Making the best of it

It is difficult to motivate myself to get out there and ride for fun when the weather is so unpleasant. The 30-40 degree temperatures could be dealt with, but in conjunction with the daily precipitation riding became untenable.
Friday's forecast looked much more pleasant, beginning with temps at freezing at 7am and building to near 50 later in the day with no precipitation.
I jumped on my bike and headed out of town. The nice thing about agreeing to meet someone somewhere far away and they are driving, is that they can rescue your sorry butt if you don't make it. So I agreed to meet this cute guy, to whom I'm married, 90 miles away in the Finger Lakes.
He passed me and stopped to chat at about 70 miles out from Buffalo, tried to give me a lift, then moved on. I was kind of tired, but a goal is a goal and I only had 20 miles left.
How did I route myself? I started out following a set of google maps for bikes printed directions, but quickly (30miles in) realized that the extra miles google added to keep me off major thouroughfares was going to add about 10 miles. Since I really haven't trained this year and the weather wasn't fabulous, I decided to stick to route 20. The speed limit is generally 55, but it goes through small towns and has a 5 foot shoulder.
Listening to RadioLabs podcasts pretty much the whole way, I noticed little orange plastic tags nailed to the shoulder. They were seemingly quite random. At one point I slowed to look more carefully and found they were actually tiny orange bowtie pastas. So bizarre! They lasted about 20 miles, barely decreasing in frequency until Avon, when I must have diverged from their path. All sorts of scenarios jumped from my head on this one. Someone abducted and stowed in a trunk or some little kid in a carseat dropping a 40 lb bag out the window one bowtie at a time...


I arrived in Canandaigua at 5pm, tired, hungry and stiff, but in good spirits and far from spent. Staying at Bella Rose b&b. Very nice, sweet hosts and excellent breakfasts. This is wine country!





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Adventure Cycling Flickr Post

Oooooh. 15Kb of fame.  4/5 of the way down. See us all!  (1) Bobby, (2)Rich, Nick and Mac, (3)Mike, Heidi, Jamie, (4) Sara, Leslie, Janelle, Ted, Bill.  Soooooo cool.

Returning to Bicycle Gearing

I came across my original table for calculating the gear ratios and gear inches of my original road bike. Searching through my older posts, I realized I never put that information out there, even after I had decided to buy the Bike Friday New World Tourist.  Determined to not dive into spending more money without guaranteed results, I had used this very fine site to determine the inches and ratios of each bike to make sure I would be gaining something meaningful.

Steps:

1. make a table with the number of teeth on each chain ring in the front and each cog in the back
2. divide the front chain ring teeth by each of the rear ring cogs to get the proportional (ratio) size difference between them for each combination
3. mulitply the size of your wheel by the proportion (ratio to 1) to get the gear inches.

Note in the case of my two bikes that I lost a little at the top end of the BF (I can't pedal downhill as fast), but gained significantly at the bottom end. The highest gear inch on the BCA is over 100 and on the BF it is only 94.55.  The lowest on the BCA however, is 28.93.  On the BF, I can get all the way down to 18.75.  Screaming downhill was far less important than effectively chugging up those steep hills. My top speed on the BF was 49mph, by the way.

Still snowing; Work on blog

Totally unrelated to bikes, bicycling or touring. Indoor hobbies- no not that one.
I decided to rework my blog, since it is so depressing outside. I can look at my bright, cheery computer screen.
One of my issues was that my blog only had 2 columns, causing the right column "stuff" to extend way too far down the page. Also, my pages where taking up space in the right column. Thinking I had to get a new template, I began searching for a new 3 column template, when low and behold a thing of beauty popped up in the results. This kind and industrious person scoured the internet to simply turn a 2 column template into a 3 column. And she/he DOCUMENTED it for the rest of us!
This is why I harp at work at documenting discoveries. So sweet. And quick (for me).
So a SHOUTOUT to the perseverance of a fellow blogger.

Weather report

Early last week- weather report for this week:
highs in the mid to upper 50's, lows in the mid 40's, very little rain

Middle of last week:
highs in the mid 50's, lows in the low 40's, chance of rain

End of last week:
highs in the low 50's, lows near 40, chance of thunderstorms

Reality:
Highs near 40, lows in the low 30's, snow

I looked out on my planned trip to the Finger Lakes on my ONE WEEK BREAK and saw 26 mile per hour winds and snow. Then I wimped out. Maybe I'll leave on Monday. Nope. Still snowing. Maybe Tues...



Cleaning bike instead. White BCA is perpetually nicked and dirty. So I am trying out black nail polish, paint pens and sharpies. Here is pretty much how I was thinking it would look. Pretty amazing, but we'll see if mine comes out nearly as spectacular. The BCA name is a little odd. With a mixed brand history, it seems unclear whether I got a really high quality bike, but it has lasted extremely well in my hands. Some leads state BCA was related to Ross.
I've started by making some doodles on paper. I realize the paper is flat and the bike is not, thank you very much.

NO RAINPANTS or SNOWBOARD MITTENS this afternoon! 34 degrees!

Business First called me for an interview today. It was an interesting experience. I wrote down some notes to self of things worth mentioning: since I work with so many people each year (teachers and students) and they know I ride a bike to work, when they see a cyclist they think, "Hey, I wonder if that is Ms. xxxxx, maybe I should be careful". This is probably the greatest advocacy cyclists can be involved in. For every one person on a bike, they have scores of fans; family, friends and neighbors. All these people are more careful of cyclists than they might be otherwise.
As for the cycling scene in Buffalo? It is improving. Hardly anyone ever honks at me, even though I continue to travel at least 2 feet out from parked cars (probably jinxing myself, but I have never been hit or doored). Hundreds more bike racks (thanks Green Options) and a school district which has never hindered my ability to commute.
Cheers to living in Buffalo!

Long winter

So. Seemingly long winter. On an unseasonably warm Saturday, my husband bet me the snow was done. 4 days later and 8 inches deeper I laughed at him. It was one of the few days I have driven this winter. Nasty 2 inch ice and 5 destinations detered me.
This morning I took this picture of my lonely bike in the Co-op bike rack, gloating because I was the only stalwart one out in 18 degrees, when someone else rode up.





I am reading "Bicycle Diaries" by David Byrne. In the preface he remarks that the state of cities is improving as people begin to realize there is more to life than sprawling lawns and parking lots. This seemed too much to hope for, but maybe not.
Walking through a business section near my home, there was a man looking for boot laces, which couldn't be found in the nearby stores. Employees recommended he go to a chain store in the burbs, but I jumped in and recommended a chain store in the city (better of two evils). The man commented that that would entail getting in a car (+1 point). I told him it would not and he agreed he could use the bus (+1 point for thinking on it rather than knocking the idea down).
A second note: a friend told me her son refuses to allow her to drive 3 hours to retrieve him from college, because it is a foolish use of gas. He wishes gas was $7.00 a gallon. He won't eat meat because of the resources it sucks.
So much hope and optimism.












To top it all off: blinding sunshine in large quantities. Had to remind myself why I don't move to Portland.

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Deep Breath, Move On

So I had a job shift again, but I didn't have to reapply this time. Made me kind of angry. I took the rest of the day off and went out riding. 22 miles. Really felt fine. 27 degrees and light snow, but moderately clear roads. The key to riding at any time is routing and this holds especially true in the winter. Roads with narrow shoulders become roads without shoulders and drivers are less likely to expect a cyclist.
I went out with a Foxwear base, Smartwool turleneck and Gore windproof jacket on top. On the bottom, Foxwear mid-weight tights and J&G rainpants with leather sneakers. Normally I would wear boots, but I thought I would try the sneakers with thick wool socks. This barely did the job of keeping my toes warm. When I got home, my feet were quite cold. I used a balaclava and Burton snowboarding mittens and both of those were good choices.

Two months of winter commuting

I shifted jobs, so to speak. Instead of being responsible for one building, I am part of a team responsible for 6 building. I try not to switch buildings during the day, but instead to make multiple appointments in one building and stay there all day. I am not opposed to cycling from one to another, but when the temperature dips below 45, I have to switch clothes and it is time consuming to dress and undress. The time between buildings is not a problem. Gruesome detail: in a pinch, if you arrive stinky and have a change of clothes, you can use hand sanitizer to freshen up. Works by killing the bacteria causing the odor.
I recently purchased Foxwear tights and a NTS (next to skin) polar dry long sleeved top. Very impressive. Keep in mind that the guy is almost a one-man-band. He take the order, sews the stuff, and ships it. The tights are polar tech 250 weight, water/wind repellent and warm. Sometimes I wear them by themselves, but combine them with Gore rain pants if it drops below 25 degrees. The top has no zipper (and I would not recommend against getting zippers on polar tech- the guy struggles with sewing them in flat). It is the 2nd thinnest grade, pale yellow with black stitching and performs almost as well as my smartwool. I often layer the two, with the polardry next to my skin. Pricing is great and he will make it like you want it. I asked him to give me a little extra in the looseness of the tights and to make them 2 inches longer than the inseam measurement he asked for. I like to tuck my tights into my boots. So nice.
I also bought a Gore sunshine yellow jacket. Wind and water repellent, I got caught in a shower and arrived dry underneath.

Touring in late fall

In early October I stated my desire to ride to the annual tech in Ed convention in Rochester, NY from Nov. 21st to the 23rd. People nodded and smiled. She'll give up on that idea; she forgets it's cold in November. But 32 degrees isn't so bad. As a matter of fact, it was 40 when I left. 94 miles. The thing that almost got me was the day length. And the fact that you can't average 18mph on a limestone trail. But I did it. It took 8 hours.
I got away with a long sleeved silk top, long sleeved smartwool top, wind resistant gloves and the brilliant Foxwear leggings. I also was never quite able to lose the thinsulate beanie. But by the time the sun was going down I had to add in a fleece and was reaching for the rain coat.





Behind me note the "bridge", which is the remnant of an aqueduct which long ago carried the Erie Canal over the Genesee River. Yup. Though some rivers were utilized for the canal, this one needed to be avoided to keep clear of a major elevation change. When the canal went kaput, the city capped the aqeduct and turned it into a bridge.


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Do they know who they're dealing with?

November 1st? Are they kidding? It was November 20th and I was out there daring a snowplow to run me down.



BTW- the white SUV in the photo belongs to a guy who turned around and came back because he thought I took a spill while riding on the sidewalk. In truth I was just lying on the ground trying to set the camera up for a timed photo.

My apologies to the person (iz) who tried to post a comment/question: What do you mean under the FAQs "How did you feel when you finished?" when you answered, "Overwhelmed by the complexity of life". I moved that whole post to become a separate page and lost the comment. But this is probably important enough to make a whole post about.
So here goes: When I returned, I had been on the road for almost 3 months. For 3 months, there was no real schedule, no commitments, no appointments and very few choices. I carried 3 sets of clothes: two cycling outfits and one for civilization. If one cycling outfit was dirty, there was only one choice. In a grocery store, there were not too many choices. Frozen foods were totally out, anything which required an oven was out, meat was out and extremely perishable foods were only choices if they would be eaten quickly.
When I got home, I had a closet/dresser full of clothes from which I could not decide. The morning after I got home, I went to work for a half day. Opening the closet reduced me to an idiot, who stood trying to make a decision. It took me 15 minutes. The total amount of "stuff" in my house was unnerving. I wanted to get rid of everything. That morning, since the only thing I had in my panniers was a bag of dried apricots, that was breakfast. It did not even occur to me to look in the cupboards, even less the fridge.
I couldn't even go out with my friends I was so overwhelmed by the decisions which needed to be made and the tasks which needed to be accomplished. Simple things, like cleaning and making dinner or having the tires rotated on my car (yes, I actually have one) were like life altering decisions. As funny as it sounds, it was quite serious. Thinking I was just bizarre, I spoke with others who have left home for extended periods of time, such as Peace Corps volunteers and other cycling tourists. They had all experienced the same phenomenon.
Did I recover? Now back 2 months, I still haven't fully recovered. I am restless and have purged my house of many of my possessions. I go out on long day rides. I long for the next tour expectantly. I have made attempts to simplify. Not all negative.

Funding for improved bike trails and lanes is covered under the Federal Highway Trust Fund. AAA Mid-Atlantic has asked Congress to remove the allocation for funding geared towards these improvements, even though out of 89 Billion, only 1 billion is earmarked for improvements for pedestrians and cyclists. I would encourage people to sign the petition to AAA to censor their Mid-Atlantic branch in its attempts to press on with this endeavor. The Rails to Trails organization has done a great job of gathering the facts and accurately quoting details from the controversy.