The Interest Continues

I wondered if a lot of people bought $500 bikes and then got home and thought, what did I do that for? Apparently, the interest continues. This article is from today's Guardian.

Londoners flock to bicycle shops
Deborah Haynes | London, United Kingdom
11 July 2005 09:25

More and more people will cycle into London this week as the fear of being caught in a terrorist attack on public transport overrides concerns of being knocked off their bike by a car, experts say.

Sales of bikes -- from fold-away models to multi-gear machines -- have rocketed at cycle shops across the capital since last Thursday.

Millions of stranded commuters were forced to use overground stations, boats or simply their legs to get home. Many, in their desperation, poured into bike shops to purchase their own set of wheels to speed the journey up.

"It was just one person after another coming in out of desperation," said Grant Young, the owner of Condor Bikes in west London, the oldest bike shop in the city, which sold about 50 bikes on that day compared to the normal 15.

"People have said to me, great business, but it's not really. It is nice to be able to sell bikes, but for another purpose," he said.

As the dust settles on Britain's worst terrorist atrocity, however, a lot of Londoners remain fearful of the risk involved in catching an underground train or hopping on a bus, and some have dusted down old bikes from the garden shed or invested in new ones to sample a different kind of commuting.

"I think the attacks will probably make a few people think they are a bit frightened to go on the transport system at the moment," said Young, while adding that he doubted the fad for bikes would last for everyone.

"Things will go back to normal, so if there are 500 new cyclists now and 200 of them stick to it that's great," he said.

Evans Cycles, the biggest independent bike chain in Britain, sold four-times as many bikes as usual at its nine outlets in central London last Thursday -- about 400 bikes -- and had another good day Friday, said director Mark Evans.

He noted that in the past people have said they feel unsafe riding a bike in the city because of the heavy traffic.

"Now they don't feel safe on public transport so I expect over the next few weeks more people will be trying out bikes," said Evans, adding that a bike also saves commuters money on rail and bus tickets and keeps you fit.

Swarms of people -- some examining helmets and reflective gear, others trying out bike models and more still purchasing specialist cycling shoes -- crowded the Onyourbike store, another independent outlet by London Bridge.

Toufique Ali (25) a researcher at the BBC, is among some of the prospective buyers, after Thursday's bomb blasts prompted him to replace his old bike, which broke about a month ago.

"I don't like public transport whatsoever and I like to be on my bike more often because you are self-reliant," said Ali.

"I was always going to get a bike, but the attacks did spur me into going to the bike shop this particular weekend," he said.

The terror factor aside, however, industry experts note that bikes have been growing in popularity for the past few years, with the market in Britain expanding at a rate of about 20% to 25% annually.

In London, a congestion charge to drive cars plus the uncomfortable heat of the underground in summer has helped to push people onto their bikes.

In addition, "most people who try it for the first time realise they can cycle to work faster than if they were going on a bus or a Tube," said Young.

"The ones who have stuck it out can't believe how fit they have got and how well they are feeling and, if they are overweight, then the weight has literally just fallen off," he said.

On the down side is the obvious risk of using the roads, but cycle groups have drawn up maps indicating the safest routes.

There is also the threat of bicycle theft. - Sapa-AFP

Sudden Popularity of Bikes

The bombing attacks on London's transport system yesterday ground public transportation there to a halt as the Underground and bus lines shut down. Suddenly people who depend on that transportation we compelled to find other ways home. Lots of people had to walk. Bikes became instantly popular. This is from South Africa's News24 site:

London - Bicycle stores in Central London reported brisk sales on Thursday as commuters in the capital sought alternative methods of transport, after the suspected terrorist attacks on the city's public transport system.

With taxis in short supply and services canceled on both London's underground railway system and its central bus network, commuters are flocking to the city's bike shops in an effort to get home.

"We've sold a hell of a lot of bikes today," said the manager of Evans Cycles in central London.

"People are coming in and buying bikes because they can't get home today."

Another of the capital's bike shops reported similar sales.

"We're getting a lot of calls asking what are our cheapest bikes but we've actually sold out of them," said the manager of Condor Cycles.

The manager confirmed he had sold about 15 of these bikes by early afternoon.

Being central London, the lowest priced bikes at these shops were between £200 and £250.

Quick-thinking commuters saved themselves some cash by visiting bicycle hire shops, though by Thursday afternoon they were out of luck.

"We're all out," said an employee at On Your Bike, a cycle sales and rental shop near London Bridge.

"We've actually built extra bikes to cater for the demand but they're all gone too."

I do love London but I don't think it's much of a biking town. It is very congested and, speaking as one who has rented a motorcycle in Central London and ridden out, solo navigation is a complete menace. The city is heavily dependent on public transport and that makes the Underground and bus systems natural targets to maximize disruption. It is ironic that in the Twin Cities, where public transportation is fairly marginalized, a similar attack would have a tiny impact on most people's daily lives. Ironic also that when one thinks of really vibrant world cities, London, Paris, Tokyo, New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago, there is usually a pretty comprehensive public transportation infrastructure. With all these iconic targets and all that public transportation, it's not hard to imagine more attacks along these lines.

Lotsa Bugs

I rode to church tonight. We had a Communications meeting at 7:00 and I set off from home at 5:30 or so. Down Hoyt, through the State Fairgrounds, but I had to go around the University as roads are blocked off for parking lot paving. On to Como Avenue, which is passable even on the Atlantis with 700C X 28 tires, then across the Mississippi and to the Hub Bike Coop. There is a good chance I'll head out on a short bike tour Friday (more on this later) and I wanted to pick up an Ortlieb handlebar bag. They had one; it even had a sale sticker inadvertently on it, so I bought it and installed it. This should have taken me about five minutes; it instead took two of us about twenty. The Ortliebs wrap this cable around the handlebar four times, hook it into a little unit, then screw the bag mount to the unit, which also tensions the cable. The only way we could get it in the end was to slide the mount over so the cable was wrapped around the thinner part of the handlebar where it's meant to be wrapped (my bars are still bare as I fiddle with brake lever positioning, change stems, etc.), then scooching it back where it belongs.

I finally got this done, paid, and zoomed off, now bound to be late. I rode down beside the light rail tracks, cut across Hiawatha and got on the new Midtown Greenway trail that cuts right across town on some old railroad tracks, and went off down there. These tracks were sunken into the ground and go between bunches of warehouses, factories, etc. There were people riding, running and even picking berries. I was clocking along at about 16mph, a decent pace for me, and some little guy nuzzled in behind and drafted me. There is an "exit" to Bryant, and I took that, then rode down Bryant to 46th, which is where the church is.

Meeting over, a little after 9:00, I decided to take the Minnehaha pathway to the river, then up the west side, etc. In the fading light, this turns out to be Bug City. It was especially bad around Lake Nokomis/Hiawatha, where a beautiful view of the Minneapolis skyline against the colors of dusk reflected out of the placid waters of Lake Hiawatha seduced me into stopping to take a picture. Well, the pictures sucked, in part because I couldn't hold still long enough because I was being attacked by swarms of mosquitoes. Slap! Slap! There used to be an ad for (I think) Deep Woods Off! where this actor would spray it on his arm and cheerfully stick it in a glass box full of mosquitoes who would shy away. I think they were paid professional mosquitoes. The mosquitoes at 9:30 on a calm summers night are enthusiastic amateurs and I was one heavy CO2-emitting unit so they were very excited! Little mosquito dinner gongs must have been going off. I high-tailed it out of there with a couple of blurry shots and raced away.

The air was thick with bugs. I couldn't breathe through my mouth for fear of eating a crunchy snack (mmm, with a liquid center!). At one point the trail crosses a street and a couple of cars stopped since it was a pedestrian crossing and let me go and there were swarms of insects backlit by their headlights. Yech!

I stopped at Dairy Queen by the park (I hadn't had dinner) and after that the ride was away from the creek and the light faded to night so maybe the bugs would have gone away anyway, but next time I'm coming home from church at night I'll have to consider whether to do the bug-o-rama along the creek, the vaguely threatening Midtown Greenway (I think it would feel vaguely threatening after dark), or some other route.

The rest of the ride was uneventful. The nickel-metal hydride batteries for the Vistalite Nightstick seemed to work fine. The 10W bulb I have in there seemed a bit diffuse; I bought two, so may try the other one to see what its light pattern is like. The new Ortlieb bag worked fine. I got home late and had a beer and some chips and now it's off to bed. Sadly, my Nashbar box came and the Lake MX-60 shoes I ordered on the cheap don't fit--they're 48s, as big as Lake makes, and I'm going to need 49s it looks like. Bummer.

Independence Day

July 4th was a perfect riding day but I didn't ride much. It was, for the first time in, what, months?, a day on which nobody had any obligations whatsoever. No work, no school, no church, no camps, no Minnesota Boychoir, no Bel Canto Voices, no guests, no nothin'! I didn't get up until 9:30 and was the first up.

Karla decided to make French toast to use up some bread we had lying around preparing to rot. I realized we were out of maple syrup, even the fake stuff, so took my first ride of the day, a 1.1 mile round-trip to Rainbow. Yep, I know, you're all just so impressed you can hardly speak.

The day wore on as we did other things. After tea, we realized we didn't really have anything planned for dinner. I proposed that we all, including Karla, ride our bikes up to Byerly's to go grocery shopping. To my surprise, she said yes. I bellowed upstairs for the kids and they came tumbling down upon hearing that Mom was coming too. We mounted up as a few scattered raindrops spattered down (curse you!) but they stopped right away and we set off at a stately pace to Byerly's looking like a flock of ducks, only in this case the ducklings led the way in desperate sprints then waited around for Karla and I to catch up.

We negotiated the last little bit to Byerly's through the road construction, parked the bikes and went shopping. Half an hour, 90 bucks and three grocery bags later we came out and loaded up. Henry had a rear rack trunk on, and all the meat went in there, to keep it cool. Karla got the two bags of Kettle Chips, lightweight but bulky, in her handlebar basket. The rest went in my two grocery panniers on the Marin.

I have big feet, size 14s, so I mount the pannier back quite a way. Load them up with a lot of weight (including half a gallon of milk, two litres of Root Beer and an elegant tall bottle of French Orangeade, plus lots of fruit and vegetables) and the front wheel become very lightly weighted, at least while walking the bike. I have been thinking about an Xtracycle, where in this case I could carry more groceries and where they would also be ahead of the rear axle, and it would be good for this. I also should break out our old bike trailer, the one I used to haul the kids in, as I bet it would hold six bags and then I could ride my bike through the Byerly's Pick-Up lane and have the stuff loaded into the back. I'll have to try that.

Anyway, we made our stately way home. Traffic was very quiet, which is good, as Karla's a nervous cyclist at the best of times. The kids once again bubbled along, full of life and confidence. I picked my way carefully along to avoid bruising fruit or breaking bottles and we made our way home, where I lit up the barbeque while the kids zoomed around firing off smoke bombs and lighting off sparklers. Two rides down.

Once dinner was over, pleas came from the children to go watch fireworks. Bicycles are great for this, but I didn't want to ride to downtown Saint Paul or Minneapolis at this point, but said we could go up to the Roseville fireworks. Karla the nervous rider had no interest in this, but I quickly fitted the three bikes with blinky taillights (my Marin always has one mounted in any case) and an assortment of headlights, zip-tied a basket onto the rear rack and put in a 10X12 foot painting dropcloth and a Mexican blanket, and we rode off north to Roseville's Central Park. Bikes are great, there's no parking hassles, we rode straight out to the outfield of a baseball diamond, parked the bikes (two of them had the ever-handy kickstands!) and spread out. Henry was soon off playing on the monkey bars with some kids from school; Geneva and I lay in the settling dews applying bug spray and watching the clouds roll by. The drop cloth worked great--it's canvas, but rubberized on one side to keep paint spills from seeping through, and that also keeps the damp of the grass from coming up.

The fireworks started, Henry came zooming back over and we all admired the show. When it was over, we packed up in about two minutes and rode back out of the ballpark and along with the pedestrians up the street. Cars were jammed, all trying to leave at once of course, but we slipped past them and then home through the dark.

I rode 12.5 miles for the day at a pace that rarely had me breathing any faster than normal. For those who race, or train for brevets, or commute big distances, it was as nothing. Still, it was three trips which are easy to take by car out of habit. If we're going to make a difference in this world, it's going to start with small trips like these, one at a time. I'm not ready to renounce the automobile, we've grown too used to its convenience, but I am trying to reduce my use of the car when it's not necessary.

As a side note, when I was in Freewheel Bikes on Saturday I parked my Atlantis inside using (of course) the kickstand because the inside bike rack was full. My bike and gear elicited some comment, but the most hopeful was from a couple of ladies sitting there on a bench as I prepared to leave. I snapped my exceptionally-useful-but-of-course-no-longer-made pannier onto the rack and one of the ladies asked how it had attached. I took it back off and showed her; it's a standard steel-ring on elastic for the bottom, two hooks on top, nothing fancy like the Ortlieb or Carradice mountings. One lady asked, doesn't that make the bike unbalanced? No, I said, the weight is close in and low and in fact this morning (that was Saturday) I'd gone to the grocery store and brought back a gallon of milk, among other things. She asked how that fit in the bag; I pointed out that I used a grocery bag-sized pannier (I have both a Jandd and a Breezer model) and that they probably had them there at Freewheel. It's very useful for small loads, I said. They were talking to themselves as I left, "we should go back and have a look". I don't know if they looked or bought or not, but it felt good to evangelize just a little to a receptive audience.

Spittin' Cherries

Saturday I rode thirty miles to try out the new I-35E bridge, which has a pedestrian/bike sidewalk, unlike the older version. I think this opened this spring; I had seen it driving over the bridge, but hadn't ridden it. So, off I rode. I took lots of photos of this bridge, and of the Highway 55 bridge over the Minnesota, and the University of Minnesota bridge over the Mississippi, all photos I'm going to use when I get around to writing a Two Cities Two Wheels site and post photos of these things. I chatted to a guy at Lake and Hiawatha looking for Saint Paul and showed him my Twin Cities Bike Map, one I'd recommend for anyone riding around the area and available at most local bike stores. I stopped at Freewheel and bought a new, shorter stem to bring my handlebars back a bit, and also a brass bell. I rode home and put this stuff on, mounting the bell on the vertical part of the stem, a different mounting than I've done before.

Sunday we were hosting coffee hour with another family. They did an American flag cake, we did a British flag cake, both white frosting with blueberries, raspberries and strawberries for the color. We also did a bowl of cherries. Geneva and I rode Saturday night up to Cub Foods, where cherries were on for $1.49 a pound, and bought five pounds, then rode home in the gathering dusk, Geneva chattering happily away.

We didn't ride to church Sunday, as there was frequent lightning and driving rain at the time we'd have had to leave, so we all drove in the car. After church, the cherries didn't all go, though the cakes did. I have to say, the Union Jack has a better blend of berry flavors than the Stars and Stripes, which have all the blueberries up in one corner. We took the cherries and put them in the car trunk then went down to Southdale Hospital to visit a friend who is in with pretty bad cancer. Geneva's same knack for chattering away on the ride home from the grocery store also lets her brighten up a room, and our visit was a happy one for someone in pretty dire straits.

Leaving, I was concerned about the cherries cooking in the trunk, so we got out the big mixing bowl, rolled down the windows and drove off down 66th happily spitting cherry pits out the windows. Karla was admonishing us not to get any in the new car (a 2004 Toyota Avalon) or down the sides, but then she's an only child who didn't spend happy summer days in the '60s spittin' pits while roaring down the highway with no air conditioning in the car. Her mom would not have approved. My kids approved, roaring with delight and laughter as we went Ptoeee! out the side windows, trying to hit signs, the grassy median or sewer grates. All except Karla, too elegant for this sort of nonsense, who collected the pits demurely in a paper towel and resisted entreaties to do one big shotgun spit with them at the end when we were all out of ammo.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that really struck me. It talked about how what children remember and what parents remember of childhood are often wildly at odds, that kids will remember the daftest and silliest things, not the Important Moments. I don't know if in the end the kids will remember riding up to the store to get cherries for church or driving back from the hospital spitting pits out the window, or both, or neither, but the time spent in these sort of things, bicycling and non-bicycling, feels like time well spent.

Bike Nerdvana

My cycling buddy Paul, last seen riding south out of Prescott a couple of weeks ago, showed back up Tuesday with his eleven-year-old son Karl. They drove up this time, and are leaving their car with us while they take Amtrak to Seattle to visit family. The westbound Amtrak leaves around 11:00PM and Paul showed up about 12:30PM. Time to kill! What do we do? Work on bikes!

W A R N I N G ! Boring Bike Tech Stuff Follows!

First on the list was re-gearing the Atlantis. The high gear on this bike was a 46/11, or about a 112 inch gear. I never ride gears this high. On my old Motobecane my high gear was a 52/14, or about a 100 inch gear, and I basically never rode a gear that high even back when I rode a lot more. Also, I wanted closer gearing jumps in the middle ranges, so Paul brought along a bunch of cassettes and random loose cogs.

The first order of business was taking apart my Sachs cassette. While on some cassettes this can apparently be a chore, involving punches and drill presses, this one proved very simple; a single long thin bolt loosened with a 1.5mm hex key, out it came, and the whole thing fell apart. We then went through putting it back together but substituting in new gears. The cassette went from Old to New gearing:

Old 11 12 14 16 18 21 24 28 32

New 13 15 16 17 18 19 21 24 28

Perhaps this display shows the change better:

Old   11 12    14    16    18       21       24          28          32

New         13    15 16 17 18 19    21       24          28

The overall range is less, the lowest gear is higher and the highest gear is lower, but that tight cluster through the middle should allow some real fine-tuning of my effort and speed in the useful cruising gears. And, if I don't like it, I'll just take it apart and try something else!

Time also for more practicality. Paul brought up a couple of kickstands he had lying around. One was way too short, but the other one worked, after a trip to the hardware store to pick up a 2-inch 3/8" bolt for the mounting. Kickstands are funny things, I think that almost no serious cyclist thinks they're cool. I'm not sure if the correct word for the traditional cyclist's attitude towards kickstands would be 'disdain' or 'contempt'. Me, I love 'em. I love the cheap one-legged ones, like I just put on the Atlantis, somewhat less than the $50 Esge twin-legged ones like I have on the Marin, but after having had kickstands for years it seems incomprehensible to me that a Practical Bike would come without one. It's just so darn handy to flip it down and stand the bike up. Riding an Atlantis with a Brooks saddle can quickly get you pegged as a Retro cyclist, but even the Retros don't use kickstands.

I happened to mention to Paul that I'd seen the clearance Blackburn rack ($10) at Boehm's on Sunday but it didn't fit. Nonsense, he said, we'll bend it! We threw (gently) the Atlantis in the back of my pickup and hauled it down to the Boehm's at Selby and Snelling and took the bike in. After fiddling with the rack, we decided maybe it would fit and I ponied up the $10.70. At home, I lit the charcoal and while it was getting going we got out The Pipe (a big long pipe clamp) and put it over the fixed seatstay extensions on the rack and bent them, using the Wonders of Leverage, until they fit. I came up with a motley assortment of 5mm bolts and sure enough, the rack fits. It's even silver, which is a good look for my Atlantis.

Let's see; gears fiddled with, kickstand on, fenders installed, rack mounted. About all I need now is a bell and this thing will be useful.

We also ruined Henry's bike, at least in some eyes. I bought this Trek 620 touring bike from a bike shop in Iowa Falls in April for $100. It's in really nice shape. However, it has a gearing which is a bit odd, a six-speed freewheel (on the legendary, though not necessarily in a good way, Helicomatic hub) with 28/45/50 chainrings. The tight spacing between the 45 and 50 tooth chainrings was for a gearing setup called Half Step Plus Granny and it had many Wild-Eyed Zealots who loved it back in the 1980s. The gearing, laid out, did make sense, but every increment up was a double shift, one cog on the freewheel and a shift to the other of the middle and large chainrings. Paul brought along some chainrings he had lying around, and now Henry's bike has 28/34/45 chainrings. I might even dig up a 24 tooth small chainring for him to lower the low range on the bike. We figure somewhere there are some weathered but fervent Half Step Plus Granny zealots shedding a tear.

As happens on these things, it's the small stuff that's a total timesink. The 45-tooth chainring on Henry's bike wasn't meant to be the large chainring, so lacked a little stubby bolt next to the crank arm to keep the chain from wedging in there if you accidentally overshift. Your bike probably has one. So, we walked over to the hardware store, bought a small bolt and a couple of nuts, marked, drilled out and tapped the chainring, then installed the little bolt which was too long so we got out the trusty Dremel tool and cut it off in a satisfying shower of sparks and the acrid smell of disintegrating cutoff wheels. All told, this took more than an hour. If we keep that derailleur properly adjusted, this little bolt will never be needed. This is why I don't work in a bike store. I could see telling a customer, yep, we can put a little screw in there. The parts will run you $0.37 and labor will be $108.00.

There's more to do on Henry's bike. We're going to build him a set of 700C wheels, which will fit better than the 27 inchers that are on there now and allow fender clearance, and the rear wheel will use my Marin's old Deore LX cassette hub (I bought a new wheel after the old one kept breaking spokes because of corroded nipples)(I just love the words "corroded nipples") and thus go to eight speeds. This will require spreading the rear triangle on the bike out to fit, but this is a steel frame (lugged Reynolds 531) and so can take that sort of thing. If it still works, we'll stick with the slightly odd Duopar derailleur he's got on there.

Some more mods are coming for my bikes. Nashbar had a 20%-off sale on everything and I ordered up a couple of cheap sets of clipless pedals, a pair of shoes I hope are big enough (size 48s) and some cheap brake levers and a kickstand (for Henry's Trek 620). I'm going to try the clipless thing for the first time. I'm going to go purely clipless on the Atlantis and got a pair of clipless/platform pedals for the Marin so on that bike I won't need to always put on bike shoes to ride to the bagel shop or grocery store.

I love this aspect of bicycles, that everything can be modified and customized and you can be very intentional about every little part and component, or care deeply about some (my frame, bottom bracket, handlebars, tires) and be agnostic or oblivious about others (brakes, levers, rack, seatpost), or be oblivious about everything. Cycling welcomes the whole spectrum of involvment with the machines and I really enjoy my little point in the continuum.

OK, it's all clear, civilians can return to reading.

I took Paul and Karl down to the Amtrak station and the train showed up about 45 minutes late, about par for the course. Paul is taking a folding bike with him in a big suitcase. Once the train got there, I left. They'll be back in a couple of weeks.

Two Cities to Church

Saturday morning I decided to move the Atlantis another step towards practicality by installing my Esge fenders. This took a while. One of the features of the Atlantis is that it has clearance for big tires and fenders. I installed pretty compact 28mm tires (the Rivendell Roly Polys) and as a result have oodles of clearance. In fact, when I held the fenders up, they looked a bit daft. So, I used little aluminum spacers (3/4" and 1") to move the fender closer to the tire at the chainstay and seatstay mounts. I also drilled a hole through the fender to screw it directly into the bridge on the seatstays. This all took a while.

Meanwhile, other duties called. A huge branch of one of our silver maples had come down and I had to cut it up and haul the branches to the Ramsey County Compost site. I took the first load down, then went to the Sibley Bike Depot. These guys take in old bikes and fix them up and resell them. I had been in there when my friend Paul was up for the Great River Energy Bike Festival and they had had a couple of enormous Schwinn World Sports in the collection. I'd expressed an interest in the red one and last week had a call that I could buy it "as-is" if I signed a release saying I wouldn't sue them.

So I went in and got the bike. Frames this size are very rare in my experience. I can count on one hand the number of times I've run into 27" (68cm) frames in stores, and bought the Atlantis frame in that size in part because Rivendell is one of the few makers building stock frames that big. Given this, it was extremely odd to find two in the Bike Depot. I signed the papers, paid $125, and took away the bike, shown below:



The frame is double-butted chro-moly lugged steel with forged dropouts. The Bike Depot guy seemed to be something of a connesiuer and said the frame was built by Bridgestone about the time Schwinn went broke. This particular one has a rusty chain and pedals, nondescript components and a potato-chip front wheel, but the frame is a tenth the cost of the Atlantis frame and I have designs on possibly getting an Xtracycle for it.

I stopped at the hobby store, too, and got some Testors red enamel. Time to mark the Atlantis as mine. Here's the bottom bracket:



Lots of stuff to see here. You can see my name painted in, the Phil Wood bottom bracket inside the shell, the primitive cable routing around the bottom bracket shell and the 3/4" spacer on the chainstay fender mount. You can also see the third bottle cage mounting bolts and the fairly frivolous bit of paint job in the bottom bracket lug.

I'm not sure painting my name on the BB helps much, but if it's stolen, it's a quick ID to make and probably won't be noticed by any thief. I've done it on all my bikes. I had a Trek 750 hybrid stolen in 1995 and never heard another thing about it, so maybe it's wishful thinking, but it gives me comfort.

Sunday Geneva and I rode to church. Henry's still off on his Minnesota Boychoir Tour, so he'll have to try next week. We hadn't done this before. Karla started at St. Luke's Episcopal as Music Director in January. During Choir Season (think school year) we have to be there by 8:15AM and it's a solid 13 miles away, so we haven't ridden. School's out, choir's over and the church is on the 10:00AM Summer Schedule, so we don't have to be there until about 9:58 (well, Karla does, the rest of us can get in at the last second).

Geneva and I set out at 8:40 and arrived at, well, at about 9:58. It turns out to be 13.7 miles, down Como Ave past the State Fairgrounds (with a cheesy circus on right now), down Raymond and then Pelham to the Lake/Marshall bridge, across the river, down the West River Parkway to Minnehaha Parkway, then out the bike trail to Lyndale, where we got off onto surface streets to get to 46th and Colfax. I had to make an announcement about some painting we'll be doing and quickly ditched the bikes in the library and went straight into church, dripping wet with sweat. I took no photos on the way over due to the time constraints.

After Coffee Hour, for which I am now the Scheduler and coordinator, Geneva and I set off home. We hadn't got far when she got one of her shoelaces caught in her chainring and had to stop to extricate it. Here she is, having just done this:



Minneapolis is as high-tax as Saint Paul. This buys you great public facilities like this bike and pedestrian path and also some public art, like this enormous bunny. Here are Geneva and I with this critter:





This is the first time I've ridden the Minnehaha bike path. When we moved here, eleven years ago, I made the observation that people had pretty limited spheres of operation. People seemed to have their work, school, church and mall and lived much of their day to day lives in this small orbit. The cities are so pretty that it seemed weird to me to meet people from, say, Minneapolis, who had only ever been to Saint Paul twice. Well, we kind of fell into the same pattern, and thus I went more than a decade riding around and never once rode from the falls to Lake Harriet, one of the signature trails in Minneapolis.

Anyway, we ate at a Dairy Queen by the park, then rode over to see the falls. Minnehaha Creek, along which the bike path we'd been riding flows, goes over these attractive falls shortly before the creek enters the Mississippi.



Rather than ride up the west side parkway again, we crossed on the 46th Street/Ford Parkway bridge. It's a quirk of this state that street names change when they go from one city to another, so all these streets change names when they go from Minneapolis to Saint Paul. On another level, counties all name their county roads independently from the adjacent counties, so the same road will suddenly change numbers at the county line. Paul had found this confusing when riding up from Iowa earlier in June. I hadn't noticed it before. Anyway, off the Ford Bridge (it's by the Ford plant, where they make Rangers) you get a good view of Lock and Dam Number 1. This is the first of 27 numbered locks, the last one at Alton, Illinois, just above the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers near Saint Louis. This one also has the biggest single drop on the river, 60 feet from the upstream side to the downstream side. You can see a map of the "Stairway of Water" here.



Gosh it was hot. Humid, too. We rode up the east side of the river. At the west end of Summit Avenue there is a drinking fountain. Here's Geneva drinking, with a memorial to residents of Saint Paul and Ramsey County killed in the World War, then a view upriver to the distant, hazy skyline of Minneapolis. This monument was erected in 1922, hence the lack of a reference to World War I; with the horrors of pointless trench warfare a fresh memory it must have seemed incomprehensible that in another 20 years we'd do it all again.



And then we rode home. We stopped at a bike shop (Boehm's) that had a silver Blackburn rack on clearance for $10, and I got excited about it, but it had fixed front stays and didn't fit the Atlantis. Oh well. When we got home we'd ridden 30.5 miles. Geneva is 11 (and three quarters, Daddy). She's so good. We don't move at Lance Armstrong-like speed, but she cracks off 30 miles and thinks it's a great way to spend the day. I never rode anywhere near that far when I was 11 (or eleven and three quarters).

Henry's back now, bubbling full of stories of his weeklong Boychoir Tour, and, weather permitting, we'll try this again next week.

Why I Was Late for Mass

Another Twin Cities bike blogger (Daily Spirit-Human) wrote about doing a Critical Mass ride in Saint Paul in his blog in May. He thought about calling it Non-Critical Mass, as it wasn't going to plug intersections or annoy people, just ride around downtown. I've never done a Critical Mass, so can't speak from firsthand experience, but I'm not sure that annoying motorists is a great way to win friends and influence people. On the other hand, riding visibly around downtown being assertively polite didn't sound too bad. I think he ought to call it Sub-Critical Mass. I thought I'd give it a try.

Anyway, we were supposed to meet at 4:45 and ride off at 5:00. I got back from work and got stalled. Karla and I were talking about Dr. Breedlove's death and Geneva, who had gone to ValleyFair yesterday with the church Youth Group and got back after I'd gone to bed, had to tell me about surviving the Steel Venom ride. I finally set off.

Delays mounted. Here's the bike at the Black Bear Crossing on Como Avenue:



Note the utility of the kickstand!

I rode on downtown, hitting lots of red lights. I typically don't ride through red lights, figuring that if I am going to act as a legal road user, I'm going to follow the rules. When I do have motorists complain that bikes always ride through red lights, I can tell them they're wrong. I also point out that cars are always running stop signs and red lights themselves.

I got downtown about 5:15. No Mass in sight. Oh well. I coasted down towards the Robert Street bridge. It's a nice view of the river. There are parts of the Twin Cities that look a bit like a model railroad set, and this lift bridge over the Mississippi is one of those bits.



Riding onto the Robert Street bridge you get a good view of the operator's hut on top of this bridge.



I like the domestic touches.



This bridge is usually parked in the up position so that barge traffic and the more majestic yachts can get by. I wondered if it were down for a reason, and rode across the bridge to the south side of the river. There's a lovely walking and cycling path along the river. It even gets an official rail crossing. As soon as I got there, a train appeared and crawled by. I think the speed limit on the bridge is 5 miles per hour. Here the Soo Line locomotive crosses the pedestrian pathway.



It chugged across the river. On a bike, it is remarkably simple to hop aboard and quickly move a couple of hundred yards for the next shot where it would be tough to run over quickly enough for the next shot on foot.



The train looked long and I couldn't get past it on the pedestrian path until it got past, so I rode back over on the Robert Street bridge. I rode around downtown a bit but saw no packs of cyclists. I rode up to the Sibley Bike Depot to see if they'd gone there, but it was closed. Then I rode home.

Going up Como Avenue I'd just crossed at Black Bear Crossing again when I heard yet another train. I stopped to take a picture. Here a CSX train comes chugging past. At this point the westbound trains, like this one, are lugging uphill, so they're not going that fast. This is one of the few level crossings of the mainline tracks.



About six years ago a child was killed at this crossing. He and his twin sister tried to beat a train over on their bicycles. The young girl made it, the little boy almost made it. The train clipped his back wheel which threw him to the ground pretty hard. I don't remember the details any more, but the injuries killed him. These kids were about the age of mine, and ours crossed this everyday going to school (in a school bus) so it made a real impression on them.

We had a reception to go to, so I quickly washed up, changed and we drove off to that and to dinner. I'll have to try this Critical Mass thing again next month and see if I can make it on time.

Dr. Breedlove Dead

I tried the Google Cycling News link off another site for the first time and was surprised to read that Dr. Robert Breedlove was killed yesterday morning while competing in the Race Across America (RAAM). Although born Canadian, I pretty much grew up in Des Moines and Breedlove was a big figure in the cycling community there. I never actually met him personally, but a longtime friend and cycling companion of mine rode with Breedlove a lot and in fact Breedlove had bought a custom tandem sized to fit my buddy Mark to do the Paris-Brest-Paris ride in France. Once I was down visiting my Dad and had stopped by Mark's house. He and Theresa have four kids, I added my two to the mix, and Theresa and I were feeding them all lunch when Mark came in off a 150-mile ride with Breedlove.

Apparently, according to Des Moines Register article (I'm not sure how long this link will work), Breedlove was riding in Colorado when he veered across the centerline into the path of an oncoming truck. The truck hit him and he was killed instantly. As with early reports, it's hard to say what's going on. The driver of the truck was 15; he says Breedlove appeared to slump over his bars right before veering over. I think there's going to be an autopsy so perhaps some problem will come to light. Perhaps it won't, and this will just go down as another accident.

This has little to do with Practical Cycling, but this guy did do some very impressive miles (15,000 miles a year) while keeping his orthopedic medicine practice going. He still holds the tandem record for the RAAM race. People I know well knew him well, and the bike shop owner quoted in the article (Forrest Ridgway, owner of Bike World) was another high school classmate of mine, though we weren't close.

The Race Across America is continuing. I hope the other riders are careful.

In a later update (I'm editing the already-posted article), I had emailed my other cycling buddy Paul, who was just up here a couple of weeks ago to work the Great River Energy Bike Festival races, and he said that my other buddy Mark had left Wednesday to go to Kansas to work on Bob Breedlove's support crew through to Ohio. Paul hadn't heard yet from Mark. You can see a photo of Mark and Paul in 1980 on this page, when they rode a tandem together to Boston. I'd just graduated from Iowa State, Mark was going to start medical school in the autumn and Paul had another quarter to go before graduation. Funny, a quarter century has elapsed and we're all still doing biking.

Informed Thinking on Energy by our President

Here's George W. Bush in Washington DC on June 8:

"We're spending money on clean coal technology. Do you realize we've got 250 million years of coal?"

Two hundred and fifty million years of coal? Wasn't this guy in the oil business? The U.S. Department of Energy reckons we have domestic reserves if coal equivalent to 285 years at the rate of consumption in the U.S. in 2001. The plant matter that later became coal was laid down during the Carboniferous era, between 280 million and 340 million years ago. This era was after the Devonian and before the Permian. You think that Mr. Bush, who spend many of his formative adult years in dreary Midland/Odessa, Texas, which is located in the Permian Basin and has the famous Odessa Permian Panthers football team, would appreciate the timescale.

It's nuts that we have done virtually nothing to reduce energy dependence on foreign princes and potentates in the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Perhaps factual errors of six orders of magnitude in understanding our energy situation feed into this decision process.

On the other hand, my next-door-cube neighbour was out looking at cars last night after her newly-licensed 16-year-old daughter totalled the family Camry into a lightpole in the driveway at work (fired off both airbags!). They test-drove a Prius which they thought was pretty cool, but the wait is now 8-10 months. People are making some of their own decisions in regards to energy even though the administration has asked nothing of us in this war except to accept tax cuts and shop more.

Drivers like this daughter frighten me. They've got a license, scored well on the drivers exam and within six weeks have totalled a car. I don't know that it's clear what she was doing that she couldn't make it out of the parking lot without crashing the Camry, but it probably was something to do with the radio, a CD or a cellphone (this is my speculation). (I could really annoy my cube-neighbour and say it was probably the crack stash and birth control). You just hope like hell that some goofball 16-year-old full of misplaced confidence and different muscial tastes than Mom doesn't one day inadvertently mow you down. I'd hate to get killed because someone wanted to listen to Green Day.

You sure get fast claims service when you total the car in your insurance company parking lot! I suggested that we send her a Crash Test Dummy t-shirt in a company envelope and a letter thanking her for the increased premiums we'll be getting, but my cube-mate thought the situation at home was perhaps a little tense for this yet.

While looking for appropriate Crash Test garments, I came across this one on eBay. I might even buy one of these, I don't have a modern plastic cycling jersey yet:

eBay link

A couple of yellow/black circle stickers on the helmet and I'd be all set!

Get Naked at Work

My normal 4.8-mile commute went to 7.9 miles this morning. I took a load of shirts to the cleaners for clean and press, then rode to work. A couple of hundred yards from the entrance to the driveway I suddenly had a flash of realization that I hadn't packed any dress socks this morning. I ambled along thinking, ok, what do I do? I could wear the white socks I have on, but that'll look pretty daft with my dark olive pants and black dress shoes. I could ride back home. That'll kill most of an hour. I could go with no socks. That seems more appropriate for boat shoes on your yacht at Nantucket than black dress shoes in the office. What would I do in a car? Well, I wouldn't forget my socks. I glanced at my watch; it was already a little past 8:00, so Target would be open. I could ride over there.

So I did. I bought a six-pack of dark dress socks in the Extended Sizes (13-15 shoe size), a box of Kleenex and a tin of nuts, then rode back over to work, making up the 7.9 miles.

I took a shower. In 20+ years of professional work this is the first office I've been in with a shower. It's not brilliant, but it is there. It's at the back of the first floor men's room, a room about 8X10 feet with a couple of hooks on the wall, a couple of folding chairs, and a shower stall. It has a locking door, so you do get privacy. This also prevents hi-jinks like co-workers pinching all your clothes while you're showering, something that would occasionally happen in the dorms at college, but that's way funnier at 20 than it is at 47.

The shower thing works well in part because hardly anyone uses it. There must be a couple of other users because they leave some soap and shampoo in there; I take mine with me. On the other hand, it never seems wet in there, so maybe they don't use it a lot. If 50 people all of a sudden began commuting by bike and wanting showers in the morning, this wouldn't work so well, but at the current level of commuting here it seems fine. There is one other guy who rides regularly. He rides more often than I do and further as well, 13 miles one-way. He also gets here about 6:00AM, unlike me, more of an 8:00-8:30 kind of guy.

The shower room has no lockers, so everything goes upstairs with me. The cycling shorts, t-shirt and socks just go in my commuting pannier, the shoes I carry, and I take the towel up and drape it over a box under my workstation to dry out. For compactness, I use a Cascade Designs packtowel, very thin material. It dries you off differently than luxurious Turkish cotton bath sheets, but it folds down really small. It's all polyester microfibre, so can get smelly if left wadded up in the dark, so I wash it and hang it out to dry in the sun from time to time which cures that problem.

I don't always shower at work; in cooler and less-humid weather, I'll just change clothes after a damp-mopping of myself in one of the lobby bathrooms. This time of year, though, it can get plenty humid and it's not hard to work up a sweat even in only five miles.

I keep a pair of dress shoes and a belt in a drawer in my cubicle, so after the shower pad upstairs in stocking feet and put on the shoes and belt. Now I'll have a spare pair of dress socks in there as well.

Ride Report

Thursday I heard from Paul, last seen heading south out of Prescott, Wisconsin (see the end of the previous post to see the pix) on his way home to Cedar Rapids. Here's what he had to say:

Cole,

I am still alive. I got home about 4 pm on Wednesday.
Highway 35 was a good road. It has a 3' shoulder the whole way to Winona and enough small towns along the way for supplies. Although it was a rather bleak day (I got rained on twice, but no tornados) the route is pretty. I had a slight SE headwind all the way to Winona. In Winona I spent the night in a better than average Mom and Pop motel. The rooms has refrigerators in them so I froze my Camelbak and then ripped the bladder the next morning when I put it into the backpack. Shit. Fortunately, the next two days were cool so I could get by with two water bottles.

On Tuesday I rode from Winona to Decorah. I got a late start onacounta it was raining when I got up. The storm blew through by 9, so that is when I started riding. The roads were wet, but I didn't get rained on. In MN I followed Hwy 43 through Rushford where it crossed the Root River Trail. South of Rushford are some nice climbs. Rt 43 is good, but it does not have a paved shoulder most of the way. The wind was strong out of the West and I was hoping it would swing around a bit to the NW but it never did. When I got to Decorah I had to decide whether to spend the night there or ride another 40 km to West Union. I stopped at a nice local bike shop which had an internet connection. The forecast was for a strong NW or NNW wind on Wednesday, so I decided to spend the night. Ate in a real hole-in-the-wall bar that was recommended by the bike shop owner. Tuesday night was Mexican (food) Night. Good food. Decorah seems to be a nice town.

There was still more rain on Wednesday, so I did not start until about 7:30. More wet roads and a few drops but no big deal. The big deal was a 15 to 20 mph NW wind. Hot damn. The roads from Decorah to Arlinton (a little town NE of Oelwein) are great: hills, vistas, and little traffic. After Arlington it is much flatter. No matter, flat with a tailwind is nice too. By this time the wind was NNW at almost 20 mph. Nevertheless, I never once felt my highest gear (46 x 13 = 93 in) was not high enough. There was one slightly downhill stretch of perhaps 0.5 km that I thought I would spin out my highest gear, but it did not happen. I just don't see the need for a gear bigger than about 90 in.

Anyway, Wednesday was a great day. It's not often that I get to ride 185 km on great roads on a 68 degree day with a 20 mph tailwind.

I had fun at the races, We'll see you in a couple of weeks.

Later,

PBS

Five Days of Bikes

I didn't have time to post these photos etc. each day as I took them so am running them all at once to cover the rest of the Bike Festival weekend.

My grade-school buddy, college roommate and best man Paul was up from Cedar Rapids to volunteer at the Great River Energy Bike Festival and also to mess around with bikes. Here's what we did:



Thursday the kids got to ride to school. They were very excited to do this and grateful that the weather had turned out nice. It's 7.7 miles, and Paul and I rode them down. It must have seemed a touching tableau of some happy alternative family, me on my PeeWee Herman bike, Paul on Karla's Wicked Witch of the West bike, and the kids.

Once at school, we ran into Jim. He's an engineer with 3M and had designed and had built (by the 3M Woodworking Club) a trebuchet. It was designed to throw golfballs and eggs, not rocks or diseased ox carcasses, and looked great. Here's Jim with the trebuchet and 40% of his offspring, Lizzie and Mary Clare.



Of course, Paul the engineer and I couldn't keep from hanging around and "helping" for a bit. Jim needed distance markings laid out to measure the throws. The fifth and sixth grades were doing a competition and had previously performed experiments with sling length, release points and projectile weights. Unbeknownst to these kids, Jim had also brought along a carton of eggs to toss at Mr. Foat, the history teacher, who would wear a bunny suit and protect himself with a Viking shield, possibly made of cardboard. Before we left we fired the trebuchet a couple of times. Here a golf ball is getting flung.



We rode home, stopping only at World Cycling Productions, who don't have a bike rack at their building! I guess I'm not entirely surprised; they're big on bike racing videos and clothing and gear, not Practical Cycling. More typical than our two nerdy bikes locked to a No Parking sign down the street was the customer looking at stuff who went out, got in the Mercedes station wagon, and drove off. Anyway, we went home and worked on the Atlantis for a bit. Here it is hanging in the garage:



The buildout of this frame was pretty straightforward except for the brakes. I was putting Tektro Oryx cantilevers on it and the stupid mounting bolts were too long. I was fretting about this complication when Paul suggested we just cut the darn things off shorter (the bolts, not the brakes!) with a Dremel tool. Here he buzzes away at it in a shower of sparks. The cutoff wheels did cut right through the stainless steel bolts and then they went on properly.



We rode back down to school to get the kids, leaving the house shortly before the school called to say Geneva had sprained her ankle running the hurdles for Field Day. Fortunately, they got ahold of Karla and church and she got to school about the same time we did. We put Geneva's bike in the trunk and Karla took her home while Paul, Henry and I rode back.

Friday we worked like dogs. There was some bike work in the morning including an obligatory visit to the bike shop, then we reported for duty in downtown Minneapolis for race course setup duty. The Great River Energy Bike Festival/Nature Valley Grand Prix Minneapolis Criterium was to be staged here.

We got issued shirts and vests and spent a sweaty couple of hours setting up tents, tables and fencing. We couldn't block off the roads yet, but instead set up fencing along the streets to be moved out at 6:00 for the 6:45 women's race start. Just as we got done setting up fences it began to rain, and we retreated to a tent to eat Subway sandwiches and then to Starbucks for a coffee for an hour. By 5:45 the rain cleared off and we re-emerged.

The Hennepin County Sheriff had a couple of squads there with bicycles though I never saw them come off the cars.



Nicollet Mall is not always open to bikes:



We moved out the fencing. This is looking west along Marquette from 11th Street.



Some racers began warming up while we were doing this.





Here are some more. The store in the background is the now-closed downtown Schmitt Music store. The music mural is Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, according to my pianist wife Karla.

Some cyclists stayed on their machines while we worked. This is the Velo Girls team under the skywalk to Orchestra Hall.



Once the race started, Paul and I were busy working as Course Marshals. My crowd was generally pretty good and only once did I have to guide people back with my flag stick. Paul had some male racer give him crap during the women's race when Paul wouldn't let him cross because there were racers coming. Paul argued with him and wished afterwards he'd taken the guy's number and reported him. Here is Paul watching up-course for racers to appear.



We marshalled both races and then helped tear down, working until nearly 10PM. Between these highly annoying whistles and the clanging metal fencing during teardown, we both suffered bad ringing in the ears and temporary (I hope!) mild hearing loss. Next year I'm bringing earplugs. We went to Whitey's for a pitcher of beer and dinner before going home.

Saturday the race moved to Red Wing and we stayed here. We finished off the Atlantis and it was time for rollout and a test ride. This is a 68cm frame. We went out on the quiet street behind the house and I rode it for the first time. At this point there's no handlebar wrap on it because I want to fiddle with brake lever position. There's also no toe straps on it here. I did briefly stand up to try pushing the 46/11 gear (112 inches!) which is just silly. I am going to have to build a custom cassette to get my gears the way I want them. Anyway, this is my first ride.



It's funny for me to see this photo. I never see myself on bikes. Keep in mind this Atlantis is a 68cm (27") frame and those are 700C wheels. It seems enormous when I look at it, it looks pretty small when I'm on it. The other weird thing about Saturday is that Paul and I took Henry to a Minnesota Boychoir taping session at a church in downtown Saint Paul. We decided to pop into the Sibley Bike Depot. These guys can be pretty hardcore; a bunch of them helped on the Wednesday teardown and one of them refused even to ride in a car down to the far end of the course; "I don't do cars" he'd stated, matter-of-factly. The weird thing is, the Depot has lots of old bikes for sale and they had two 68cm Schwinn World Sports there! I have only rarely seen a stock 68cm frame for sale anywhere, and here they had two! The World Sport is a decent chro-moly lugged steel frame and Paul has one with an Xtracycle on it. Before converting into the Xtracycle, he'd ridden it on RAGBRAI after riding across the state (of Iowa) to the start point, a 900-mile journey overall. I put my name on the red one with thoughts of an Xtracycle dancing in my mind.

Sunday Saint Luke's sang at the Lake Harriet Bandshell in Minneapolis. Parking can be a problem here, I guess, plus I wasn't sure exactly where it was, so Henry and I tossed our bikes on the Subaru and drove to church, parked in the church lot, and then rode around the lake to the Bandshell. One of the problems with cycling is that people just don't dress properly. Here I am at the Bandshell with my Marin.



I used that basket on the rear rack throughout the Bike Festival events, it's pretty handy for carrying things around. I may actually add a front rack to the Marin and put the basket on there and leave it.

Anyway, once done with the service, which went great, Henry and I rode back to the church parking lot, put the bikes on the roof rack, and drove home. I changed, took down Henry's bike, and zoomed off to Stillwater. I went in on Highway 12 and traffic was backed up halfway up the hill. I pulled off on a sidestreet, the same street our old goofball Rector lives on, as it happens, and parked the Subaru. I took down the bike and rode down the hill to report for duty.

Bikes are great for what I think of as Terminal Mobility, and today I did it twice. In both cases, I used a car to travel the big distances and bikes to get around once there. Bicycles are terrific for ranging around for a few miles where cars are a pain to deal with and walking is too slow. In Stillwater, I was assigned to the top of the brutal hill climb the Criterium would climb (15 times, I think). It was also where the finish line was.

The women had raced earlier. Paul, already at the top of the hill, saw this race. He had taken his clipless pedals back off Karla's Wicked Witch of the West bike and put them on his Waterford to ride the 25 miles or so out. I got established as well, then a race person came along and asked me to move down the hill a bit to keep the crowds off the course. I didn't get a lot of opportunities to take photos but did get this one of the pack grinding their way up.



The crowds get pretty close in these races. This hill is a 20% grade, it was a chore to walk up it. I might be able to ride up in my low low gear, but once would do me just fine, 15 times with a pack snapping at my heels would really hurt. As it happened, a lot of racers also had trouble and got lapped and pulled out of the race.

From the Well-Dressed Cyclist of this morning I looked like this for the afternoon:



I had volunteered for Course Marshal and Teardown. Once the race was over, I helped at the top of the hill with fencing, tents, banners and scaffolding, then moved down the hill for more fence work. Here is the crew working in downtown Stillwater picking up the white metal fencing.



This wasn't nearly as noisy as it had been in Minneapolis, but I'm still bringing foam earplugs next year. Once done, Paul and rode down to the Freight House to sit on the deck, have a couple of Coronas each and some nachos. This cost $29! Damn! Next time, we're bringing a six-pack and a bag of Doritos.

We rode up the hill to the car, put the bikes on the roof and drove home.

Monday morning Paul left to head back to Cedar Rapids. We looked at routes south out of the Cities. I don't know that end of town very well from a bicycling perspective and Paul was hoping to ride to Winona, on the Mississippi in southeastern Minnesota, but that was going to be pretty painful with predicted headwinds, possible rain and clearing the Metro area. I offered to drive him to Prescott, Wisconsin, so he wouldn't have to deal with the traffic and we decided that was the way to go.

I got up at 5:30. Paul was already up and about. We put the bike in the truck and went to the Day by Day cafe on West 7th street for breakfast. If you get in before 7:00AM the Early Bird Specials are half-price. We then went down to Prescott, just over the border at the confluence of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers.

Paul was travelling pretty light:



This is all he had for luggage:



I took the pictures above then Paul, without ceremony, got on and rode off to the south:



Paul was heading down Wisconsin State Highway 35, which runs along the east bank of the Mississippi. Anyone in a hurry goes on U.S. Highway 61 on the west bank and there aren't many towns between Prescott and Winona. I haven't heard from him yet but trust that it worked out. Paul's wife Anne emailed Monday night and said he'd made Winona right before the storms. I think he got rained on; we ended up with tornado warnings and severe weather back here.

I drove from Prescott to work, a 50-minute proposition. Coming along Shepard Road in Saint Paul, the orange drum, sandbags and traffic cones from the turnaround for the Wednesday Time Trials were still off the side of the road.

This five-day interlude was a lot of fun. Between the bike races, finishing the Atlantis buildout, riding around town during normal weekdays and lots of drinking beer and talking bicycles, it was like a brief reliving of the carefree days of summers in college. Next year we're going to have to talk a couple of more Bike Buddies into coming up and spending five days on bikes.

Now back to normal life!

Saint Paul Time Trials

I took today off to volunteer at the Great River Energy Bike Festival which kicks off with the Nature Valley Grand Prix, a set of five bike races. I was scheduled to work 12:30 to 3:00, my biking buddy Paul from 5:00 to 9:00.

It was cloudy and humid out, after-effects of a storm front which moved through at 4:00 in the morning overnight. We decided to go down and watch the Pro Racing, which started at 11:00, and spent a bit of time fiddling with bikes. Paul rode my wife's Trek 700, an unfashionable and fairly old women's-framed bike with fenders, rack, bell and a front basket. He did switch his clipless pedals to the bike.

Off we rode. We got downtown a little after 11:00. We were up on the high bits above the river and so stopped on the Wabasha Street bridge, where I took this photo:



I like this photo, the cyclist looks so insignificant in comparison to the size of the barge tow going upriver, the train tracks, cars, etc. A lot of transportation stuff comes together in downtown Saint Paul, there's even an airport in the distance.

The Time Trial race is a timed race. Each racer gets sent off by themselves and their run is timed. This one was nearly five miles, out and back on this road along the river. Here one of the women racers is in the start box. My buddy Paul later noted that the very serious-looking official on the right had great legs. I hadn't noticed at the time.



The timer counts down, the girl with the nice legs shows three, then two, then one finger, and off the racer goes. They went tearing off east along the river and under the old railway bridge. Here a cyclist goes under as a coal train rumbles overhead.



The river is flowing east at this point, but then turns southwards again. The road follows it and that's where the time trial went. There was a motorcycle camera crew covering some of the racers; I don't know enough about racing to know who is good and who is peloton fodder, but apparently this guy merited interest.



The cyclists had to turn around an orange traffic cone thing at the far end of the course, then race back to the finish line, right by where they started. Here a cyclist approaches the turnaround.



The racers are timed on this so they are racing against the clock. Still, they are sent off every thirty seconds and it is possible for a fast cyclist to overtake the one sent out ahead of them. I don't know if this photo shows an overtake that just happened or one that is about to happen, but one of these guys is going to be bummed out. I suggested to my buddy Paul that if you were really fast it would be kind of demoralizing to have a little brass bell on your handlebars like my wife does (and I do) and give slower riders a friendly little "ding ding" as you kicked their ass.



These guys ride really fast.



I didn't actually take any photos at the finish line.

The event was slightly odd, different from the Minneapolis Criteriums I've volunteered at in the past. This was due to this being the middle of the day on a weekday and also from the lack of pedestrian traffic down along the river. Most of downtown Saint Paul is up the hill, and I don't think there were many office workers who just wondered down over lunch. The Minneapolis Criterium, held on a Friday evening, is a different kettle of fish, tons of people, lots of traffic, and a jolly crowd in the after-work, had-a-couple mode.

Bike Racing is not very Practical, but it is kind of fun. We seemed to be the only volunteers who showed up on bikes and they were perfect, allowing us to range up and down the whole course (hence all these photos) at will, checking on stuff and delivering water to volunteers. There were more volunteers during the early afternoon shift than were really needed to cover the limited pedestrian crossings, so our roles were pretty ill-defined. Once the race was over, Paul and I hung around and helped tear down the tents, etc. We ate a tasty dinner 4:30-ish at the Eagle Street Bar and Grill (again, the bikes made getting there very easy while traffic was all jammed up and it would be a bit of a walk), then Paul went back to work the 5-9 shift while I went home and on to choir rehearsal. We all finally pulled in just after 9:00, pooped. Time for a good night's sleep.

Big Miles

Not by me, of course. My buddy Paul rode up from Cedar Rapids to spend a few days here volunteering at the Great River Energy Bike Festival. I'm taking the rest of the week off to do this as well. It oughta be fun.

Paul rode here today from Cresco, Iowa, about 165 miles away. I didn't get home from work until 7:30 or so, and he'd just arrived. He rode a Waterford 1200 he'd had made for him many years ago. This bike doesn't have dropout eyelets, so, no room for a rack and panniers. Instead, he put on one of those seatpost-clamp racks with a rack bag and mailed his stuff up here. He said one bag, a fast bike and a credit card make for an easy way to tour.

We're both working the Saint Paul time trials tomorrow. There are supposed to be thunderstorms early. Pro racing is from 11:00 - 2:30, and I'm on the 12:30 to 3:00 shift. I'm not racing, of course, I'm in either Expo Operations or am a Course Marshall. Come see us!

Suburban Sales Down

There's an brief article in today's Wall Street Journal saying that GM's SUV sales were down in the month of May. GM's overall sales were down 12% for the month; sales of the Suburban were down 15%, those of the Yukon 23% and sales of the Cadillac Escalade were down 41%. GM has big inventories of these vehicles and is now offering discounts to the general public like those offered to employees to try and move these vehicles. One local dealer is even giving away a free car (a Chevy Aveo, starting at $9,995) with the purchase of a new Suburban. Maybe you can toss it in back. Separately, GM's debt ratings were reduced to junk status during May. Also, they lost either $1.1 or $1.3 billion in the first quarter, I've read both figures.

What's this got to do with bicycles? Part of the reason I like Practical Cycling and am trying to incorporate it more into my daily routine is to do my little bit to reduce oil consumption. As a country, our oil consumption has climbed in recent years in part because of a reduction in the aggregate fleet fuel efficiency since the 1980s. Part of this has been driven by the big popularity of SUVs since the mid-1990s. This popularity has been helped by cheap gasoline.

A recent survey on the Oil Industry in the The Economist magazine made the point that the oil producing nations learned in the 1980s that if you raise the price of oil too much, the countries that get hurt the worst aren't the industrialized consuming nations of the West, who adjust consumption patterns and efficiencies to adapt as we did in the late 1970s/early 1980s, but the producing nations, who saw oil prices collapse in the mid 1980s and stay low for the following fifteen years, resulting in a dramatic drop in revenues for countries with burgeoning populations and little other productive outlet. The trick for the oil producers is to try and hit a price point that extracts maximum revenue from the customers without driving them to consider alternative fuel or technologies. (actually, this is the trick for a lot of businesses)

Cheap gas (at least in the U.S., where gasoline is not heavily taxed as it is in Europe) has eased the need to increase fuel efficiency and encouraged a fairly profligate use of fuel. SUVs exemplify this, big, heavy, low-tech vehicles with lousy mileage. The auto companies love these things, as they're cheap to produce, have commanded premium prices and are exempt from many of the safety and efficiency regulations imposed on passenger automobiles.

The oil markets are complex, nobody has the ability to manipulate them completely, and for a variety of reasons (increased overseas demand, terrorism premiums, refinining capacities) prices have increased to a point where some people are beginning to make adjustments to consumption patterns. For me, it was riding my bicycle to the grocery store this morning to buy milk, bread, muffins and strawberries; for 88,000 people in the last year and a half, it has been buying Toyota Priuses (Priii?); for a lot of people, it is apparently not buying SUVs. Hence GM's sales problems.

Is this the dawn of a New Age? Hard to say. Cars aren't going away. The Saudis could open the spigots and drive the price of oil down again to discourage structural adjustments that would reduce demand. When gas costs $2.20 a gallon, it seems really expensive (and you can argue until you're blue in the face that it is still cheaper in real terms than it was in 1981, but $2.20 now still feels more expensive than $1.50 24 years ago) but if the price moderates to $1.89 maybe that doesn't feel so bad anymore, Prius sales ease, Suburban sales pick up and we're back to increasing demand and effective maximization of revenue by the oil producing nations. GM is apparently betting on this, introducing new upgraded models of the Suburban and Yukon next year.

This makes me sad. I wish that the domestic auto makers had some appealing technology to offer, I wish it wasn't just Toyota and Honda with the hybrid vehicles for sales, vehicles which, by the way, have six-month waiting lists and sell above list prices. I know, I know, Ford has the Escape hybrid, but guess what? They had to license the drivetrain technology from Toyota. I also worry about the long-term impact of the weakness of the domestic auto producers. We have just seen United Airlines dump its pension obligations on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation; other airlines must see this as a savvy move, a way to escape having to fund their employee pensions. GM and Ford have huge pension and retiree medical benefit liabilities that put them at a cost disadvantage to foreign competitors. You don't think we (as in the PBGC) will own those pensions before too long? You don't think it will be very tempting for these firms to declare bankruptcy to escape retiree medical benefit obligations?

Like I said, cars aren't going away. I'm keeping mine, for one. But there's no reason that cars can't get more efficient and that bicycles can't supplant some car trips. It's this last bit that this blog is really about; it's not bike touring, which I enjoy but don't have the time for at this stage of life; it's not bike racing, which I think is a great spectator sport but which I've never had a prayer of being a competitive participant in; rather, it's the half-mile jaunt to the grocery store or the five-mile run to work, a ride to the local bar, a run to the library. This summer, with only one church service, I hope it's the 13-mile run to church. These trips add up and they constitute a major percentage of auto trips taken. I'm trying to substitute the bike for the car for some of mine, and that's what I'll be writing about.

Disrupted Day

I didn't ride to work this morning. I didn't go because I have to run some errands at lunch and after work as it's my wife's birthday tomorrow. This decision turned out to be propitious as the kids missed the school bus. Karla had headed off to church to get the service bulletins prepped for June 5 and 12th. June 12th we're doing a service at the Lake Harriet bandshell (10AM, be there or be square) so you can come hear us sing.

Anyway, it was about 9:15 and the kids called and sounded pretty panicky. School's seven miles away, south of our house, and I work five miles north. I trooped back out through the parking lot, drove home, picked them up, and took them to school. It was another gorgeous day, and there were plenty of bikes out. I sort of wonder what all these people do who are riding around at 10 in the morning on a Tuesday. I also mulled over what I would have done had I ridden my bike to work; probably I would have had them catch the 61 bus west, transfer to the 84 down Snelling and get off by school. I haven't read the schedules, but I wonder if that would have been faster than riding a bike home and then driving them. They've never done the city bus by themselves, so that would have been mind-expanding for them.

In other bike news, the light bulbs I ordered last week showed up. These are 5 and 10-watt MR-11 replacements for my VistaLite Lightstick. I gave them a quick try and they all worked, and both Henry and Karla complained when I shined a 10W bulb at them so it must be pretty bright. With birthday preparations, I didn't have time to really try these out, but I'll compare all three bulbs in the dark to see which I like best.

Separately, I also got my work assignments for the Stillwater criterium July 12, the afternoon after we sing at Lake Harriet. I'm a race marshall then help with course teardown. This is all part of the Great River Energy Bike Festival/Nature Valley Grand Prix bike race, and I'm also volunteering Wednesday (Saint Paul) and Friday (Minneapolis). They are still in need of volunteers, so if you have an interest, go the site and there's a spot under Home for Volunteers. The Course Marshall stuff is very easy to do, so don't worry about needing lots of instructions and training.

I'm not a big bike racing fan, but it is a very accessible sport, and volunteering like this is an easy way to support it. It is spectator-friendly since you can get very close to the course and be right by the action. You can also move around the course to get different vantage points. At one time there were Grand Prix car races in Des Moines and Minneapolis, at about the time we moved here. The setup took weeks and the downtowns looked like prison camps, all concrete barriers and chain-link fences. When the raced, the cars flashed by in a cacaphony of exhaust and noise. The bike races, by contrast, setup, run and teardown within a day. You'll see some photos from the races I volunteer in a week and a half.

On the news tonight the weatherguy said this is the first May since 1983 where we didn't get to 80 degrees. It felt cold and wet and the last couple of spectacular days have only started to erase the damp chilly memories.

A Perfect Day

This, this is the day you live for in the Twin Cities. It's sunny with puffy white clouds, gentle breezes, seventy degrees, low humidity, no mosquitoes and a daughter who would like to go for a bike ride. After a morning of file-sorting productivity and a bite of lunch, we headed out, my eleven-year-old daughter Geneva and I, with no real plan.

One of the things I'd like to do is write up some Practical Cycling tips, especially how to deal with the major obstacles in the Cities, namely, railways, highways and rivers. To start with, we skirted Como Lake and headed down Chatsworth. Chatsworth ought to be a bicycling superhighway for north/south traffic in Saint Paul. It has its own bridge under the north set of mainline railway tracks, then what you might think of as an informal crossing of the south set of mainline tracks, shown below:



There was a train off to the west and I had thoughts of waiting to take pictures of it, but there was also a pickup with lights on coming our way. It occurred to me that this might be railway personnel who wouldn't altogether approve of this crossing point, and we moved on south.

The neighbourhood south of the tracks is part of the Frogtown area of Saint Paul and is not a socio-economic demographic that everyone would feel comfortable with, though I ride through pretty regularly. We moved on south. You cross University on a stop-sign, then come to another obstacle, Interstate 94. Chatsworth again reigns supreme, with a pedestrian bridge right across the highway. Here Geneva rides on across:



It's funny how south of I-94 the neighbourhood rapidly changes. By the time you reach Summit Avenue, the most beautiful street in Saint Paul, you are only a stone's throw from the Governor's Mansion.

We decided to blow off the Grand Old Creamery ice cream shop, east of us, and head west to Izzy's. We rode off down Summit Avenue. This is a terrific street to ride on, lined with houses that range from cheesy suburban models at their most modest to huge robber-baron mansions built when domestic staffs made such large houses possible. Summit also has terrific bike lanes. Here's Geneva heading west down Summit:



We cruised down to Grand Avenue to see if Wet Paint was open, which it wasn't. While waiting at a stop sign on Grand a young woman rode by on a bike with an Xtracycle. It's the first time I've seen a female on one! Cool! A female bike nerd! We cruised by Saint Mary's Episcopal, where we used to go to church before having some priestess issues, stopped by the Wheelers on Dayton but they weren't home, then went to Izzy's for an ice cream. It couldn't have been a more perfect day out. Here's Geneva enjoying her ice cream:



Well, we'd come this far, let's just cruise on down Marshall and go across the bridge. This bridge is Marshall Avenue in Saint Paul and turns into Lake Street in Minneapolis, probably the most diverse street in the Cities as you ride down it. We got across the bridge slowly, enjoying the view you miss from the car. First we stopped at the east approach to take some picture, including this one of my daughter:



Out on the bridge itself, you could look up the Mississippi River and see downtown Minneapolis in the distance and a bit of boat traffic on the river. A friend of ours has a boat, and I've been up this stretch of river, and south of the Lake Street bridge the river is so far down in the gorge that you can barely tell you're in a city. It's part of the overall attractive physical setting of the Twin Cities. Here's the view upriver:



The Mississippi north of Saint Louis is mostly a collection of pools contained behind a series of 29 locks and dams, which drop the river 420 feet in total. Some of the pools seem pretty dormant, but there is a definite current here. You can see it pulling at the buoy in the river;



You can see it against the bridge pier as well:



One of the nice things about living in Minnesota is the high level of public services. People bitch about the taxes and our Governor took a no-new-taxes pledge so that he in recent weeks vetoed a 10-cent-per-gallon gas tax (a tax which hasn't been raised since the late 1980s) because that would be a new tax but then proposed increasing the taxes on cigarettes under the guise of a "fee". What an idiot. I've been to some of those low-tax states. Ever been to a public park in Texas? They're shitholes. People don't move to Minnesota for the weather and many of the things that make this place attractive are paid for by taxes; good education, good parks, clean rivers, decent roads. They also show up in things like this rest spot in the middle of the bridge, utterly impractical from a transport point of view, but a delightful stop for people on foot or bike:



We rode up the west River Road, seeing a fox carrying a bit of prey cross the road ahead of us along the way. We rode up to the West Bank Dinkytown, the local name for the aggregation of businesses that accrue around universities, to stop in the Freewheel Bike Shop. They were closed for the day. Probably a good thing, with the spring we've had, trying to work on a day like this would be tough. We rode up alongside the light rail train tracks (more taxpayer-supported improvements) to downtown, refilled water bottles at the Mill City Museum, and then went east across the Stone Arch Bridge. Tax dollars paid to keep this old railway bridge open for pedestrians and cyclists. You see a lot of funny vehicles down here; there are the usual assortment of bikes, there's a tour company that runs tours of the grain milling district on Segways (the Sidewalk SUV) looking like string of ducklings following their leader, and there were several unicycles. This pair, for instance, took my Two Cities Two Wheels things pretty literally:



Hey guys, I meant two wheels EACH!

You can appreciate the power of the river from the bridge. This power allowed Minneapolis to thrive as a grain milling and lumber center. There are still raceways for the water. Of course, now all the old grain mills are condos and museums so when someone wanted to put in an actual hydroelectric generator, one using existing waterways, the ample drop, and producing electricity with no emissions or waste products that last for millenia, the condo owners objected. The useful productive image is nice, but God forbid we put in any actual productive industry. Those cranes you see in the background of this photo ain't puttin' up grain mills and factories!

You can appreciate the power of the river looking north from the Stone Arch Bridge:



That's a lock on the left. I'm not sure what it's called, Lock and Dam No. 1 (of the 29) is at Ford Parkway/46th street a couple of miles downriver. This one is lifting out of the pool above that to above the St. Anthony Falls shown here. At this point, the traffic is local barge traffic only, not the big multi-barge tows which run to Saint Paul and up the Minnesota River a bit.

We clattered across the cobblestones at the east end of the Stone Arch Bridge and stopped to fiddle with the suspension fork on Geneva's bike. While doing this, a guy came riding from the left and, appearing to show off, powered through the turn. The vestigal railway tracks took him by surprise, he had to adjust his turn wide, ran into the curb, flailed along for several feet and then crashed hilariously into the grass alongside the road. Geneva and I managed to contain our laughter and feign concern. He was unhurt, other than his ego, which had a compound fracture or two. His bike looked nice, too, some touring Cannondale.

We cruised on home, heading up Como through Northeast Minneapolis and into Saint Paul past the cemetery, the State Fair Grounds and through the crowded Como Park to home. We came in through the back gate, 22 miles after setting out. I put my stuff away and opened up a beer, one of a batch of British Bitter I brewed earlier in the year after a several-year-long hiatus from home brewing. If I never lose weight from cycling, it will be because of this:



Oh well, there's a long tradition, my father, an Englishman, used to ride his 3-speed Reynolds 531-framed roadster around Warwickshire and Worcestershire to, among other things, go drinking in pubs.

What a great day, and what a fun ride. Geneva and I did nothing Practical, it was sheer enjoyment. And I can't say enough about how fun this is with the kids. I don't think you really know what love is until you have children of your own. My son is great (he was at home writing a paper on the Tokugawa Shoguns of Japan, this school is relentless right to the end of the year); my daughter is terrific, and the relationship between father and daughter is something special. She's at a real sweet spot right now, too, a fully-engaged person and not a snotty teenager (yet)(maybe never, that would be great), and thinking nothing could be better than to go bike riding with Dad, 22 miles for an ice cream and taking pictures. I couldn't agree with her more.

This is going to be a terrific summer.