Zwei Drei Geschwindigkeiten

According to Babelfish, that means Two Three Speeds.

If you're not into old bikes at all, this entry is going to be even duller than usual. If you have a passing interest, these bikes might be of interest. These bikes are a slightly different tack than the usual English three-speed bicycles. These are German three-speeds. They're called Rabeneicks, I'm guessing they're from 1958 or so (based on Sturmey Archer hub vintages), and they're down at One on One Bicycle Studio in Minneapolis (yes, that's Ein auf Einem).

The back story? I guess the original owner was in the U.S. Army in Germany in the 1950s, bought these there, and brought them home. It is thought that they weren't ridden much once back in the U.S. I am not an expert on this stuff, Rabeneicks seem to be ill-documented on the web (at least in English), but they look to be largely original. I thought they were cool when I first saw them in the infamous One on One basement, and asked if I could come in one Saturday morning, pull them out, and take photos. I did this yesterday. These are the photos and notes.

There are two of these bikes, a mens' and a ladies'. They are for sale for $600 for the pair, or $333 each, though it would be a pity to break them up after being together half a century.

Here are my photos:

(Note: as with almost all my photos, if you click on the picture you'll get a much larger version to better see the fine details)


This is the Rabeneick Men's bike...


...and this is the Ladies'.


One of the things that immediately drew me to these bikes was the "hood ornament", a metal eagle on the front fender. It looks so Germanic!


Everything's very solid, including the bell, with the Rabeneick name prominently showing.


The ladies' bike says Rabeneick Rad. Rad? Wow, man, that's Rad!


The men's bike has Weinmann 1020 brakes, the ladies' has one of those on back and an Altenburger sidepull on front. This is the brake lever for it. Both bikes had these Bakelite handgrips.


German they may be, but they're both Sturmey-Archer three-speeds.


The ladies' bike has this seat tube decal. A feature I really like is the little tool box affixed to the frame, visible in the background.


This is the toolbox.


This shows the dogbone wrenches (literally, "Hundeknochenschlüssel", what a great language, I should have taken German instead of French in high school) in the ladies' toolbox.


I don't know what this means. Neither does Babelfish.


Here's the Weinmann brake lever.


The ladies' bike has a 1958 Sturmey Archer SW hub. This was the replacement for the common-as-dirt AW hub but could be a finicky unit (the joke is that SW stands for Sometimes Works) and the AW came back into production, so that the one on my bike is a 1967 AW.


It's funny with steel stuff how slender things can be. This is the front hub. I like the wingnuts.


This shows the actual Altenburger front sidepull on the ladies' bike.


The bikes both have wheel locks. Nowadays, European bikes (and Breezer Uptowns) have these kind of "handcuff" locks--this one just sticks a bar in the spokes. It's called a Trelock Automat.


The Ladies' bike has Continental Type Corsa tires. Love these whitewalls. I think the ridges on the sidewall are to improve traction for the sidewall dynamos. Clever chaps these Germans! Also, the ladies' bike had all these holes drilled in the rear fender. It looks to me like it was to lace in a skirt guard. The men's bike doesn't have these drillings. Finally, notice the textured rim, little dots cut into the braking surface.


The saddle is an "L. Lepper, Beilefeld" unit.


I love fender lights. I just ordered one for my Schwinn, though it's batteries and LEDs while this one's a bulb and dynamo. Even so, it seems to have side windows for better visibility to traffic.


This is the downtube decal on the men's bike. This bike isn't Rad I guess. (Rad actually means "wheel" in German).


The cable routing for the men's bike takes the shift cable over a pulley. No cheesy English plastic shift pulleys here, boys, it's a metal pulley.


This is the whole drivetrain. At this date a swastika crankset would be out of the question, but they could have had more fun than this. Again, the steel components are very slender compared to modern aluminum or carbon components.


Even then they had reflectors in pedals. I don't know well these work, but they are pretty neat.


The men's bike has an alloy-shelled Sturmey Archer AM hub. The AM is the medium-range (the common-as-dirt AW is the Wide range). This is a 1956 unit.


The 6 volt 3 watt dynamo. That's the same as current specs.


This is the headbadge on the men's bike.


The ladies' stem is very plain, but I loved the sort of "ship's prow" casting (forging?) for the men's stem.


Another L. Lepper. You might want a cover.


They're solid, handsome bikes. They're also 50 years old.

To photograph these I set them up at the front of One on One and just used the mixture of open skylight and incandescent. I had to move a couple of new Bianchi racing bikes to make space. Boy, was that illuminating! Having just hauled these battlecruisers out of the basement I picked up a tiny (probably 19") Bianchi carbon racing bike and it weighed about 4 pounds. I exaggerate, but it was extremely light, especially compared to the all-steel Rabeneicks.

Thanks to One on One for letting me do this. I bought a coffee and then lunch from them and they were very agreeable to letting me do this. I may do it again on other interesting bikes in their collection. Also, in case you are wondering, I have no business arrangement with them--if this entry hastens the sale of these bikes I don't get paid. I just did this because they looked like unusual bikes and it was kind of fun to do on a unique pair of cycles.

Finally, if you're deeply interested in photography, these were all shot on my Sony DSC-R1 10.2 megapixel camera using a tripod. They're at ISO 160 and exposures often ran more than a second. One some photos I filled in the shadows a bit by holding a reflector just out of view.

You know you're too tall when...

...your knickers are too short.

One of the longstanding themes of me and bikes is the difficulties trying to get stuff big enough. I stand 6' 5" tall with a 36" inseam and wear a size 14 shoe (49 European). The fashion in bikes is for everything to be small, so that most bike shops leave me utterly uninterested in their newest offerings, which often max out at 60 or 62cm frame sizes.

In the last couple of years I've managed to address this. My main bike is a Rivendell Atlantis in the 68cm size (27"). I've got 175mm crank arms on it and the 56cm wide handlebars. It's really the first bike that ever fit me properly and has been a joy to ride--there's only so much that lots of stem and seatpost can do on a fundamentally too-small frame. (If you click on my Profile photo you'll see me dwarfing a 21.5" Marin mountain bike frame with lots of seatpost, a tall stem and riser and handlebars that come up a bit more--but the bike still feels cramped, and is now relegated to winter duties). My around-town bike is a early 1980s 68cm Schwinn World Sport bastardized into an 8-speed Nexus hub bike. It has regular 170mm cranks but the wide Nitto Albatross bars, real longhorns. Both these bikes, when around other people's rides, look like they have about a foot of headtube and the Schwinn, with thin 1980s frame tubes, looks particulary willowy.

Clothing remains an issue. In everyday stuff I wear a 17 1/2 X 37 shirt, 46 XL suits/jackets, very large hats and XL gloves. Cycling shorts are no problem, of course, nor are short-sleeved jerseys. Other items, though, get harder. It's tough to find size 49 cycling shoes, and 48s and a grimace don't make it (I tried). When I came across the Adidas El Moro IIIs in 49, I bought two pairs. One learns to buy when stuff is available. Long sleeved jerseys can be a problem; I tend to buy XL or XXL just to get the sleeve length, ending up with a really baggy fit since I have a very flat chest, due in part to a big chest operation I had when I was about 16 which at least gives me an artful scar and two belly buttons (OK, one's a drainage tube scar). The buy-large strategy doesn't always work; I recently got a Nike Tete du Course merino wool jersey in XXL length. It was $200 originally, I got it on deep discount sight-unseen, and the sleeves are short. It's made in Italy and their impression of an XXL doesn't seem to match up with North America's. It's not uncommon for garments made with really expensive luscious fabrics to be a bit stingy in the fit, which is pretty cheeky when you are asking $200 for a jersey.

Anyway, I decided to try some knickers. I was going to buy some last year but the places with my sizes were out and I never got around to it. This year, the guys at Bicyle Fixation are doing some knickers. They're wool, they're dressy, they're actually made in the United States of America! They even have a bit of flashy satin lining! I ordered up a pair.

They arrived yesterday. I was so happy, and nobody else was home, so into the living room and off with my trousers! I tried on the knickers and...they're too short. Not by a lot, 2 or 3 inches (OK, that's a lot in a garment), but with my upper leg horizontal, as on a pedal stroke, the knickers' cuff binds diagonally over my knee. I was really bummed out about this. There was a little note in there from the Bicycle Fixation people, how the wife was unimpressed by the selection of cycling garments for her husband, how they put together these wool gabardine knickers, how the flashy satin was actually from their wedding...I loved the vibe on these things. I wish they worked for me. They just don't fit.

(As an aside, there is a review of these knickers at Fixed Gear Gallery).

So, I'll be contacting them and returning them. In the meantime, I just got a pair of unhemmed wool dress trousers from Sierra Trading Post for $20 and they're lovely. There's a lady around the block from us who does alterations...I'm thinking I'll call her up and see if she can sew the trousers into knickers for me. I'm going to call her tonight and take over the Bicycle Fixation knickers so she can see what's involved. On the whole, I'd rather keep them, but they do need to fit. If you're normal-sized (my buddy Paul, who picked up the Tete du Course jersey for me in Cedar Rapids, said "that's what you get for being a freak" when I whined about the short long-sleeves on the garment), I'd think about a pair.

PS Later on today, after having posted this entry, I got a call from George's Shoe Store, where I'd left a pair of Rockport Dressports 14 Narrow shoes to be resoled. The sole that I'd selected? They don't make them that big. Sheesh, story of my life. I approved a different sole, and they'll be ready next week.

Wow, that's a slap in the face

The Wall Street Journal has a front-page article this morning about a health club in Hong Kong that has hooked up some of its elliptical exercise machines to run its lights. The machines had little generators in them already to light up their own displays, but most of the power was wasted as heat. Rewired, they run several fluourescent lights. The article goes on to talk about other efforts along these lines; generating power from backpacks, dance floors, even heel strikes of Army boots, something the military's been looking at. Of course, says the article, this has a long history. Old phones had a crank that generated electricity when you wanted to make a call, you can get windup radios and flashlights and...

Some people have been capturing their own sweat for years, including children on bicycles whose pedaling generates electricity to operate their headlights.

Yep, lots of SON hubs on those Huffys! The emphasis was mine, not the Journal's.

It will be interesting to see if dynamo hubs get more popular as the light output of LEDs rises but remains well within the output of the hubs (about 3 watts). A 3 watt bulb is OK, the 3W LEDs are getting really bright.

The online Wall Street Journal requires a subscription so I'm not linking to it.

Separately, Wells Fargo seems to have got a reprieve. Longtime readers may recall that I was not allowed to make a deposit last July in the drive-through lanes of the local Wells Fargo bank branch. A desultory correspondence with Wells Fargo yielded conflicting answers as to whether this should be allowed and the suggestion that I just go inside. I relished the idea of dragging my filthy dripping bike into the Arden Hills branch, which at that time had no bike racks, but in November some racks appeared. Now, the small church that employs my wife as a superb Music Director started offering direct deposit, and she signed up. Both Februrary paychecks have appeared all by themselves in the account. I was chastised by some commenters for not having done this earlier, and I have for years in my own employment, but it was only just offered by the church. Wells Fargo has averted my wrath a bit longer.

Finally, despite this being a worthless winter for me riding (I've been gone a lot, either on business trips or working on my father's house in Des Moines), I was named to the Saint Paul Bicycle Advisory Board on January 24th. Unfortunately, they didn't tell me until February 6th, the morning of what should have been my first meeting, and I was in Des Moines scraping wallpaper off walls at the time. It is a pity I wasn't informed on time because I would have gone to the Iowa Bicycle Summit on Thursday/Friday February 1/2. I drove to Des Moines that Thursday evening anyway, I would have just gone a day earlier and gone to the Summit.

Fortunately, my longtime cycling and house-repairing buddy Paul went. He was about to spend a bit more than a week scraping wallpaper, ripping up carpet, painting, repairing, throwing out stuff, etc. with me. He sent me these links:

The Iowa Bicycle Coalition.

Iowa Department of Transportation Bike Site. Iowa does a bike-specific state highway map which is clever. They of course get huge numbers of riders for the annual RAGBRAI ride and my sister emailed yesterday and said it's ending up in Bellevue again this year, where she lives.

Iowa Bicycle Summit homepage which has links to the Powerpoint presentations. The one called "Bicycle Facility Design" took all day Thursday. Paul also liked the one called "Road Diet". These have lots to do with traffic engineering--lane widths, three lanes versus four, etc. Over the weekend, scraping wallpaper and talking about the Summit, we were both consumed with a desire to take tape measures out to streets and measure some lane widths. As with most Powerpoints, these would be better with the accompanying narrative, but they're still something to chew on.

There was a separate link about Bicycle Boulevards.

Like I said, if I'd known that my Ascent to Power had commenced, I would have taken another day off and gone to this summit, but I wasn't informed until too late. I got the materials from the Saint Paul Bicycle Advisory Board and my first meeting is March 6th, so I'll add my voice to that group and probably be better-informed about what's going on. In the meantime, I am the Ward 5 representative, and so one of my first goals is to ride every street and visit every tavern in Ward 5. Don't know where Ward 5 is? Yeah, neither did I. It abuts Larpenteur on the north (the north city limit), then basically runs from Hamline east and north of Front to Dale, then north of the BNSF railroad tracks east to Edgerton.

Anyway, March is here, and although it's snowing like a bastard at the moment, the weather will turn much more promising in the next few weeks. I have a couple of more weekends to do down at Dad's, but with luck we'll sell the house this spring and be done with that time sink.

Gold Plated Bicycle

I was out wandering around The Northwest last week, in Boise for a day, then Salem, Oregon for three days and ended up in Portland, Oregon, before flying home, connecting through Seattle. It was a business trip through the end of day Friday, then I took a look around Saturday and Sunday morning since I'd never been there before. Here's the notable bits.

I stayed in Salem, the capital of Oregon and also where our Western Regional Office is located. I was looking around downtown to see what that was like and went into a bike store called The Bike Peddler. Nothing notable, particularly, but they had a pretty cool bike hanging up high.

It is called a Cellini and it's very striking, mostly because the frame is gold plated. The photos hardly do it justice. I asked the guy about the bike. He said one of the store guys bought it for $60 or $80 from an estate sale. They thought it was about 1982 and was all-Campy on a gold-plated frame with cherrywood rims. The Cellini name was also engraved on some of the components, like the chainrings.

They didn't know many details. They said there was no bike maker named Cellini that anyone knew of, but that the bike did have the name of Italy's largest goldsmith on it and the initials of a major tradeshow. Maybe it was just showing off. How it came to be in Oregon nobody knew, but here it pops up at an estate sale for under a hundred bucks. The frame was stunning. The components alone would be worth more than the $60 or $80. I should have offered them $150, think of the profit!, but it would have been hard to get home.

One of my lesser life goals is to take photos of all the state capitols. It's not a Mission from God or anything, but when I'm in the area, what the heck. I nailed Salem Saturday morning (I got Boise, too, but had shot it before). It's a pretty boring capitol building, as these things go, not big and majestic like Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa. Out front they had inspiring carvings, including this one of some chick slapping a horse.

The accompanying notes showed it was Sacagawea leading the Lewis and Clark expedition Westward Ho, and from straight-on it doesn't look so much like a dope slap.

I drove north towards Portland on a highway west of but parallel to I-5. I was going to McMinnville, Oregon. It's lovely country, with lots of vineyards and nut orchards, particularly for hazelnuts. At McMinnville, a charming little town, I went to the Evergreen Aviation Museum. I like airplanes, and visit aviation museums when in the neighborhood, and this one has a very odd, one-off aircraft, Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose. This is one big-ass airplane:

You can see a guy standing down at the lower left. It's kind of a novelty aircraft, not an Important Airplane, but it's cool to see it live. It was designed to carry troops and supplies from the U.S. to Europe, overflying the German U-boat menace in the Atlantic. As a seaplane, it would land on a handy body of water and offload through a hinged nose right onto the invasion beach. It would lift 100 tons using its 8 3,000 horsepower engines and was made of wood so as not to use valuable strategic metals or workers needed for other aircraft. As it happened, the U-boat menace faded, ships work lots better for moving lots of men and supplies, these engines would have been nightmares, the plane wasn't done until two years after the war was over and only flew once, for about 2 miles. It has a colorful history, though, and represents the outer limits of piston-engine aircraft development (the wingspan is bigger than a 747s or even Airbus's new A380, although that's partly because they have swept wings). Although I haven't seen it, the movie The Aviator is about Howard Hughes and includes the Spruce Goose tale as part of it.

An interesting sidelight is that Evergreen, besides being a global aviation company and owning this museum, also owns a hazelnut farm and a vineyard/winery, so they had a wine tasting going on in the museum. I tried the wines and bought a bottle of 2004 Spruce Goose Pinot Noir and a hazelnut cookbook (plus some nuts), which actually looks pretty good.

On to Portland! I originally had plans of spending all day Saturday on a rented bike looking around, but didn't arrive until 2PM in my rental car. I did Plan B, driving (oh shame!) around to several bike shops.

One notable thing was wooden fenders. These seem to be the in thing in bike bling in Portland. River City Bicycles had them, and they looked great, plain finish or contrasting woods in stripes or patterns. River City Bicycles also had a neat gate made of bicycle frames that surrounded the little picnic and garbage area behind the building. I liked this idea:


I went to Cyclepath which turned out to be high-end racing stuff, but they also had wooden fenders. The guy here was at least straight about them--he said they didn't work that well, since there's no shape to them--they're flat rather than concave. He also said his were varnished where the River City ones are just oiled. OK. Sure looked nice, though, and the Cyclepath guy said his were cheaper because they were made from scraps from a furniture factory or something.

The other item that struck a chord was the Ahearne Cycles flash cage. I have a weakness for flasks anyway, and this is just really appealing in a novelty sort of way. Would it be useful? Not really. I like whiskey, for instance, but basically never drink it while riding. About the only time I take booze on the bike is when I pack 1.5 Gin and Tonics in my stainless steel insulated water bottle and go to the Bike In at the Bell. Still, I like the idea even if it seems to be optimized for the Surly flask. You can check out the rest of the Ahearne products, as well; I like the Grocery Rack with the optional bottle opener.

I hit up a couple of other stores as well, it makes a good way to see a city, trying to find a whole succession of addresses in a place you've never been before and without benefit of a navigator. The city seemed like a mix of the Twin Cities and San Francisco, with some big hills (though not as many as SF) and crowded streets. It was about 27 and cloudy but at least it wasn't raining.

Sunday morning I went to an Episcopal Church downtown and then, leaving, took a wrong turn and head up the hill towards the Zoo. I'd read about Zoo Bombing, a bike culture thing in Portland, where they ride the (excellent) transit system to the Zoo, up on the heights, and then ride down. This is often done on kids bikes or BMX bikes and for the more daring includes getting onto Highway 26, a virtual Interstate, where the circa 50mph speeds allow them to blend with the traffic. It helps to be young, stupid and drunk, apparently. Me, I was just stupid, got off at the Zoo exit, crossed the highway and headed back down and then off to the airport. It is a long steep hill and I can imagine getting going faster than hell on the way down. Nowadays when I go fast down hills, like over 30 mph, my thoughts drift towards the pragmatic, like, hmmm, I wonder what would happen if my front wheel blew? Or if someone pulled out of a cross-street? I don't enjoy it quite the way I used to.

Anyway, half a day of driving to bike stores gives only the faintest hint of the bike culture out there. Next time I'm out maybe I'll do it in a more attractive time of year and actually spend a couple of days in Portland on an ill-fitting rental bike. It would be cool to see some of the luscious Vanilla Bicycles and maybe try out a Stokemonkey, both Portland-based enterprises.

As bleary as 27 and cloudy looked, it at least wasn't 36 and rain. Two days after I left they had a big snowstorm and there were enough photogenic wrecks it made the news here in the Cities.

Merry Christmas!

I've barely ridden since Thanksgiving, being occupied with all the regular church stuff, a huge dinner we lay on there (about 150 people this year) and painting our dining room. I love this time of year, but December tends to be my lightest riding month and this year was no exception despite the moderate temperatures. Merry Christmas anyway!

Not actually our house. This one belongs to a family a couple of blocks from us called, I think, the Griswolds. As with most of my photos, click on the picture to see a larger version.

Wells Fargo Worries About Their Carpet

Long time readers may recall my low-level argument with Wells Fargo and their policy of not accepting deposits from bicyclists in the drive-through lanes. Wells Fargo, apparently wanting to inconvenience their bicycle-riding customers as much as possible, suggested that I just go inside the bank. There's no bike parking at the Arden Hills branch, I said. It was suggested that I just take my bicycle inside with me and if the staff has any questions say I'd been instructed to do this.

This has been a slowly-evolving story, and I thought the next move (besides using the drive-through ATM to make my deposit, just as quick and they can't refuse to accept it) would be to ride in in mid-January with my studded knobby tires and filthy bike dripping snow, slush, salt and grime on their carpets and cheerfully say that I'd been instructed to do this rather than use the drive-through lane. I discovered last winter that the bike will retain a lot of filth and drop it pretty quickly when it warms up (I found this out at church, where I'd park it by a floor drain).

Wells Fargo, very prescient, must have figured out what I was going to do and countered. On 21 November I went over to the bank and...

Curses! The canny bastards have put in a bike rack at Arden Hills! No excuses about no bike parking.

I contemplate my next move...

Velos de los Muertos

Last year, on a whim, I made myself a skeleton outfit out of black Levis, a cheap black sweatshirt, a Mayo Clinic Health Guide and some iron-on interfacing, then rode around on my bicycle cackling at people with a pumpkin on back. This was good fun.

I got my inspiration in part from the Mexican Dias de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations, which tend to be exuberantly colorful.


This one was in the Museum Shop at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

I decided to do this again. First, we had to get the pumpkins ready. We have a huge yard with a back gate, so have a couple back there, a couple by the back door and one by the front door, plus I needed one for the bicycle.


I pressed Henry into service doing pumpkins.


And here I am. Got to add fingers to my black gloves. When I first tried this last year, I used an REI candle lantern to illuminate the pumpkin. This turned out not to work very well. I switched to using several red blinkie lights and that works great. In this photo, I have six of them blinking away inside the pumpkin. Of course, they all blink at different rates so you get this cool flickering effect, much better than an actual candle.

Photo Note: to get the pumpkin face to show up, I used a slow shutter speed, 13 seconds in this case. The bike and I are illuminated primarily by the flash, the long exposure allowed the pumpkin blinkies (and background sky, neighbor's living room and moon) to burn in. A tripods is handy for this. This distant shot was to see if I framed it right--it was extremely dark outside. Once established that I had the camera aimed right, I zoomed in and got a closer shot:

The quick feedback of digital is great! This is with my new Sony DSC-R1 camera, my first "serious" digital, giving me the flexibility to use external flash and set manual exposures.

I rode about 10 miles all in all. I prefer to ride towards people and grunt or recite some doggerel like Ghosties Big and Ghosties Small, Skeletons are the Worst of All and then cackle and throw a candy bar at the smallest kid. Sometimes I just grunted, sometimes I stopped and handed out candy. Unlike last year, nobody came out and gave me a beer. I don't think it actually frightens anyone under 6, but it sure startles the hell out some folks! I think it adds to the light-hearted neighborliness as well.

And I look nice and friendly:

The makeup looks better from a distance!

Late Summer & Fall Pictures

I haven't given up riding, I've just got really bad at blogging! I've got a couple of posts to catch up, and am going to date them at roughly the correct time, but here is a smattering of photos from the late summer and autumn.


I wanted to go and take some pictures with Mamiya 6 (a 120 medium format film camera) to try out some cheap mailers, so went riding along the Mississippi River in Saint Paul. Here's how I carried the camera; in the usual camera bag in a basket mounted on my Topeak rack. These racks are pretty ugly, but you can quickly interchange components using a sliding attachment, some spare ones of which I bought last spring. This isn't even a Topeak basket, it's a Wald with a Topeak mount on it. Anyway, this works great for Bicycle Based Photography. You ride to the spot, part the bike (the kickstand is great for this, as when this train went through), pull out the camera bag and shoot away. This is how the Atlantis was set up in late summer, with the cute but so far largely-unused Nitto front rack.


Here's the Billingham camera bag in the basket on back. The bag has some padding to protect the camera. Also notable here is the stainless steel Jong Won JSB-500 double-walled water bottle, which will keep ice water icy for hours even on hot sunny days, and hot coffee plenty steamy on an hour's ride to church in the winter.


I love how bike magazines talk about "the cockpit" of bikes they test, like it's real complicated or something. Somewhat more cockpit-like than usual is this VDO computer, which has an altimeter and temperature. I'm at 711 feet about sea level here at 89 degrees Fahrenheit, and am pretty sure the altitude's right because I, being a nerd, rode to Holman Field to set the base altitude one evening (704 feet at the north end of Runway 14/31), then rode straight home to establish my garage's base altitude (916 feet ASL). You have to reset the base each morning (or at known altitude locations, like airports, Continental Divides, the ocean, or the top of Mount Everest) because changes in barometric pressure will fool it. It also can get fooled, so that when I take it out of my air-conditioned office into hot summer afternoons and ride home, the temperature-compensation can give misleading altitude gain readings as the thermometer catches up to the heat.


Ah! A new shipment of tubes so Rivendell can make some more Atlanti! Gotta love steel bikes!


When my employer asked me (as a commuter) about bike racks, I developed an unhealthy interest in bicycle parking. This, by the way, will get you nowhere with the babes at parties. In any case, driving back from dropping the kids off at camp Karla and I stopped in Forest Lake. They've developed their lakefront, and installed their U-racks improperly (they should be parallel to each other, not in a line!!!).


Meanwhile, back in Minneapolis, Phase III of the Midtown Greenway came into wide use well before its official opening. There are thoughts about extending it across the Short Line Bridge into Saint Paul, which would be great. Sadly, there was a fire on the bridge over the summer that damaged it. I was glad to see repair machinery out on the structure and have since seen trains at the elevators on the Minneapolis side of the river. The Greenway ends here at the moment, and the fencing is much more formidable now, but in August I could still walk right up.


That's not the only bridge work. In the summer of 2005 Como Avenue, a good way to downtown Minneapolis for me, was closed for months while they completely rebuilt it. In the summer of 2006, the street was beautiful but now the railroad was rebuilding their bridge across Como Avenue by Mannings Cafe. On weekends, you could pick your way through. During the week there were lots of construction guys around and I (on the way to my dentist in downtown Mpls), took the detour.


You can see the new supports here alongside the old steel (or iron?) ones. The new ones won't have a support in the middle of the road like the old ones did. The trick to all this was keeping the rail lines open during construction. Funny that I'd take photos of bridgework on the way to the dentist! Ho ho. The road is open again.


Another way of carrying cameras. This is an Ortlieb front bag with the camera insert. This insert provides some padding and structure to the insides of the bag. In this instance, I'm carrying a Contax G2 film camera in there.


One day in September I rode the Intercampus Transitway going towards Minneapolis and at the end, instead of vast empty parking lots, there was a fuss going on. It was the ceremonial groundbreaking for the new University of Minnesota football stadium. Some official was blathering on about the commitment to excellence and proud football tradition and how the new stadium would be great. Personally, I thought they were idiots to get rid of the old stadium, about a block away from where this ceremony was taking place. They had a nice brick traditional stadium and knocked it down to make way for the Aquatic Center. Swimming pools are nice, I guess, but college football in the sterile environs of the Metrodome is just lame. I thought they were nuts when they made the move, in 1982, and it's rewarding to see them come full circle and essentially admit it was a mistake. Now, as a Minnesota taxpayer, I get to help pay for this farce! This evening, the Gophers took on the University of Michigan and lost 28-14.


There are some grain elevators where this stadium's going. In the well-established tradition of actual productive businesses making way for entertainment venues, these will be knocked down to make room for a few football games each year.


The U (as the University of Minnesota is known in these parts) apparently has bought these silos. The warning signs are to keep people out. There have been occasional deaths of kids playing in grain elevators and falling to their deaths.


The lameless and futility of the University of Minnesota football team is a perennial feature of life here, but so is the beauty of fall. This picture is north up the Mississippi River gorge from the 46th Street/Ford Parkway bridge at the end of September.

Since I'm catching this up later, I can report that the University of Minnesota Golden Gopher football team, playing in the storied Insight Bowl, gave up a 38-7 third-quarter lead, allowing Texas Tech the largest comeback in college bowl history, and lost. A day or two later, the coach was shitcanned. Ahhh, the proud traditions of U of M football!


And on the way to work one day there was a flock of birds paddling by on Lake Johanna. I pulled over, dismounted, and took this photo.