothing. It also has a stiffer seat back and can go faster miles an hour.
One of these days I’m going to steal it.
In the meantime, it needs fancy fenders. I gave her mine.
50 States – A New Plan
As most readers of this blog know, my favorite bicycling event is the Washington Area Bicyclists Association’s 50 States Ride. It involves riding 60 miles through the streets of DC on a route that includes the avenues named after the 50 States. I have done this ride a dozen times (2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020). This year’s ride is scheduled for Saturday September 11. Barring an onset of sanity, I intend to ride it.
T-shirts are awarded to finishers. I have worn mine all over the country and am often asked, “Wow. did you really ride in all 50 states?” Which begs the question “How many states have you ridden in?”
Through no planning, between 1960 and 2019, I have ridden in 34 states: New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Virginia, Maryland, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Colorado, Kansas, North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Delaware, New Jersey, Vermont, and Pennsylvania.
I have had in the back of my mind the notion to ride the remaining 16 in five tours: New Hampshire and Maine; Alaska; South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska; Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. Oklahoma, and Arkansas; and Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Since they are not bunched together, this endeavor would take me several years.
I started my 2019 tour from Indiana to California with an ache in my left hip and left knee. The mountainous terrain and long days (made necessary by a lack of support services on the route) in Colorado, Utah, and Nevada beat my body up something fierce. The pandemic was a blessing in disguise, allowing me to get medical treatment (physical therapy, cortisone shots, and other therapies). Even now, however, I feel worn out. Perhaps this is father time’s way of telling me to change my approach.
The pandemic and scores of rides in mid-Atlantic weather these past 24 months, have conspired to make me proficient at another activity: napping. Today I rode 46 miles in suffocating heat and humidity to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in DC. At the garden I spent about an hour walking around in the hot sun. When I got home, I had some lunch, took a shower, and laid down on the couch to meditate. I woke up two hours later.
It occurred to me that maybe riding in all 50 States is a younger man’s game. Maybe napping in all 50 States is more my speed these days.
So how many states have I napped in already? It’s a difficult question to answer because, well, I was asleep at the time. I am pretty sure I have napped in these states: New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Hawaii. Texas, California, Oregon, Wisconsin, Michigan (on the ferry on the lake), West Virginia, Indiana, Colorado, Florida, and Arizona. I have 36 states to go!
Maybe I could establish the Washington Area Nappers Association.
I could have a t-shirt made: I Snored the 50 States.
June Bugs
The month of June was notable primarily for the Brood X (17-year) cicada invasion. It was surreal around here. The din started coming in spots then eventually became ubiquitous for about a week. It was like living in the Twilight Zone.
Covid restrictions for vaccinated people were lifted. So off came the masks. Not surprisingly I caught my first cold in a year and a half. I think I’m going to keep wearing a mask in crowds.
I did four social things this month which was four more than I did in June 2020. I went to a get together of grad school friends and to a happy hour of Bike DC people. I managed to drag myself out of bed to go to Friday Coffee Club, motivated by the fact that my friend Lis was back in town from another of her exotic overseas work adventures. Yesterday, I rode to DC to drop of a book of short stories at Klarence’s house. Klarence follows the author on social media. The author is married to a former colleague of mine. The book received stellar reviews but it’s appeal was lost on me. I hope I found it a better home.
Despite these four events, I feel completely numb to the idea of socializing. I can’t remember ever feeling so disconnected. It doesn’t bother me at all either. I suppose I’ll gradually return to my old ways. Someday.
I read only two books this month. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart is another YA (young adult) fiction book from my daughter’s stash. I liked it a lot. For some reason YA books seem to lean toward the creepy. This one certainly had that aspect. The second book was Ten Innings at Wrigley by Kevin Cook. It’s about a 1979 baseball game between the Phillies and the Cubs that had a score of 23-22. The account of the game takes up only about a third of the book. The first third describes the strange and often pathetic history of both ballclubs. The last third tells of the fates of some of the key players in the game including Dave Kingman, Bill Buckner, Pete Rose, and Donny Moore.
As for movies and such, we watched the second season of Lupin, about a gentleman bandit in Paris. Worth your time. And we began watching the Loki series. I think Owen Wilson (who I generally don’t much care for) stole the first two episodes. He wasn’t in the third and it did nothing for me. Three more to go.
I went to a couple of Washington Nationals games. One with my daughter. The other solo. Both times the heat and humidity made watching very uncomfortable.
Bike riding had it’s ups and downs. I rode 1,004 miles, my first four-digit month since July 2020. My CrossCheck hit 20,000 miles on June 2 and went into the shed for a hiatus. I switched to The Mule (my Specialized Sequoia) for 870 miles, interrupted by 51 miles on Big Nellie, my Tour Easy recumbent. Speaking of interrupted, my ride home from the happy hour on Big Nellie was interrupted by a catastrophic fork failure. Fortunately I was going slow at the time and was on a trail so I didn’t get run over by car after I fell. I have since returned to the scene of the crime. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a large bump across the trail caused by a tree root. The trail is rapidly becoming hazardous as these root bumps emerge in clusters on every section of the trail. Now that the National Park Service has taken a pass on maintaining the right of way, I fear that my crash will be the first of many.
I did five rides of over 50 miles. The last one of these was a couple of days ago. I was intending to ride 100 miles on Maryland’s Eastern Shore when heat. humidity, and illness convinced me to turn back after about 30 miles. I got lost in the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge, thanks to Verizon wireless’s spotty service and a paper map showing an apparently non-existent road. I checked Google maps on my laptop later and saw that I had missed a turn and ended up separated from the road by swamp. My recovery turned a 55-mile bailout into a 62-mile slog.
For the year, I have ridden 4,782 miles, about 26.6 miles per day. I am on pace to ride 9,697 miles this year. Gotta up my game to get the 10,000 mile prize. (There isn’t one.)
Perspective
The most recent issue of Adventure Cyclist arrived in the mail the other day. The front cover is a photograph by someone named Chris Hytha. It’s the kind of picture I will never take because I do not have the gene for this sort of thing.
Where is this? I wondered. The Nullarbor in Australia?
Nope. It’s the Utah State Highway 21 between Milford, Utah and Baker, Nevada. The rider in the picture isn’t me but it could have been. In 2019 I rode (and walked) this stretch of desert, part of an 84-mile day with no services. No food. No water. No humans. No shade. Just the bike and me and a road that goes on forever.
Photography and videography of bike tours often show spectacular landscapes like this. Sometimes drones are used (why you’d want to carry a drone and all its supporting doodads is beyond me). When you are in the landscape, your perspective is entirely different.
I didn’t recognize this picture. To me that day was all about three mountain passes and the basins between them. I didn’t remark about how the road seemed to stretch out forever because I was too concerned with the 100 feet in front of me. On and on and on. Grinding along at 10 miles per hour for most of the day. It can be meditative or, perhaps, mind numbing is more apt. At one point, I sped down one pass and crossed a cattle guard (metal bars perpendicular to my line of travel) at 30 miles per hour. That’ll wake your ass up in a hurry.
Fortunately, the road didn’t go on forever. The dusty town of Baker seemed like a movie set. A crossroads. A few buildings. The kind of place that fits the phrase “Wherever you go, there you are.” To get to where you are, just take the road to the vanishing point in the distance.
Big Nellie Update
On Thursday evening, I was riding Big Nellie, my long wheel base recumbent, home from a social event in DC, when the front fork (the part that holds the wheel to the steering mechanism) snapped off. The bike is a Tour Easy which was made by a company called Easy Racers. Easy Racers apparently went under a few years ago. Many of the components on this rather exotic looking machine are standard bike parts made by companies like Shimano and Grip Shifter. Alas, the fork is not one of them.
I posted a picture of my fractured friend online and tagged Bikes@Vienna, the shop where I bought the bike 20 years and over 43,000 miles ago. To my surprise, Tim, the shop owner, said he might have a replacement fork. I drove Big Nellie out to Vienna and dropped it off.
The next day I heard back from Tim and one of his mechanics. The forks they have are not the right size so Tim advised that I send an email to the man who last owned Easy Racers and cross my fingers.
I followed his advice but also sent emails to several well known (to me anyway) recumbent dealers all over the country. One immediately responded with a “no.” A few hours passed when I received an email from Peter at Bicycle Man in Alfred Station, New York. (I am a native of upstate New Your and had to look this up on a map. It’s between Elmira and Buffalo.)
Lo and behold he had a few original Easy Racer forks. After a couple of phone conversations made unproductive by my rank ignorance of bike components, Peter offered to call Tim and iron out a solution. As it turns out, the fork is incompatible with my stem and headset (parts that connect the fork to the handlebars) but that can be remedied by replacing the latter two components which are standard bike parts.
As I write, my new fork is on its way from upstate New York to Northern Virginia. I won’t see the completed bike for several weeks because this is the peak time for bike repairs, a situaiton exacerbated by the pandemic.
The bike also needs a new middle chainring, which was damaged during my crash somehow. And, since I haven’t done any maintenance on the bike in years, there is a laundry list of other repairs. For example, the Grip Shifters lost their tackiness a long time ago, an issue I have been remedying with hockey tape. And since the bike is in for work anyway, I am getting a new chain and cassette (rear gears). The chain is pricey because this bike uses three chains linked in one long loop.
I am not replacing the bar end plugs. I have plenty of wine corks which had a little panache.
So thanks to the interwebs and the brotherhood of recumbent bike dealers, I believe I’ll have Big Nellie back on the road in time for some riding later this summer.
A Few Spokes Shy of a Wheel 