Turtles All the Way Down

Today was that kind of day that started great then ended with a thud.

Little Nellie and I have been getting along splendidly ever since I put H-bars on the bike. My hat’s off to the crew at Bikes at Vienna for transforming this bike that had become, quite literally, a pain into a bike that feels like a magic carpet. It’s quite a lot of fun to ride and the wide handlebars that I selected do an unexpectedly good job of absorbing road shock.

I knew today would be the first mow of the season so I wanted to get in at least an easy ride beforehand. (You gotta have your priorities straight, you know.) Parts of the lawn have barely begun to grow while others have deep, thick grass. I expected the latter to be rough going.

After riding Little Nellie 35 miles yesterday north to the DC cherry blossoms, I decided to ride south to the neighborhoods of Hybla Valley and Woodlawn. As I walked into my backyard to fetch my bike I came upon a visitor, a box turtle. He was stopped in one of those spots in the lawn with barely any spring growth. The turtle didn’t shy away as I took its portrait. Box turtles can live anywhere between 50 and 100 years so there’s no telling if the turtle was visiting my house or I was visiting his. Since my neighborhood was developed about 60 years ago it is entirely possible that this little critter has been around longer than my house.

Last summer I did an odd maneuver on a two-lane highway in Kansas to save a box turtle from getting run over. I crossed over to the left lane to force an on-coming driver to drive around me and miss the turtle in the process. It worked, but a few minutes later the underage driver’s parents came after me and went all kinds of crazy with road rage. It was an incident that was truly alarming, especially in light of the fact that Kansans are generally the most chill drivers in the country. The scary encounter was well worth it though, because the box turtle was spared a grim fate.

I was slightly underdressed for today’s breezy 50s but that didn’t subtract much from the joy of spinning along the flat roads of Hybla Valley. I crisscrossed the suburban landscape, traffic-free because the entire western boundary of the neighborhood is a nature preserve. I saw a half dozen retirees mowing their grass, giving me a good case of the guilts.

The Woodlawn area located between Fort Belvoir and Mount Vernon is another low traffic place that features a few gentle hills that keep things interesting. There’s also a backyard bald eagle nest that I like to check out. Nobody was home in the nest so I’ll have to go back another day.

I arrived home a bit chilled after 31 miles. I put Little Nellie back in its storage spot and looked around the backyard for my little friend. The turtle was nowhere to be found. I suspected in the three hours since I encountered the little guy, he had made his getaway onto the farm next store. Over the years I have seen a turtle – perhaps even the same one – wedged along the bottom of the fences around our yard. I assumed he had headed to the farm because beyond the farm fence, there are all kinds of places that a turtle can hide, safe from the neighborhood predators (foxes, raccoons, dogs, raptors).

A big bowl of hot soup and some indoor time allowed me to warm up a bit before heading back out to mow the lawn. After about 30 more minutes of prep, I was underway in the backyard. All was going well until I hit the tall dense grass in the back left corner of the yard by the fence along the edge of the farm.

The grass was really thick and I was laboring to push the mower through it when I felt and heard a thud from under the mower. I pulled the mower back expecting to see a ball or some other obstacle but instead I saw the turtle. It had been hunkering down in the tall grass only a few feet from the fence. It had made it about 150 feet across the yard since I saw it in the morning.

The poor thing never stood a chance. Its end was brutal and quick. Looking at its remains almost made me throw up. How could I be so stupid. Ugh.

I gave my friend a proper burial in the garden then went about the rest of my business.

What a horrid end to a beautiful day.

No Pain, Big Gain

My last post I described how I swapped handlebars on Little Nellie in an attempt to make the bike useable again. When I bought the bike in 2007, I ordered tit with drop bars. because that’s what I had on my other bike, The Mule. Despite having ridden Little Nellie well over 22,000 miles with drop bars, the bike never felt right, even after buying a shorter stem and changing brake levers. Worse, in recent years the impact shock from the bike’s little wheels and single beam frame made it increasingly painful to ride. I figured that maybe the problem with the drop bars was that they were causing me to reach too far, extending my lower back, and leaving it vulnerable to road and trail imperfections.

I had H-bars installed. H-bars are essentially straight, horizontal handlebars with a short vertical bar welded to either end. They allow me to have two hand positions – either on the horizontal bar or on the risers on the vertical part of the bar – and keep me from overextending my lower back while riding.

Little Nellie's New Look — Little Nellie with H-bars

I really thought this new handlebar idea was a long shot. If it didn’t work, I’d sell or donate the bike. I felt pretty foolish spending over $400 on the conversion (plus some while-were-at-it other work including a new front wheel). I expected the H-bar to be a minor improvement at best, allowing me, if successful, to use the bike for running short errands.

When I picked the bike up on Saturday, I did a 15-mile test ride. It went well, but the real proof of the pudding would come in longer, repeated riding. I woke up Sunday with no lower back problems. In fact, to my surprise my lower back actually felt better than the day before.

This week I rode the bike three days in a row, for 30, 31, and 32 miles. The last time I rode this bike more than 100 miles in a week’s time was in November 2019. In fact, I rode it less in all of 2022 than I did the last five days.

The only time I’ve felt discomfort while riding was when I hit a bump awkwardly during today’s ride. Otherwise, the riding has been fun and pain free. When I got off the bike, Monday and yesterday, my back was a bit stiff. This may have more to do with lifting a heavy box on Monday and doing maintenance on my ungainly gas-powered lawn mower yesterday. The stiffness went away once I sat down for a few minutes, which suggests that it was just my spinal stenosis acting up.

As before, I found that riding my Bike Friday is a bit more tiring than a conventional bike like The Mule. That said, I feel like I could peel off a 40- or 50-mile ride in reasonable comfort. That’s easily enough to do errands.

I think part of the difference in comfort is the width of the H-bar. Having my hands out a bit more to the side allows the bar to flex a tiny bit when I hit bumps. My butt is also a little further back on my saddle where it can benefit from the saddle’s suspension springs.

I plan to experiment a bit with fine tuning my saddle position, moving the saddle up and/or back a couple of millimeters (it makes a surprising difference.)

I am declaring the transformation a success.

While out tooling around today, Little Nellie decided to celebrate by turning 23.

Little Nellie turns 23 #bikefriday #newworldtourist #odometer

If you are considering buying a Bike Friday, I highly recommend getting H-bars.

Old Bike, New Look

Little Nellie is my Bike Friday New World Tourist folding travel bike. I bought it in 2007 and have ridden it over 20,000 miles. It was custom made to mimic the dimensions of The Mule, my full-sized Specialized Sequoia touring bike.

Little Nellie’s wee wheels make it a blast to ride. It darts about on the road and accelerates fast. Those wee wheels have a downside: they transmit road shock like nobody’s business. My aging and decrepit lower back had become increasingly unhappy with this feature.

I knew I had to make changes from the very start. I ordered a fit stem from Green Gear, Bike Friday’s company. This was an ugly stem that could be adjusted in various ways. Once I was satisfied with a particular configuration, I sent it back to Green Gear and they made me a proper stem to mimic the fit stem’s settings.

The new stem helped some with my back problems. As time passed, my back complained anew. I tried new brake levers, hoping to compensate for the long curved horns of the drop handlebars. Again this helped a bit, but the back pain came back yet again.

As I do day rides around my neck of the woods, I frequently see a man with gray hair riding a green Bike Friday. He seems quite comfy. I noticed that, unlike Little Nellie, his bike has straight bars. Bike Friday sells handlebars that have an interesting feature; they are split in the middle. This allows easy packing when travelling.

This got me to cogitating. It seems I had three choices. (1) Keep riding Little Nellie as is and incur increasing levels of back pain. (2) Sell it. (3) Swap out my handlebars for flat bars and use the bike more as a utility bike.

So I decided that, at the risk of throwing good money after bad, I’d go for what was behind door number (3). I also decided that I would pay a bit more for split handlebars.

I drove to Mount Airy, Cycles in Maryland some 50 miles from home and looked at an array about eight different flat bars with the split feature. I decided on a pair of Bike Friday H-bars. These handlebars have a flat section but also have risers on each end. this provides more places to put your hands, thereby avoiding fatigue in the hands, arms, and shoulders. the bottom of the risers extend beyond the flat part of the handlebar. This would allow me to use my bar end shifters, saving some money on the conversion.

The Mule came with narrow handlebars. After many years, I realized that wider handlebars would give me more control, add to my comfort level, and open up my chest for easier breathing. When selecting the new bars for Little Nellie, I chose the widest ones with the H-bar design.

On the way home I dropped Little Nellie off at Bikes at Vienna, a bike shop that specializes in bikes of unusual design, such as folding bikes, recumbents bikes and trikes, and such. Over the course of the last few weeks they worked on the bike. It turned out that my front rim was toast so a new one had to be ordered, which delayed things a bit.

Today, I went to pick up the new Little Nellie. I must say the mechanics did a darned nice job. I immediately took off for a test ride on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail. The wider bars combined with the small wheels made the bike even twitchier than before. Also, I found my hands gravitating to the riser portion of the bars. As I came upon some people on the trail, I reflexively reached for the brakes. Uh Oh! The new handlebars had brake levers on the flat portion, not the brake hoods as I was used to.

No worries. I managed not to take out any trail users. This ain’t my first rodeo, you know.

There are other subtle features that will take getting used to. The shifters can sometimes make rather unpleasant contact with my knees. My handlebar back doesn’t fit anymore so I’ll have to switch to a fanny pack. And my bell was on the right side instead of the left. I whiffed on the bell a few times. (I switched it over to the left side when I got home.) I will have to be careful loading the bike into the trunk of my car because the wider bars can make contact with the underside of the trunk lid. Finally, I have to find a good place to put my mirror. (It was left loose probably knowing I’d be fiddling with it.) These are all quibbles though.

The good news is that the new configuration is definitely more comfortable. The bar tape is fake (I think) cork which feels soft. The brakes – once I found them – gave me plenty of stopping power. And I rode up and down hills like I was on a big boy’s bike. The new front wheel rode like butter.

In the weeks ahead I’ll take Little Nellie out for longer rides to see how my back better tolerates repeated use.

New Bag Rear — Little Nellie’s original cockpit. Note the mirror is missing. I was mounted on the left side just above the shifter.

Winter (?) Work

It’s been a snowless winter so far here in the DC area. Temperatures have been warm-ish, with only a couple of days below freezing. I’ve been riding nearly every day which means that my legs think it’s April. My bikes are another story.

I have four bikes and every year I use the winter to get them fixed up. Bike shops are generally not as busy this time of year. Of course, if I had a shred of mechanical skill, I’d do the work myself but as Dirty Harry once said: a man’s got to know his limitations. Or, in other words, my best repair tool is my credit card.

I am fixing my bikes in the following order: Little Nellie, The Mule, the Crosscheck, and, maybe, Big Nellie.

Little Nellie is getting a makeover. The bike is in pretty good shape but I have never liked its drop handlebars. As I get older, I find that riding Little Nellie is really hard on my lower back. A contributing factor might be the long reach to the brake hoods. In any case, it has never felt comfortable, even after getting a shorter stem. Nearly every day I see a man of a certain age buzzing about on his Bike Friday. He has flat handlebars and seems to be quite comfortable. So, I decided to swap my drop bars for handlebars. I could have bought some run of the mill flat bars from a local bike shop but, unlike Bike Friday bars, they are not split in the middle for easy packing. I frequently stuff the bike in the trunk of my car and a single-piece straight bar might not work. Moreover, the bike is designed to be disassembled and put into a suitcase so having split bars would make this much easier.

I contacted Bike Friday to buy a set of handlebars from them but amazingly they blew me off. Their web site no longer has a shopping page. Since they are still selling bikes, they obviously must have bike parts but they wouldn’t sell me a handlebar. I got online and found a bike shop in the DC area that sells Bike Friday tandems so I called them. They had several split bars that I could check out. I drove about 50 miles and compared about six or seven bars. I originally had planned to use straight bars but the shop had set of H-bars, straight bars with vertical end bars. I bought them then brought the bike to Bikes at Vienna for the work.

After a few days, Daniel the mechanic at B@V called me to tell me that I need a new front wheel. The rim is original and has almost 23,000 miles on it so I am not surprised. Between the cost of the bar, the new wheel, new brake levers, cables, housings, and such the total cost of the conversion is about triple what I had planned on. I hope it works. It should be ready sometime this week.

When I pick up Little Nellie, I’ll drop off The Mule. The Mule needs a whole lot of work. The bar tape is shot. The front brake has a skipping action which I suspect means the wheel needs to be trued. I had some problems adjusting the tension on the rear break and may need to replace it. A few months ago I destroyed both fenders and will need new ones. I’ll probably replace the chain and cassette too. They still have some life left in them but changing them now means I won’t have to change them again until after the summer. Finally, the front derailer gave me trouble last summer. It may just be the nature of using aftermarket chainrings that have no ramps (which guide the chain during shifting) combined with shifting under stress. Anyway, it’s worth checking.

Once that is done, the CrossCheck goes in for service. Because I don’t tour on it, it gets a lot less stress than The Mule. Still it needs new wear items: bar tape, chain, and cassette. Maybe brake pads. It has a weird front rim that has a notch between the braking surface and the part that the spokes connect to. That notch eats brake pads. I’ll probably live with the rim since brake pads are cheaper than rims.

Big Nellie is down in the basement on the resistance trainer. It’s in pretty good shape. The shifting is a little sloppy but I can live with it as is. I’ll evaluate it once the weather gets warmer and I can take it for a long ride outdoors.

While all this work is being done my thoughts are turning to a summer tour. Stay tuned.

Getting Stooped

Anytime you ride 40,000 miles in four years, something has to go by the wayside. I have neglected my house and yard now for a long time and it shows. I have so many projects to do in the months ahead there is no point in making a list.

The first job on my backlog is to re-paint the metal stoop outside our kitchen. I last did this a couple of decades ago> I did a poor job and the paint never looked good. It’s been a rusty mess with lots of chipped paint for years.

Last week I spent three two-hour sessions washing and scraping and sanding and grinding away at the mess. I also fixed some rusty holes using some epoxy. I did the best I could before saying “no mas”.

Next up was priming. The weather here was absolutely perfect for bike riding but alas I was back at the stoop. It is a cruel coincidence that perfect riding weather is also perfect painting weather.

First, I taped off the area. Next I rode Little Nellie to the hardware store for primer, a mini-roller and a brush. The last time I painted the stoop I used a brush. It was a frustrating mess. This time I started to prime with a small roller and was shocked at how much better the roller worked than that old brush. The horizontal surfaces all have a texture to them supposedly to impeded slipping. Getting paint on all sides of the textured surface was impossible with a brush but it was super easy with the roller.

As I primed I could see cracks in the paint that I had missed during prep. I did what I could to fix these. No doubt I’ll be re-doing some of this later in the year.

Unfortunately, I ran out of primer so I jumped back on Little Nellie and returned to the hardware store. The upside to this misadventure was that I now knew how much paint to buy for the top coat. So I bought that too.

The rest of the priming took about 20 minutes.

Priming and painting are infinitely more rewarding than prep. I had spent about six or seven hours doing prep and felt like I had accomplished nothing. After an hour or so of priming I felt like I was cooking with gas.

Today was the last step, the top coat. Last time I used black gloss paint. It was slippery and didn’t adhere well at all. The hardware store paint guy said that black satin would be a better choice and would not be as slippery, so that’s what I used. It took no time at all to paint the stoop. The only problem was the fact that the daylight was such that I had trouble seeing where I had failed to completely cover the primer. So once I had painted the entire thing, I walked around and looked for spots where I could see primer peeking through the top coat. After 15 minutes of this I declared victory.

All that’s left is to take off the painter’s tape.

In celebration The Mule and I went for a ride among the blossoms in Alexandria and Arlington. Cherry trees are fading. Red Buds are taking over. After that come lilacs and azaleas. Also, the deciduous trees are leafing. Soon the Mount Vernon Trail will be a tunnel of green again. This will obscure the three bald eagle nests between my house and Old Town Alexandria. Two of these nests are quite active. The third seems in need of a tenant.

My next project involved a big tree root. No chopping though. Stay tuned for all the excitement.

2020 – One Last Recap

It was such a fun year!

Okay, let’s start again. 2020 sucked but at least I salvaged some decent bicycling. I managed to go 10,240.5 miles this year. My Cross Check edged out The Mule for most miles: 4,179.5 to 4002.5. The other 20 percent of riding was split between Big Nellie (my Tour Easy recumbent) at 1,458.5 miles and Little Nellie (my New World Tourist) at 600 miles.

My bikes now have a total of 145,082 miles on them. Either one of them break or I do.

End of Year	Odometer Miles	Miles Ridden
Specialized Sequoia	60,020	4,003
Tour Easy	44,243	1,459
New World Tourist	22,598	600
Cross Check	18,221	4,180
Total	145,082	10,241

The monthly distribution was kind of Bell curvy. (I took stats, can’t you tell?)

As a prize for finishing in first place, the Cross Check got a new look. People used to pick me out during events by my humongous Carradice saddle bag. No longer. I switched to an Arkel Tailrider. It kind of wrecks the all black look, but it weights a bit less than the Carradice. The bike still weighs a ton but that will be addressed when I replace the tires with something lighter.

Little Nellie Cracks 20

For the last month I’ve been riding my Bike Friday New World Tourist nearly every day. I named it Little Nellie after a scene in You Only Live Twice. (It’s easily one of the stupidest dogfight scenes in movie history.)

The bike was designed to mimic the dimensions of The Mule, my Specialized Sequoia touring bike. It’s pretty close except for the little tires which kind of beat me up. My recent binge of lifting weights and doing physical therapy really helped keep me from aching on long rides though.

Today, Little Nellie hit 20,000 miles.

I bought her in 2007 so that’s a shade under 2,0

00 miles per year. Near the end of my ride I stopped at Spok

es, my local bike shop. I asked Taylor, the service manager, to look it over. It was creaking and popping in ways that suggested trouble was brewing.

Taylor couldn’t find anything wrong in the usual places but he did find a crack in the weld that holds a hinge to the folding seat mast (into which the seatpost slides). I called Bike Friday and they asked me to send them a picture. I think they will replace it under warranty. Good thing it’s the seat mast, which can be replaced without shipping the entire bike to Bike Friday in Oregon.

Two Tailwinds, Two Paisanos

The early afternoon weather in DC was beautiful. 70 degrees with a strong breeze out of the south. As luck would have it, the Washington Nationals were playing a game against the Arizona Diamondbacks at 4 p.m. I bought a ticket and jumped on Little Nellie, my Bike Friday, and rode the tailwind 15 miles to Nationals Park.

It was a lovely ride except for the bit about the big black car nearly hitting me 100 yards from the stadium. The driver’s window was open. I barked at him that he had just done something incredibly dangerous. He seemed not the least bit concerned. Then I jumped off my bike and beat the crap out of him. There was blood everywhere. I beat my chest and howled.

Image may contain: cloud, sky and outdoor — Not a bad day for a baseball game or a bike ride or a nap in a hammock

Okay, not really. I let it go at words and went in to enjoy the game. I sat down the left field line. My seats were on the field level. I brought my glove for protection. Sadly no foul balls were hit my way but a woman two sections over got clobbered by one and was escorted out for medical attention. The two teenage boys in the row behind me ate their way through the first eight innings. Mom bought them hot dogs and pizza and funnel cake and ice cream. I could sense them growing with each passing inning.

Image may contain: 2 people, including John Pickett, stadium — The giant presidents at the ballpark are very creepy up close. Shortly after I took this picture, Washington ate these two fans.

During the game I had a chat online with my friend Emilia who was sitting across the stadium. Emilia is from Venezuela. She and I keep tabs on the Nationals players from her country. There have been five paisanos in recent years. For the last few weeks there were none. Emilia texted me to let me know that Adrian Sanchez, who was called up from the minors to play third base for the injured Anthony Rendon, was from Venezuela. A short while later she texted that the Diamondbacks David Peralta was also from Venezuela. “I will not root for him,” she said.

Image may contain: sky and outdoor — That’s Emilia. Somewhere up there.

As it turns out, we have the lesser paisano. Peralta hit two home runs (he eats the National’s pitchers alive) and the Diamondbacks won in ten innings.

Around the 7th inning the skies grew dark and the wind changed direction. I thought for sure I’d get soaked but rain never came. Instead I was pushed all the way home from the game. Even the clouds of bugs didn’t ruin the ride.

So let’s recap with some maths:

Two Tailwind Ride > Big Black Car + Wrong Paisano + Bugs in My Mouth

And a final note: Big congratulations to Blissful Britt who finished her last exam for her college degree today. On to grad school. (Just kidding.)

Errandonnee Part Deux

Yesterday I took the day off from bicycling to go to the March for Our Lives in DC. We drove and took Metro for a number of reasons and it worked out remarkably well.

Today, I got back in the saddle with an old friend, Little Nellie. Little Nellie is my Bike Friday New World Tourist. She has a hair over 19,000 miles on her. I recently put a new large chainring, cassette, rear wheel, rear tire, rear tube, and chain on her.

Errand No. 5: Non-store Errand, a test ride to make sure all the new stuff was working properly.

Destination: Around the neighborhood

Observation: I was half expecting my rear tire to explode because it was so hard to install and the wire bead was slightly bent. So I rode over a couple of potholes to stress it. To my chagrin, I found that the shifting was messed up. The chain was jumping over the big sprocket and getting jammed between the cassette and the spokes. On the opposite end of the cassette, the chain was making unpleasant noises. Be careful what you wish for; you might end up with something worse.

So the first errand resulted in a second errand.

Errand No. 6: Store

Destination: Spokes Etc. At Belle View, my local bike shop

Observation: If I ever move, I will make sure I have a good local bike shop nearby. Spokes has been my go to shop for over 25 years. More often than not (like today, for instance), they do minor repairs while you wait. The Spokes mechanic (Sean, I think) figured out what was wrong within seconds. The new hub of my rear wheel is sized for an 11-speed cassette. My cassette has only nine speeds. He installed a proper spacer and tweaked things a little. In five minutes I was on the road again. Bicycles are so much more fun when they are in proper working order.

Spokes Service Area. Note: neither mechanic is Sean. He is bashful.

The fix was so good that I took off and rode another 16 1/2 miles for a total of 24. Total miles so far in the Errandonnee: 58 1/2

Not My Kind of Day

I feel like bitching and moaning.

I went to my physical therapy appointment today. For the better part of a month I’ve been rehabbing a nerve problem in my left shoulder and arm. I’ve now gone to nine appointments. I have nearly all my range of motion back but it still hurts when the arm and shoulder bear weight or move in certain ways. Thursday is my last appointment. I think it’s time to try acupuncture again. At least I got a big foam roller that makes my back feel great out of the deal.
Today is the first day of the 2018 Errandonnee contest. It was cold and rainy with the possibility of ice accumulation here in the DC area. I can’t risk falling while on blood thinners so I had to forgo riding to physical therapy and lunch which would have easily knocked off two of my twelve errands. We are getting a freak snow storm tomorrow so that knocks that day out as well. And Saturday is out because I am going to a march in DC with Mrs. RC. So I am down to nine days, at most, to complete my 12 errands. I rode Big Nellie in the basement just to keep sane.

No automatic alt text available.

A few weeks ago I ordered a new rear wheel, hub, and chain for Little Nellie from the manufacturer, Bike Friday, in Oregon. I have been waiting weeks for this to get here. It took them a week to get around to building the wheel. Only then did they discover that they didn’t have the cassette I ordered in stock. So I had to wait for that to arrive at their shop. So it finally came today. Yay! When I opened the box and pulled out the wheel, I decided to mount a tube and tire to it and get the bike back on the road. Only then did I discover that Schrader tire valve wouldn’t fit through the hole in the wheel rim. This is a first for me in over 40 years of bike riding as an adult. They drilled the rim hole to accept narrower, presta valves which are not readily available on small (406) tubes. When I called them, they suggested I take it to a bike shop and have the hole drilled out. Really? Now I wish I had had the wheel made locally in the first place. Anyway, I told them to ship me three presta valved tubes instead. (They’ll work fine on my old front wheel which has a Schrader sized hole.)
My Cross Check and I are not getting along. When I got back from my bike tour on The Mule, the Cross Check didn’t feel right. I was sliding forward on my saddle. So I tilted the nose of the saddle up a couple of weeks ago. My mechanics instantly improved. Unfortunately, after a 51 mile ride, my back started to ache like mad. So I tilted it back and rode 23 miles. No back pain. Go figure. After that ride, I moved the saddle forward just a bit in the hopes of getting the better mechanics back. I’ll fiddle and diddle with it some more over the next couple of weeks. One annoying thing about this bike is that tilting the saddle is very hard to do, much harder on my Bike Friday or The Mule. I actually need a hammer to free up the metal cradle that the seat hardware sits in.
Some bike tourists from Arlington are riding north from Jacksonville this week. The plan is to ride all the way to DC. They are riding along the coast, generally following the East Coast Greenway. They report that riding US 17 is not a lot of fun, but they are making good progress. Unfortunately today is crummy weather in South Carolina.

	Rootchopper on Bike Tour 2023 – Day 5:…
	bikerchickchar on Bike Tour 2023 – Day 5:…
	Rootchopper on Bike Tour 2023 – Day 5:…
	Brittany on Bike Tour 2023 – Day 5:…
	Brittany on Bike Tour 2023 – Day 4:…