A Fistful of Advil

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

Check it out at

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

Off the Road but Busy with Bikes

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Wrong Plan – A Bike Journal

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

So check it out at

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

Another Ho-Hum January

Think of January as a warm up for a better year. It’s had it’s ups and downs so let’s review.

Biking: I managed to ride 726 miles this month. Most of my riding, 666 miles, was on the Cross Check. The other 60 was aboard Big Nellie. My longest ride was 40 miles. All of this activity was out-of-doors which is extremely unusual. The Cross Check got some TLC. I swapped out a huge saddle bag for a lighter rack bag. I replaced the chain and cassette. The finishing touch was new lighter. The Cross Check is nearly three pounds lighter now. Whee.

Weather: It was another abnormally warm month. It cooled off these last few days. Today it is snowing for the first time in over two years. Yesterday in a fit of pessimism, I moved Big Nellie into the basement.

Politics: Insurrection at the Capitol. A second impreachment. An inauguration attended by 25,000 National Guardsmen and A-Rod, Garth Brooks, and Lady Gaga. An inaugural address upstaged by Aa poetry reading. Line of the day: “I’m walking to work.” Unbelievable fireworks. Miles and miles of security fencing remains in place. Mr. Biden, tear down these walls!

Pandemic: My state decided to reduce the age for Covid-19 vaccinations to 65. Yay! Two days later they announced they had thousands fewer doses than they thought they had. Boo! I doubt I’ll get jabbed before March. So much for riding to the ballpark in April. I do know a few people in the area that have received the vaccine so that is encouraging. Meanwhile the virus is mutating. Are we having fun yet?

Reading: I have been burrowing through my pile of gift books from Christmas. All four are keepers.

  • Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
  • Just Like Us by Nick Hornby
  • The Cold Millions by Jess Walter
  • Anxious People by Fredrik Bachman

Viewing: The viewing month was pretty busy. Some keepers

  • The Queen’s Gambit
  • Luther
  • Midnight Sky
  • News of the World
  • Wandavision

We watched two old Robert Mitcham movies.

  • Out of the Past
  • The Night of the Hunter

Out of the Past was an interesting film noir if you’re into that sort of thing. The Night of the Hunter is regarded as a cinematic masterpiece. I thought it was amateurish crap barely a step above Plan Nine from Outer Space. Your mileage may vary.

Yesterday I watched Project 11, a documentary about a football injury gone horribly wrong. A compound fracture became infected with flesh eating bacteria. The documentary shows the progression of the infection; it is not for the squeamish. Suffice it to say, I may never look at the barbacoa in my Chipotle burrito again.

The Baby Race: I watched on social media as four women I know carried their lockdown babies to term. Congratulations to Claire, Megan, Liz, and Malina.