A Sunday In Hell

I celebrated figuring out what was slowing down my internet connection by watching this. Good stuff!

RIDE THE DIVIDE - Award Winning Adventure Film

I've been wanting to see this for a while...........

Vacaciones, la Segunda

We just got back from another week at our seashore vacation spot. We did a fair amount of riding again and we had a great time.

I wrote before about how people ride there with no concept of any rules of the road. This time, I almost had an accident with another cyclist. I was riding on the right side of the road down a street that is signed as a bike route. I came to a red light, slowed down and signaled that I was turning right. I looked ahead of me and to the left and proceeded to turn right. Well, a guy on a road bike had snuck up on my right side and was trying to pass me on the right and go through a red light. I didn't hit him, but it was close.

We took a day trip to another nearby seaside town to visit friends. I saw lots of people on bikes. This town also put up loads of small signs on the road to remind cyclists to ride on the road, ride on the right, stop at red lights and stop signs and to use lights at night. We didn't spend enough time in that town to see whether the signs had a generally positive effect on riders' behaviors, but it couldn't hurt.

The Machines of Experience

I think about my bicycles quite often. Recently, a very basic and simple idea occurred to me. Bicycles are experience machines. The time (and sometimes money) I spend on building and maintaining different bikes allows me to have positive experiences that I value. It’s worth the effort – the payoff is unique and great.

Each bike in my fleet has been built with a specific purpose in mind. (The Schwinn Le Tour is an exception. I bought it brand new and I have only changed the tires and stem and added racks.) With each build, a new possibility is available to me.

I bought my first real bike (Schwinn le Tour) from a bike shop almost four years ago. Through it I found a type of exercise I enjoy, a more extensive knowledge of the geography of my area and a sense of confidence as I reached various cycling goals.

Last summer I built a mountain bike. It’s a fully rigid, steel frame of unknown manufacture (I’m pretty sure it’s a Giant, though I don’t know if it was branded as such or was manufactured by them for another company). That bike allowed me to begin exploring some great off-road terrain in my area. I loved mountain biking immediately and every time I get out on that bike I feel like I am treating myself.

My “townie” bikes have allowed me to complete errands without driving. I love being able to sneak in a little riding time whenever I can. It’s not exactly high adventure, but it’s good for me.

Late last summer I also finished a singlespeed road bike build. It was a revelation. I found that I could do a lot more with one gear than I thought I could. It was also one of the rare builds where almost everything worked exactly right for me right away. I did end up switching to slightly more narrow tires, but the moustache bars/riser stem/25” road frame combination was perfect immediately.

Even though most of my bikes are built from frames and parts found in the garbage or online for low prices, I still would be reluctant to ride them in the winter. I was having a great riding fall last year and I didn’t want to stop when the snow came. I built a winter beater out of an old Raleigh Grand Prix frame and I learned a lot about layering wool clothing.

Early this summer I finished my touring bike. It’s based on a very tall (24”) Ross mountain bike frame. I got the frame and fork from ebay a while ago for $6 plus shipping. After overcoming a stuck bottom bracket cup (thank you propane torch) I built it up with trekking bars, front and rear racks and an insanely low climbing gear (24 X 34). Two weeks ago, I took it on a sub 24-hour overnighter (s24o) to test it out. Touring was one of the things that I was interested in when I got into cycling as an adult. This bike will be my ride for more s24o adventures this summer and possibly a multi-night tour.

I finished a (sort of) cross bike build recently, too. I found a Raleigh 700c hybrid frame in a dumpster two years ago. It took me a while to decide what to do with this bike until I realized that it would make a great cross-type bike. It has a triple crankset and slightly larger than ‘cross –legal tires, but I don’t plan to race it. I went on a lovely mixed-surface exploration ride and this bike did all that I wanted it to do. It was fine off-road and fine on the pavement. None of my other bikes could have done as well.

My last personal project (for now) is a lightweight go-fast type of bike. I was given a Viscount Aerospace Pro last year by a neighbor. He had let it sit in his backyard for a while, so my first order of business was to make it ride-able. It wasn’t as bad as it could be; I only needed to replace the saddle, tires, chain and some cables. It rode pretty well and seemed light and fast. The frame size was in the lower end of my size range, so I thought it might make a good go-fast bike. I got down to work and did a 700c wheelset conversion, a bar and stem swap (I had some Cinellis on hand) and an installation of a racing saddle and aero levers. The initial test ride of this set up seems to confirm my expectations for speed and agility.

Pic from 2009. This is the initial basic build to determine some of the frameset's characteristics.

Thinking about all the things I can do with my bikes motivates me to do more building and refining of completed builds. I’m grateful to have found an active hobby about which I am passionate. Cycling adds so much to my life and is good for my mental and physical health. I am also encouraged to complete more donation bikes so that others might be able to have positive experiences, too.

Vacaciones, todo que me gusta

My family and I spent a week by seashore earlier this summer. The weather was great, the beach was nice and I found money in the street almost every day. I was also very happy to be in a place where this sculpture is one of the first things people see when they arrive in town:

Around the corner from the sculpture is this awesome mural:

Check out some of the details:

Additionally, there was a bike parade (that we missed):

I’ve written about this town before, in my Personal Bike History, Part 3. People on bikes are everywhere. There are racks all over the place and many bike rental places. There’s a boardwalk on the beach and bikes are allowed on it until noon. It’s a popular morning activity.

The main type of bicycle in use is the beach cruiser. There are a few comfort bikes and some mountain bikes and road bikes here and there, but the coaster brake single-speed cruiser is the most common.

Helmet use is pretty rare. I’m of the opinion that helmet use by adults is a personal choice. I am also in favor of laws and ordinances that require children to wear them. My wife and I didn’t wear helmets during previous visits (though we do wear them at home). We brought our helmets and wore them every time this year because our daughter is at an age where she would notice if we were helmetless.

I didn’t see many helmets, but I saw even less lycra, spandex or other “cycling” clothing. I only noticed one woman on the boardwalk riding a hybrid while wearing biker shorts and gloves. Generally, it doesn’t matter to me what people choose to wear when they ride, as long as they are riding. It’s cool that the majority in regular clothes, though.

This resort town has one really good bike shop. This store had a widest selection of racks and baskets I’d ever seen in person. I had been thinking about purchasing a Wald basket for one of my townie bikes, so I bought it there for a good price.

I’d be willing to bet that the locals or long-term summer residents ride because it’s the easiest way to get around. Parking a car is a hassle and with flat topography and so many racks around the bike option makes sense. It’s nice to see a huge bike rack in front of the supermarket. It’s even nicer to see that so many of the spaces are being used.

Maybe the tourists only ride once a year, during their summer vacations. Perhaps their experiences on bikes here will encourage some to get into it at home. It certainly played a part in my interest in cycling.

One slight negative aspect is a lack of understanding regarding a bicycle’s place in traffic. I saw a fair amount of sidewalk riding and bike salmoning (riding against traffic in the street) as well as the usual red-light running and stop sign ignoring. This is almost so common that the drivers don’t know how to react to a cyclist riding in the street and observing traffic laws.

Anyway, I like it there. It’s not exactly “bike culture” or the stuff of a bike advocate’s utopian dream, but to see people riding and enjoying bikes is OK to me.

Here are some photos of some interesting bikes that I saw during vacation. I only managed to snap a few pictures of locked bikes when I remembered to bring the camera. I wish I had taken one of the flat-bar converted Huffy Windsprint (my first road bike) I saw one day, but I had left the camera behind that morning. I also should have photographed an example of a popular bike trend there – really high handlebars. Many cruisers have a stem extender that puts the bars way high. I don’t know if this is a popular practice in other resort towns, but more than a few bikes in this location had that feature.


Two old cruisers with racks for carrying surfboards. The one on the right shows a high handlebar, but this is a rather tame example.

Que rapido, pero como se dice bent fork in Czech?

So twisty.

Awesome double toptube action.

Book Review – Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America? by John Seigel Boettner (1990, Siegel Boettner Fulton)

In 1986, Californian Middle School Social Studies teacher John Seigel Boettner and his wife Lynn led a group of five twelve- and thirteen-year olds in a bike tour across the United States. Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America? is Mr. Seigel Boettner’s 439 page account of the trip. It is a well-crafted and enjoyable read.

I’m quite fond of bike touring books and this one is one of my favorites. A few characteristics of the book are pretty unique to this genre. First of all is the group. Most touring memoirs focus on an individual adult or perhaps a pair of adult cyclists. I’ve never read a touring book that includes the experiences of children.

This book is also unique in the way that the journey unfolds. John Seigel Boettner takes his time telling the story of the trip. It seems as if every single day is described in some way and never is an amount of time glossed over or condensed. It is a testimony to John’s great skill as a writer that it never feels bogged down or tedious. All of the events are related in a way that holds the reader’s interest. This is probably the slowest-moving touring book I’ve ever read (and I’ve read almost fifty at this point). It stands in contrast to a book like Thunder & Sunshine by Alistair Humphreys which moves from South Africa to England via South America, North America, Asia and Europe in almost 100 less pages.

The Seigel Boettners and their students have many important experiences along the way. There are the usual weather events, mechanical failures and illnesses to overcome, of course. But as in so many good touring books, the most important aspect of the trip is meeting people. Senators, waitresses, mechanics, Amish farmers all make a lasting impression on the members of the group as they see their country from the saddles of their bikes.

I remember the summer of 1986 pretty well, too. I was just a year or so older than the kids in this book and I went on a week-long snorkeling excursion with a group from my summer camp. While not nearly as large an undertaking as riding a bicycle across America, I have many lasting and positive memories of that time. One often gets the impression when reading a touring book that this is the tale of a (if not the) high point in a person’s life. The journey related in this book was probably that moment in seven lives.

An explanation

I’ve been meaning to get back to “Things Found in the Street” for a while now. When I began the blog at the first of the year, it was not really my intention to go at it for only a month and a half.

I stopped writing because of an incident that happened in my neighborhood. It occurred while I was walking the dogs one night and for a while afterwards I kept thinking about it. I wrote a little about what happened, but I couldn’t bring myself to publish it. Even now as I write this post with the intention of starting “Things Found in the Street” again, I am not sure if I will publish what I wrote.

Anyway, I am well and my family is, too. We are in the middle of a great summer and I have a lot of things about which I want to write, so here goes the blog once again….