To Be Or Not To Be

Today's ride was not to be.

On and off again, I've been modifying a front fender for my mountain bike.  Riding in the puddles of Mercer County Park has soaked me, and I thought fenders would not be a bad idea.  The rear clamps to the seat post, and the front secures under the fork crown.

Last night I also received a couple emails from Chris and John who were riding mountain bikes in the forecast snowfall the next morning.  I made plans to meet them at Six Mile Run Reservoir Trails.  The following video is courtesy of Video Trails Review.


This morning, I finished installing the front fender on my mountain bike in a huge rush, grabbed my gear, and ran out the door.  I told Dale that I like to test ride repairs before driving a ways to meet others for a ride.  She suggested a quick trial in our parking lot.  A good idea that ended in a crash within ten feet.  When my front fork shock compresses, the tire smashes into the fender mount and locks the wheel.  I broke my camera mount off the bike frame in this same parking lot fall, so no video of today's fiasco.

I ran back upstairs to drop off the mountain bike and grab the cyclocross bike.  On the way out the door, I asked Dale to email Chris and John that I was late and to not wait in the cold for me.  The CX bike would not be ideal for where I was headed, but I could still meet Chris and John for the ride in the forecast snowfall.  Since I had never been to Six Mile, I bollixed getting there and arrived half an hour after the planned meeting time.  Fortunately, Chris and John did not wait.  I started out the trail in the hopes of running into them, and I still wanted to ride anyway.

I struggled for nearly a mile and could not keep my chain on.  It would just fall off, like a dozen times.

OK, I've given it a good go, but now I need to try and get back to the car.  Once back at the car, I put on my glasses and found a damaged chain link from a previous ride when a stick jammed in the rear changer.  OK, I'll remove the damaged link with my chain tool from my tool bag, and still ride and maybe meet Chris and John on their way in.  When I broke my chain tool after half an hour of fussing with the chain, I threw in the towel.

Today's ride was not to be.

I've now removed the offending fender from my mountain bike; the camera mount was not actually "broken" but rather unceremoniously "removed" when I fell, so now that bike is repaired and the camera remounted.

I bought a new chain tool and a "missing link" and repaired the cross bike, so I'll give this another go.
Someday

New Bike for Christmas!

My Honey Boo bought me a bike for Christmas!

Finally a Successful Mountain-Bike Ride in NJ!!

Sure my adventures mimicking a drunken U-Boat commander/swamp buggy driver were entertaining, but not the sort of thing that I wanted to repeat.  This evening was a success!  I rode over to Mercer County Park and successfully found/followed/rode some terrific trails.  Single-track, technical from roots, mud holes, and log piles.  Well, yes, of course I did fall once, but that is fairly requisite to count as a good effort.  I definitely will be repeating this ride and exploring more trails in the area I rode for the first time today.  I tracked it with mapmyride.com here:  http://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/100916099

No pictures; just hanging on for dear life.

To Alpaca, Or Not To Alpaca

So I went out with OLPH the other day for a personal guided tour to a nice ride from my house.
Why didn't I think of this before!!
Why didn't my personal shopper at Neiman Marcus think to suggest this to me??
The New Jersey Transit Bus routes have not produced the pleasant cycling experience I was seeking, and OLPH promised me a field full of alpacas and a lovely loop.  Twenty miles of winding roads in 80 degrees and 80 percent humidity later, we get a cardboard cut-out of an alpaca.  They knew not to be out that day.

OK, you can't blame your ride leader when she saw a whole mess of 'em last weekend and they decide to stay inside with the air-conditioning and the PlayStation.

However, we did come across a ride leader seriously lacking.  Choose your ride leader carefully as I did.

OLPH checked online to find out that the store usually targeted for snacks, water, bathroom was closed that weekend.  When we arrived on our way to the next best rest stop in the area, we discovered 8 or so riders milling about the middle of the road.  The ride leader was bitching that the store was closed and suggesting that any riders needing a bathroom just head to the back of the store and piss on it.

Nice.

OLPH tried to tell the other ride leader where we were heading just down the road . . .

and he cut her off: "I have a route."  I thought to myself: ya, a well planned route I see.

So we excused ourselves and headed to a Dunkin Donuts for iced coffee, clean bathroom, and fairly poor tasting well water for our water bottles.  As we were almost ready to leave, about half of the other group of riders mutinied the alleged ride leader and showed up at DD.

Choose your ride leader carefully.

Hi, remember me?  Well this entire move across the country, make a home, get a job, has pretty much filled my dance card.  I have been the Executive Assistant to the Dean, Rutgers Business School for about two months now.  It is a terrific position with much to do and plenty of opportunities for growth and professional development.

I have done hardly any cycling or working-out since moving, but have begun finally.  Each ride until lately has been an adventure with little to do with my initial planned route, but I am slowly learning the roads here.  This weekend was a good one.  On Saturday, I joined in the May Birthdays Ride.  I rode with Laura, Jim, and 14 other Princeton Freewheelers (the bike club that I joined before leaving California).  Maybe 4 people on the ride had birthdays in May.  It was a good, flat, 43 miles.  When we all returned to Laura's house after the ride; there was quite the birthday feast and merriment.

The next day, I rode a 37 by myself.  I have always enjoyed riding alone and this was a good one.  Laura has been helping me map out good routes on the quieter roads.  It was the second day of perfect weather and I got in probably something around 2,500 feet of climbing and descending in that 37 miles.  I did not take any pictures or stop except to try and remove some serious oobleck that my tires picked up and I smeared all over my hand trying to remove the gravel sticking to my tires.

Ya.  That's just about how my hand looked.  I'm telling myself that it was plant-based natural sap oobleck.  Here are a couple pictures that I took in Hopewell from a previous ride.

It was a great weekend with 80 miles of cycling, and some quality time both days with Dale and Macy.

Midwest Windmills

With the blur of the drive, I could not remember details like where and when at the time. With the passing time, funny enough, those memories are not getting any clearer. That's kind of the point of this blog's name.

The other day, we were driving along somewhere in the midwest. I know that we have all seen wind farms generating power, but I did not know that they could be this big. All along the Altamonte Ridge, there are hundreds of windmills and I do not think that they are all that big. Maybe some are; maybe they are farther away than I realize; maybe they have gotten bigger over the years or in different locations. As we come to these that are fairly close to the highway (yes the same one and only Highway 80 we took until eastern Pennsylvania) I am amazed at how big they are. Compare them to the Big Rig in front of them.

These things are HUGE!

And then I get a better sense of just how big. Later that day, or another day, a truck carrying one of the three blades for one of these windmills passes us.

Seriously??!! Are you kidding me??!!

"Oversized Load" yeah, we got that.

Apparently they are made of something and designed to be light as practical because as this blade passed us by, it was flexing and bending a bit in the wind.

Mazin. Simply mazin to see.

We Actually Get On The Road

Moving Tip # 52: Don’t get the truck before you can use it.

OK, you can say that we needed the truck for a month for the space to put things as we dug out of our abode, but this is not a very cost-effective option. Use it if it is your only option.

August 1: one box in the truck.

September 4: truck and Prius stuffed to the gills and the aforementioned five bikes on the roof.

Weight limit pushed? Yeah, we got that. HOWEVER, we were approved and allowed to proceed uninterrupted at two truck scales. How close to the limit were we? We tossed the sodas we were drinking before weighing.

Sunday, September 4 around 10:30 we pull out of Carleton Street for the last time.

The truck groans and moans to 15 MPH and I ease back on the gas. This could be a long trip. Still getting used to a big (although not big enough) truck with a car-trailer, I head for the Caldecott Tunnel. That’s my usual way out of town heading for Interstate 80 and I was thinking about a final farewell to Mt. Diablo. However, just before entering the freeway, Dale remembers that she and Jamila discussed the onramp construction seriously narrowing the onramp and that they decided the trailer was too wide. It is wider than the truck. I’ve been thinking about the same thing and committed to the route. With veritable inches to spare on each side, I slip into the tunnel.

Focus. No showboating with looking at gauges or barely in the mirrors. I am FOCUSSED on my lane. Once through the tunnel, we do get a nice look at Mt. Diablo as I settle into my intended cruise rate of 55 MPH. It says so right on the trailer: 55 MPH and I may have mentioned that we have the truck a wee bit full and heavy.

We began acclimating Vinnie to his crate two weeks before leaving so while he did not think much of the truck or the motion, at least he had his “bed.” Macy was on the job as usual, taking her responsibilities of riding shotgun way too seriously.

Climbing the Sierras was slow going as expected, like 25 MPH. Sort of like my old VW long ago. The first real surprise and concern occurred descending from the summit toward Reno. I planned to keep the speed in check and not let the heavy truck get away from me, but I did not expect the brakes to overheat so quickly and shutter and shake the truck to the point that I was worried I might lose control. Seriously. I got it slowed and downshifted the transmission to 2^nd which gave me some deceleration in spite of being an automatic. Later I learned to keep the speed below 35 from the beginning of any real descent.

For the first push, we intended to drive straight through the first night, which we pretty much did. During previous cross-country drives with Dale, she always got burdened with Nevada. I just fell asleep at Stateline. Determined to break this tradition, I coffeed up and pressed on. The Ruby Mountains in eastern Nevada were significant but not significantly more challenging than the Sierras. We took our first real attempt to sleep in the truck for a few hours just before Salt Lake City at the Salt Flats. We have been there before and could not spend any time, this time, but it was just as impressive as ever watching the sunrise over the alien environment. Erie and beautiful.

Let's take a closer look.

Dark Chocolate Covered Espresso Beans: Keeps ya goin!

The next real concern came at climbing out of the Salt Lake area. The hill was steep and long. I expected the truck to slow as during the Sierras, but not as bad as it did. It just kept slowing, finally holding at 10 MPH. We were seriously concerned that it would reach a point and just stop. Before we started out, I joked that we were going to end up in Auburn, CA rather than West Windsor, NJ because that would be where the truck blew-up. Now I was seriously worrying that our new home would be on the shoulder of Intestate 80, just east of SLC. With relief, we summited and I descended the other side at about the same speed.

About this time, Macy’s glomming all over Dale in her lap was beginning to wear. We grabbed one of her plush beds and put that on top of Vinnie’s crate. Macy was all over that! She supervised the rest of the trip from her Harbor Master’s chair.

She eventually learned to spread out so as to rest on both Dale’s and my shoulders as she slept under my fleece jacket. Macy was loving life and Vinnie could really give a care about what was happening.

Too trashed from not sleeping, we got a room in Utah somewhere. I think. Carrying Vinnie in his crate into the room he got very scared and Macy was very anxious. Something was seriously wrong. The room smelled funny to us, but we could not find a real problem. I think that it was just insecticide futilely combatting the crickets. They own that part of Utah in spite of what humans may think. I got a few hours of sleep, but Dale and Vinnie merely waited for something terrible to happen all night long without getting any rest. In the morning we hit a Starbuck’s and hit the road.

Have you ever watched a movie containing a sub-plot for one character to manage? We were heading right for Rock Springs, WY. 30 years ago, a cross-country trip in my VW bus with my young brother came to grief in Rock Springs, WY.

In a January blizzard around 0 degrees late at night I was trying to get over a summit before stopping for the night. The snowy road, wind, and driving snow were brutal. The bus lost traction and fishtailed a couple times, but driving with the arrogance of youth, I recovered each time and pressed on. Then I lost it. With each correction of the slide, the fishtailing became worse. The rear of the bus slid one way and then the other, back and forth, getting worse each time until I slid sideways into the highway median and over three feet of powdery snow. Jerry awoke at some point during this sliding around and as I hit the median the bus flipped on its side and spun to a stop. I had made a platform for a bed in the bus so we could sleep in it and stow all our stuff below it. All of this ended up on top of Jerry and I hung from my seatbelt. I called out for Jerry in the dark and he said that he was OK. As I dug him out of the pile of everything, a trucker who had witnessed this entire thing had stopped and approached the van with a flashlight not knowing what to expect. I opened the sunroof, grabbed a down sleeping bag, and Jerry and I got out. The trucker took us to his toasty warm cab and called on his CB radio for a tow-truck. A nurse in another vehicle stopped to bandage a small cut on Jerry’s head with enough bandage and tape for a head transplant.

That was the beginning of a three-month saga to fix my bus and get it home and those emotional scars remain with me. This weighed heavy on my mind returning to Rock Springs, WY now as it does every time I’ve passed through there since. During a great road trip with Dale and Jerry during the summer some years ago, I revisited the crash-site and the three-sided barn in which I lay on the ice for a week working on my car. Haunting. This time however, was different somehow. At sunset we pulled into a little park in Rock Springs, WY as the sun set. Kids were riding bikes around in the evening heat that was easing. Other kids were skateboarding in a ramp park. Dale and I fed and watered Vinnie and Macy, sipped cool sodas and talked. It was very healing this time.