Bicycle Tours and Alleycats in Hartford this Weekend

The second Annual CCBA Discover Hartford Bicycling and Walking Tour is this Saturday, September 13th. We had 1200 people ride the tour last year and it was a blast! Check in and Registration opens at 7:00am,Tour starts at 9:15am. This is an anti-sprawl, pro fun, pro sustainable city, anti pollution, anti-couch potato, pro bicycle, pro pedestrian event.
Check the link for more info, pics and video from last year and last minute registration info.

There is also a Friday night $5 pre-ride pasta dinner and celebration @ the Bushnell Park Cafe located in the southeast corner of the park. Drink specials too! And live music! This sounds like a great way to start a wonderful weekend in Hartford. See you in Bushnell Park!


if yer hardcore...

Then, after the tour take a rest and relax...and then, if yer hardcore enough, ride F'n hard and fast til you wanna puke @ the Hartford Alleycat 4 race. I almost puked last year from riding too hard and well, i reakon that tobassco shot i had to shoot at a checkpoint early on didn't help matters much either.

Sponsors include: Manhattan Portage Messenger Bags, Baileyworks Bags, and PBR.

Register @ 60 Evergreen Avenue backyard. 6pm start. Ride safe, Ride fast. I'll be rockin' the Gunnar and protecting my dome. I think TJ's even gonna ditch the fixie and ride with brakes and gears on his Bianchi and try and dust Valdez. This is gonna be a crazy-ass competitive race. Krash, the only way you are beating me is if I flat out...sucka!


The afterparty/show will be at South Whitney House @ 8pm. HipCops, the 40's. Oil Tanker and one more TBA. Bring some loot to donate to the show. Proceeds go to Recycle a Bike in New Britain. Read more!

Pesky Kids (an update concerning my recent absence from two wheels)

I've been off the bike for the past few days, unfortunately, because my dear wife is away doing research in Nicaragua until Monday the 23rd, leaving me in sole control of my two young terrorists. Usually, the whole family can travel by bike, because Anna has a seat on the back of her rig for the little one and I tow the bigger one in the trailer, but with two kids and one adult, the equation gets complicated. Also, their preschool is in Middletown (near Anna's work), and even if I did have a two-kid trailer, I couldn't get them to school then get me to work in a timely fashion if I had to ride all the way there.

All of which is to say, I am going crazy because I have a great new bike but I'm not getting to ride it. I can say that before the wife went away, I got to ride from Middletown to New Haven and back on my Swift folder, and the hype is true: The thing really does hold up nicely on long rides, with many of the favorable long-distance attributes of full-sized road bikes. Unfortunately, it also suffers from some of the same deficits of full-sized bikes, namely, if you make the stupid mistake of riding 50 miles on a 100-degree day, it will not help you to feel less overheated. Also, if you ride it to Kenny's for PHH on a Tuesday night and it has a slow leak in the back tire and you are stupid enough not to carry a spare tube, it will not save you from having to walk home.

In other sponsor news, the Manhattan Portage businessy commuter bag is performing admirably. Before I was de-bike-ified by my wife's departure, I took it on a mid-sized grocery run, filled it to the brim, and switched from shoulder strap to backpack straps for carrying comfort. That was great. And since then, I've been lugging my laptop and lunch and voluminous court filings around the state in it and it has been everything I'd ever hoped for in a bag. Also, the "waterproof fabric treatment," about which I was skeptical, did pretty well in one of the recent torrential downpours (which I rode through to go get beers at Kenny's): Everything in the bag actually stayed dry! Thanks, Manhattan Portage, you champion of companies! Read more!