an extra quarter mile

It turns out I’ve been selling myself short: my route to work is actually almost exactly 2 miles, not the one and three-quarters I’ve thought it was.  So that takes me to 8 miles of biking a day.  Not a lot, but better than zero.

Over the weekend I stole the bike computer from my wife’s road bike and mounted it on mine.  I was curious what kind of  speed I tend to cruise at (about 11mph) and how far it really was to work.  Turns out it’s 2.02 miles, assuming I did a good job measuring the circumference of my wheel.   I suspect my average speed will be higher going home since that’s generally downhill and downwind.  Biking to work I have the landscape and the prevailing winds against me.

Just to doublecheck myself, I used Google Maps to map out my route, which is now possible thanks to their click-and-drag route function, and it gave me the same answer.  For a similar tool (which also uses Google Maps under the hood) you can try Map My Run, a utility site for runners that works just as well for biking.  Better, even, since you’re less likely to cut corners across unpaved areas on a road bike.

By the way, I used a trick to measure my bike wheel’s circumference.  The computer’s manual suggested using a measuring tape on the floor and the wheel’s valve stem as a marker while you roll the wheel along and then read off the distance covered.  I used the measuring tape on the floor – a metal tape so it would stay straight and stiff – but since I was looking for a measurement in millimeters, the it seemed the valve stem wouldn’t be a very good guide.  So I took a small strip of scotch tape and stuck it across the tire tread like a band-aid.  I used the edge of the tape as my guide next to the ruler.  It was much more precise since it had a well-defined edge and it was right against the floor and the tape.  I thought about marking the tire with chalk, but I had tape and didn’t have chalk.  Either way would likely give a better result than eyeballing the valve stem from an inch or two away from the measuring tape.

In other news: It’s going to be in the mid- to high-90’s all week, with relative temperatures over 100.  Biking home (and back to work) for lunch is gonna suck.

my bitchin ride

Finally: Pictures!

I haven’t posted anything in a while because there hasn’t been anything new worth mentioning. I’ve ridden to work every day, stopped at the grocery store several times, and things are generally going pretty well. Last weekend I took my bike in for its complimentary 30-day tune-up at the bike shop where I bought it, so it’s nice and clean and running great. It shifts smoothly, no extra noises… all’s good.

Yesterday my fenders arrived so I got them attached last night after Beatrix went to bed. Since I think I’m finished attaching extra crap to the bike, I thought I’d bust out the camera and show some of the things I’ve been talking about. First, here’s the finished product:

Sorry about the white-balance. I took the picture at night in my living room in low light and I hate using the flash. I corrected the white balance for all the other photos.

Unfortunately, it seems I’m suffering from Too Much Crap On My Bike syndrome. Check out this closer view of the rear wheel.

At the hub of the wheel, the Solobug trailer mount points to the rear. Just above it is the mountpoint where both the rack and the rear fender attach to the frame. At the top of the rack, notice the arms that reach to the mountpoint below the seat. I’m having trouble with that arrangement because the brakes on the bike are the newfangled kind that pull from one side, instead of the old center-pull version I was used to. Consequently, the brake cable has a stiff tube where it feeds into the brake itself, and that tube wants to be in the same spot as the rack mount. I don’t think any other kind of rack would be any better, and it makes it really tough to disengage the brake when removing the rear wheel. I may end up switching to a center-pull brake for the rear at some point just to clear up that problem.

Here’s a detail view of the rear hub so you can see how crowded it is. The tail end of the rack prong just barely fits past the bulky trailer mount. The first time I tried attaching both to the bike at once, there wasn’t room. I later realized the hole in the rack prong is an oblong one that allows the rack to move a couple of millimeters up and down – just barely enough to get clearance for the trailer mount, as it turned out. The bolt holding the rack and fender in place is just long enough to grab the threads in the frame hole, so I may try and find a slightly longer bolt at some point, especially if I plan to carry anything heavy on the rack.

This is the rear of the bike with a grocery pannier attached. I don’t know about other brands, but this one (by Sunlite) collapses flat against the side when not carrying any big cargo. This low-profile mode is just fine for most of my trips to work since a spare shirt and a U-lock fit without any trouble. The bag is tall, nearly as tall as a standard paper grocery bag, so the bungee cord and hook at the bottom won’t hook to the usual spot in the fork of the rear rack. Instead, it needs to stretch down to the rear hub and hook somewhere there. On this side of the bike, the quick-release handle makes a perfect hook mount.

When the pannier is opened out, it’s pretty roomy, and does hang out to the sides quite a bit. With one on each side, I take up a fair amount of horizontal space on the road. At least, it feels that way. Two bags opened out like this also catch a lot of wind, which is why they’re made to collapse flat when not needed.

If you’ve been reading along, you know I’ve been having trouble finding a good place to hook a bag on the right. Everywhere I tried, the hook threatened to interfere with the gears, which made me very nervous. Luckily, the Solobug trailer mount provided the solution. The mount comes with an extra skewer with a longer rod. The longer skewer is provided to account for the extra bulk added by the mount on the left side of the bike, and provides plenty of extra room. In my case, it was a lot of extra room. So much that the nut end of the skewer stuck out about half an inch more than it needed to. Suddenly, I had my pannier hook mount. I added a little nut to the tip of the skewer which accomplishes two things: it blunts the tip so I won’t accidentally rip a gouge in my leg; and it keeps the hook from sliding off the end. Now it nestles in the gap between the little nut and the skewer’s acorn nut. Here’s a closeup:

So that’s the bike. I’ll try and get some shots of the trailer sometime soon and throw those pictures up here, too.

rainy days

Today: Wet.

Yesterday, when I drove back to work after lunch, I brought my bike in the back of the station wagon so I could ride home after work. I stopped at the grocery store and had a chance to fill up those new panniers. It worked pretty well, though I think I’d like to find some kind of metal ring I can hook to my bike frame near the rear hub so I’ll have something easy I can hook the panniers’ elastic strap/hook thing to. On the right side, the gear side, the only place I can set the hook puts it very close to the spinning gears – close enough to make me nervous and to stay away from top gear.

Today I rode to work in a light drizzle, home for lunch in a steady shower, and back to work again in more drizzle. I’ve added a towel to my replacement-clothes pack in a plastic trashbag in the pannier, since it doesn’t close at the top. Boy, riding in a zipped-up raincoat is sweaty work.

In other news, I got the call – finally – that the trailer hitch has arrived at the bike shop, so I’ll get that over the weekend.

Next up: fenders. The cheapest good ones I can find are at REI. They’re selling decent road bike full fenders for about $30, which is about as cheap as I can find the ones of that type.

unused gear

On Tuesday afternoon, the bike racks finally arrived. “Finally” isn’t a dig at Nashbar, since I did opt for the cheapest US Post shipping option, though I’d be happy to dig at Nashbar over the literature they include in every package about some colon cleanser and its miraculous curative effects. It’s enough to put me off the company and send me elsewhere on the interweb for cheap bicycle gear.

So anyway, the racks came on Tuesday. That night I installed them on our two bikes. I wish mine had come with instructions as to which kind of bolt was intended to be used to attach what part to where, but for the time being the rack is bolted on and feels secure. I’ll put off being mad about it until it falls off because I used the wrong bolt for something.

I’m anticipating having to deal with a Too Much Crap On My Bike problem soon: The rack is made to bolt to the threaded hole near the rear wheel hub, but I can tell from looking at my wife’s bike that when the extra Solobug trailer hitch finally arrives, it will take up enough extra space that I’ll need to attach the rack to one of the other holes nearby instead. Problem is, there’s only one hole that’s threaded. Using one of the other holes will require a bolt and nut. Bleah. I’ll deal with it later if/when the hitch comes in.

With the rack in place and the panniers in the closet, I was ready to commute without my backpack and get some shopping done on the way home from work, right? Wrong. Wednesday is work-at-home day, so no commute for me. Today I’m back at work but actually drove to campus with my wife. There’s a soaking rain outside that’s been going since yesterday afternoon, and the big grocery panniers don’t offer any rain protection at all. Ordinarily I’d just wrap my things in plastic bags and get on with it, but today I was schlepping some borrowed books and didn’t want to risk the water damage. So… it’s a car day, today.

three years

Happy anniversary to me and Elinor today.

I’m still waiting for the bike racks to arrive from Nashbar. It’s frustrating: the weather is getting hotter and biking with a satchel strapped to my back is a sweatier proposition by the week. Meanwhile, the panniers are sitting in a closet at home, unused and unusable. Today I stopped at a local garden center, on my route home from work as luck would have it, and bought some flowers (a live plant in a pot) and had to bike it home hanging from my handlebars. Good thing they had bags with handles.

Today I’m a little sore, even though I took it easy over the weekend, walking around town instead of biking. Friday I was running behind and needed to be at work by a certain time, so I sprinted the whole way. I’m still paying for it.

I’m also sore partly from the gardening (aka “weeding”) work I did yesterday and over the weekend. Our tomatoes are on the verge of being choked out, so the weeds needed to be cleared pronto. It wasn’t all bad. The baby basil plants are doing just fine after I uprooted them, took them apart from the surrounding weeds, and re-planted them when they were still very tiny. They’re taller now and have several ranks of leaves, so I think they’ll make it. Over the last few days I’ve also discovered several second-generation tomato plants, seeded and grown up from fallen tomatoes in last year’s garden. This is a definite advantage to not having used the anti-seed-germination stuff early on – all these little seedlings would never have made it. Now the baby tomato plants will make a nice surprise for us later in the summer: Which kind are they?

panniers

The commute yesterday was a little wet. It was a classic midwest thunderstorm day with periods of bright sunshine on a wet, sparkly landscape interspersed with furious rain showers, nighttime gloom, and bone-rattling thunder. I used up my spare clothes at work so I wouldn’t spend the day with a stripe of street grime up the back of my shorts. Yes, I could still use some fenders.

Today has been gorgeous, though, and I finally decided to buy a bike rack and panniers online. I went for low-cost basics, so I hope everything fits and works well. At the time of purchase, the rack was about $15 and the grocery panniers (I got two) were $28 each. Those prices were about as good as I could find, including eBay, given that I wanted a strong, all-purpose rear rack and grocery panniers. The panniers should get me to the store and back while also having plenty of room for whatever stuff I need to haul to work and back. I’ll just keep a sturdy plastic bag in each one in case of rain.

I’m still coveting the laptop commuter pannier by Arkel, but can’t justify the money right now when it just wouldn’t be much use bringing home a gallon of milk from the store.

When everything arrives and I’ve had a chance to try it out, I’ll post some reviews.

a weekend turtle

Saturday was a good day for biking. Elinor and Beatrix and I left the house in the morning with bikes and trailer to go to the local Farmer’s Market. We did a little shopping and left on foot to walk around downtown for a little while, ending up at Milton’s for brunch. We scored some seats on the patio and got to chat with several friends who happened by. After a stop at Sunflower Bike Shop for some knick-knacks we biked home to lounge a bit. It was Saturday, after all.

Through all the biking, Beatrix’s new helmet worked out great. It sometimes tipped forwards when she slouched in her trailer seat, but never covered her face, and I think she found it more comfortable to wear than the old one.

On our way home from the downtown bike trip we noticed a turtle crossing a busy road near our house so I hopped off the bike to move it before it got crushed. I have no idea what kind of turtle it was, but I think it was a plain old box turtle, in which case it was a big one. The shell alone was at least a foot long. All the turtles I ever caught near creeks as a kid were little things, maybe 5 or 6 inches at most. This guy must have been ancient.

For the afternoon, Elinor had places to be so I took Beatrix in our loaner car to visit my grandmom. Being on the far side of town already, I took the opportunity to stop at some of the big box stores in the commercial soul-sucking wasteland on the southern edge of town (we needed some curtains and they couldn’t be found downtown – we tried) and then back home for the evening.

Sunday saw us in the car again, out to my grandmom’s place once more and then out the other side of town to a park near a local lake.

Today I got back on the bike to ride in to work and Elinor and I got to ride to campus together. The weather is threatening storms at some point today, so I’m packing rain gear. I really want to find some kind of pannier I can hook to my bike to carry more sizable loads for grocery trips and books and stuff from the hardware store… So much of my time in the car, I realize now, was spent ferrying stuff from one place to another. Until I get some decent packs for the bike, I’m still forced to use the car for loads that are just slightly too large to stuff in a backpack or hang from a handlebar.

end of a work week

I vowed to myself that any time I opted to take a car to work rather than ride my bike, I’d post about it. Yesterday I wimped out. The weather for the day wasn’t exactly ideal bicycling weather: steady winds at 25mph, gusts up to 40mph, and several severe thunderstorms (complete with tornado watches) throughout the day. Combined with the fact that we’re still adjusting to a new baby care schedule for the summer semester and it was just easier to drive the loaner car. We compensated, though: three adults plus a baby all drove to campus together.

Wait – three adults and a baby? Yes, that’s right, I count really well up to at least 5 or 6. Elinor and I have, in a manner of speaking, leased out our two spare bedrooms to a couple of college students for the summer. In exchange for rent, they babysit during the day when I’m at work and Elinor is in class and doing schoolwork. The students get a furnished place to stay in town for the summer and we get 30-some hours per week of babysitting in return. It’s an experiment, but we think it’ll work out pretty well for everyone. So anyway, one of the girls had a morning class on Thursday so she came along in the car.

Today it was back on the bike. The weather was the polar opposite of yesterday: sunny, high in the mid 70’s with light wind.

I have an update to report on the baby helmet. We bought the Me2 by Giro and I fitted it for Beatrix today. After applying the extra pads, the fit is great. The helmet still looks huge on her little head (perhaps pictures to come later) but it’s snug all round and the shape is much better for riding in the trailer. One negative: the extra pads are self-adhesive in name only. Perhaps I wasn’t attaching them in the right place – the manual doesn’t say anything about them and I couldn’t find any guides online to tell me the best points within the helmet to affix them – but in the place where it seemed best to me to attach the pads, they wouldn’t stay stuck. I was trying to put them along the padded band which runs from over one ear around the front to the other ear. This is the band that’s not adjustable, it’s fixed to the inside of the helmet. I spaced all four pads along the band and ended up gluing them on with Krazy Glue. That might not be the right expoxy for the materials involved, in which case I’ll have to shop for another glue. In any case, with the pads in place there and the back adjustable band tightened down, the helmet fits Beatrix’s head perfectly. It’s snug on all sides, doesn’t wobble, and doesn’t seem to be uncomfortable for her. So far, it’s a success. If things go bad on us later, I’ll share it.

a long weekend

It was a busy weekend – so busy there wasn’t any time to sit down and write. And my computer desk is covered in tools, sawdust, and bits of drywall. It was also a weekend when I needed to use a borrowed car – twice.

First I needed to pick up a couple of small chests of drawers from an out-of-town furniture store, about 30 minutes’ drive from the house. Then Elinor and I hauled about 50 feet or so of 1×12 lumber back to our house for shelving. Since we don’t have a cargo trailer for our bikes, the boards had to come home in the car.

Still, we found some time to get some riding in. Beatrix is getting more used to the trailer and we’ve found she’s easier to entertain inside it than she is in her car seat. She can see her surroundings, for one thing (she’s too small to see much out the car window), and there’s room at her feet and to her sides for extra toys and drinks so she can entertain herself while she’s riding. One feature that we wish our bike trailer had was a recessed pocket in the back of the seat for the kid helmet to fit into. As it is, when Beatrix rests her head against the back of the seat, it pushes her helmet forward and down over her face. This does not make for a happy kid. We’ve ordered another infant helmet that doesn’t appear to stick out as much in back and has more clearance at the forehead. If it helps I’ll post links and such.

Ironically, now that we’re giving up our car, I really wish we had a garage. For the three years we’ve lived in our house, I haven’t missed having one except for mornings after ice storms. If you’ve ever scraped a quarter-inch of ice off a windshield, you know what I’m talking about. Now, though, we keep accumulating this bicycle gear and we’re just flat out of storage space inside our house. I’m not willing to lock things up outside. It’s not really for fear of thieves so much as fear of weather. We’re investing some cash in all this stuff, and leaving it out in the rain will shorten its lifespan considerably. So unless and until inspiration strikes, we’re putting our two bikes in our one big closet on the ground floor (under the stairs) and storing the trailer just inside the back door.

This week’s gear purchase plan: A rack for my bike. I’m still keeping my eye out for a cheap pannier I can use for commuting with a laptop, and ideally also something big enough for trips to the grocery store. I’d love one of these, or even one of these, but the dollars are adding up fast around here. So I’ll be camped out on ebay for a while, hoping something good turns up.

lap of luxury

Yesterday I went to our friendly neighborhood bike store, Sunflower Outdoor and Bike, to buy a trailer to carry baby Beatrix around.

Last weekend we tried buying a Schwinn trailer, the Trailblazer, at Target. It was on sale for $115, which was a good price, but after going on a couple of short rides it wasn’t working out. At 9 months, Beatrix is a little younger than usual for trailer-riding. Her neck strength is just fine – she’s always had a really strong neck and back – so supporting herself with her helmet on isn’t an issue, but she’s also a lightweight for her age so she looks pretty tiny in the trailer seat. The Schwinn straps and seat arrangement just didn’t support her very well at all. We ended up padding her with towels to get her propped up in a good riding position, but when she fell asleep after a long day she was leaning precariously to the side all the way home. Add to that a lack of any roll bar or guard rail for the wheels and we decided to return the trailer, bite the bullet and buy a more expensive one. The Schwinn was nice and light and had lots of storage space, being a double-wide model, but it just didn’t seem as safe as it could have been, and we decided that this was not an area for compromise. So, back to Target it went.

What did we buy? The Trek Solobug. This particular bike store is a Trek and Specialized dealer, so their trailer options were limited, but the Solobug had lots to recommend it. Beatrix was strapped in much more securely, there’s plenty of extra tubing around to cage in the cabin and the wheels, and the jogging stroller mode seemed robust enough for Elinor to take Beatrix on runs with it – something that would have been impossible with the Schwinn.

There are some downsides. The thing is big. It’s really big. It’s over-engineered, I’m sure, and I appreciate that, but damn that’s a big stroller to be pushing around on the sidewalk. Converting the thing to a stroller involves attaching two front wheel support bars and then the quick-release front wheel. No snap-on, snap-off wheel for the front, it must be attached the same way as a normal bicycle’s front wheel, all while the baby is stuck in the seat, getting bored and cranky about the wait. Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be a designated place to stow the unused hardware. While pulling the trailer, where to put the wheel and two bars? While pushing the stroller, where to put the trailer hitch bar? Trek seems to think that you’ll leave the house either for a bike ride or a walk/run, but not both, which isn’t the case for us. We like to ride downtown, unhitch, and walk around for a while. I think I’ve found a way to stow the pieces and parts in a way that isn’t dangerous to Beatrix and won’t be too much trouble to deal with on a regular basis, but as efficient and clever as the rest of the design is, I would think Trek could have done better in this respect.

So that evening we took the new trailer out for a ride. Pulling it was easy and being a single-kid trailer it was easier to keep track of how much wider I was with the trailer in tow. When we got downtown I realized we’re going to need some more locking equipment. A U-lock and a cable aren’t enough to lock two bikes and the trailer all together and I hadn’t brought the extra stroller pieces with me. So I did the best I could and hoped nobody would try very hard to steal anything. All in all, though, the trailer worked pretty well and Beatrix is comfortable inside as long as her helmet isn’t tipped down over her eyes.

Next up: Shopping for a bike rack and pannier for commuting to work and looking around for an infant helmet that doesn’t stick out so much in back.