Bikes Outside: High Plains Drifter Makes My Day

As autumn comes and the weather gets cooler, my attentions must turn to battening down the battered hatches of Casa 'Statement before pipe-freezing season. While I am partial to more specialized establishments for supplies (lumber yards for lumber, plumbing supplier for pipes, etc) sometimes time and availability constraints find me begrudgingly shopping at the big home improvement center on New Park. On nearly every occasion, mine is the only bicycle locked up outside, so seeing another is a rare treat.

This Schwinn High Plains retains ties to the day when the Schwinn name, regardless of model, meant you could count on a certain level of quality. The mid-and-downmarket models weren't the lightest things around, but they were plenty solid. This well-preserved bike shares with most of its contemporaries the role of commuter bike in the oughts, and it's well-qualified for urban service. I realize I'm probably in the minority here, but Biopace cranks are an indicator of velo-coolness. My first new road bike rocked the oval chainwheels, and the mountain bikes of that era that I pined for but couldn't afford were elliptically equipped.

The unusual valve stem caps could also be indicators, in that I have seen such devices on cars function as low-pressure warnings. Viewed at very close range, one could also be led to believe that a robot dog has become excited. Perhaps they serve as counterweights for the large reflectors on the spokes. Regardless, the High Plains is getting the job done many miles away from its regional namesake.

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Keep it Real- This Saturday!

We all had a blast during the last Real Ride hARTford and this Saturday evening, it's time for another. They're calling this one The Magical History Tour to commemorate their 35th anniversary. The relaxed, 10 mile route will include locations and public art installations from RAW's history. Alan, Dave and I set up the bike trailer sound system yesterday and DJ Rick will be back in town to spin the virtual wheels of steel. Riders who would like to decorate their bikes on site at RAW can do so starting at 4:30. We'll start lining up at 6:00 PM and should be rolling by 6:30. Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor Street.

photo: Caresse Amenta Read more!

Birthday party!!

I won't actually be able to attend, but I encourage everyone else to go to catalogue this weekend:

Hello All Hello Autumn,

Announcing our September CATALOGUE: Adam McHose, Superorganism

Saturday, September 18

8:00pm

56 Arbor Street, Hartford, CT

Suite # forthcoming

Adam does identity. He deals in the things that visually make us up, and distinguish us from one another. We can see we're unique, yet we're also pieces of information. Adam paints people, both digitally and analogue(ly), graphs them, flattens them and makes them new. There's something thing-ish, un-reproducible about his work, but ones and zeros are still its foundation. His work is like fractals. It's portraits. Both discrete and continuous, and very colorful. Supercolorful. That's just me talking, though. Check out his website!

http://www.adammachose.com

CATALOGUE is a monthly event that showcases artists, musicians and other creative endeavors, and is hosted by Joe Saphire, Nick Rice, and Joel VanderKamp (our newly-wed!, ever-absent advisor). The event is a collaboration between artist, curator, community and space. Contact us for directions or questions: CATA.info.LOGUE@gmail.com, and please pass this invitation along to those we might have missed.

Joe Saphire, Nick Rice

I'll be off doing something along these lines:

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Moose and memory

It's been a weird week. Last weekend I was in San Francisco for Lex & Dan's wedding. While there, my parents called to let me know that my step-grandpa, Luis, died and the funeral, etc. was Thursday-Saturday. During the intervening days, a God war was waged at work.

Sunday was the first normal day in awhile, so I went for a bike ride. I went out to Granville, with stop at Neapuag and Tunxis state forest (I rode through Peoples, but not on any dirt, so I didn't get the state forest experience). While riding up rt. 20 from Riverton to Milo Coe Rd., I took a bizarre detour down an dead end. When I came back, there was a Subaru idling by the gate. As I turned to get back on rt. 20 the man in the car yelled at me to watch out for the moose up the road. Then he asked if he wanted to see pictures of the moose. They were four moosey mooses. I got out my camera, but the moose had left. If I hadn't taken the weird detour, I would have seen them, but maybe they would have killed me.

Also, I saw the monument that explains why Milo Coe Rd. is called Milo Coe Rd.

And, there were these strange RIPs on Hartland Hollow Rd., which were recent, but strange, because the road is closed to traffic.

Oh, because of the funeral, I didn't do that Landmine Classic 50 miler. I figured I hadn't enough saddle time in the last two weeks to be at all prepared, though after riding today I realized I had some miles in me. None the less, the relaxation was preferable.

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Bikes Outside: Discovered in Hartford

The 2010 Discover Hartford Tour, reviewed nicely here on Real Hartford was just one of three events that brought a bunch of people downtown to Bushnell Park on Saturday. The weather was fantastic, turnout was strong and group spirits were high. As participants trickled in, every tree, railing, post and trashcan in the southeast quadrant of the park began to accumulate bikes of every shape and size. There were plenty of high-dollar race-ready bikes around, oodles of road and mountain bikes as well as more plebeian hybrids and comfort bikes. There were a few nice tandems, some folding bikes, several recumbents and at least two unicycles sitting around before and after the ride as well. There was a little bit of everything to look at, and I didn't get nearly enough time to gawk at or photograph everything that caught my eye. As usual, I did tend to gravitate to the vintage beaters and the oddities among the many hundreds of bikes in attendance. Among my favorites were a flat black ratttlecanned Colnago slumming with a Hercules headtube badge and a home-brewed mostly bamboo bike that appeared to be Raleigh-derived.


The handmade bikes on display from MSH1 Bicycle Works were stunning, if technically ineligible for Bikes Outside. I chatted with owner/builder Matt Klucha for a while and bought some braze-ons from him. Good guy. I'll make an exception for a display bike just this once.


The scene was similar at each of the two rest stops on the 25 mile route, though each time I saw more bikes that I hadn't noticed before. Seeing so many people out on bikes in Hartford really made my day. Thanks to Bike Walk Connecticut, all the volunteers who made it happen and all who participated.


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Get on your bikes and ride!

The 2010 Discover Hartford Bicycle & Walking Tour is happening (and I do mean happening) this coming Saturday, September 11. Online registration ends Thursday evening. That's tomorrow, for those of you who are still off by a day since Labor Day. You can still register in person on Saturday if you'd prefer to pay an additional $5 and wait in line. The tour committee has been working overtime to make this year's tour better than ever, with live music, food, art, bike demos and displays, mobile DJ and more reasons to linger after you finish your ride. It's going to be a blast and you should be there!

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New Ross, County Wexford

If you ride BMX in Hartford, you probably go to New Ross, County Wexford Park and have arguments with skateboarders. TJ and I sit on the skateboarding task force and we working on making NRCW (or Heaven, as everyone knows it, but I like to call it New Ross, County Wexford Park in honor of Hartford's sister city in Ireland) a real park for skateboards and BMX (with some other stuff, too). PBS did a short documentary on it. It's really cool and you can watch it here. For a few brief second you can see me ride a skateboard pitifully.

And, if you want to lend some input to the design process of the park, come down on September 26 at 1pm for a public input session.

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Bikes Outside: Raleigh 'Round the Neighborhood

In observance of Labor Day, this week's bike outside was pushed to Tuesday morning. Today, we look at a former British subject leading an active life in Frog Hollow. It is a rare trip I make down Park street that I don't see this bike parked or being ridden. If memory serves, the mix of older and newer fonts on this particular example place it around 1970, give or give a year. The tall head tube indicates a 23" frame (the other available size being 21")

This particular Raleigh Sports (see what I did there?) some interesting aesthetic choices. The decorative spoke beads are a youthful contrast with the stodgy old school machine. The bobbed fenders enhance the sporting look and ensure that important components like the brakes and lower headset bearings are spared the flung muck of foul weather riding, without depriving the rider of his fair share of road spray. A brush repaint at some point carefully skirted around the original decals. The bike is cared for, in a very DIY sort of way.

I'm especially fond of the Raleigh Sports model, as my Dad had one, purchased new (along with a matching ladies' Sports for my Mom) at Hogie's Cycle in Hawthorne, NJ around 1975 or so. His had the 21" frame in metallic chestnut brown with a proper leather Brooks saddle. It was sold at a garage sale years ago, sadly, but I'm always on the lookout for its twin. The crisp ticking of a Sturmey-Archer hub is aural comfort food for my cycling soul.

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I miss my car

At times, I've considered getting rid of my car. I don't drive it very much and I have pay for its upkeep, taxes & fees, attempt to fix it and wash it twice a year. Before the great C&O ride, I realized that the rear passenger brake pads were used up. So, I parked the car at my parents' house (where the car tools live) and ordered some pads. The pads arrived and things were difficult- requiring special tools to retract the piston in the caliper and then the caliper didn't retract because it seems to be hyper-extended and broken. It's been a big mess and I haven't had my car in about a month. While living without hasn't been particularly difficult, as in I can get around by bike and if I really need a car to go a long distance, I can borrow one or get a ride, I really miss my car. Driving is fun.

In other news, did anyone notice how hot it was yesterday? I did one of those trans-Talcott rides and thought I was going to die. I went through three water bottles and a big bottle of Gatorade and didn't feel normal until this morning. You'd think that about a gallon of liquid with be sufficient for a five hour ride.

Lincoln Town Truck, as seen in Glastonbury during Brendan & Johanna's sojourn to the state forest.

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Bikes Outside: Pratt Still Lacks Racks in Fact

I've seen this hardtail on Pratt Street dozens of times. It's one of the regulars at the ornate iron fence in front of the late, lamented Tanuki Japanese Noodle Kitchen. It's still not a proper bike rack, mind you, but it is one of the prettiest improvised bike racks in town.


Circumstantial evidence points to bike messenger usage though a derailleur-geared mountain bike with disc brakes is a bold departure from messenger orthodoxy. It's not a bad idea, though, as there is plenty of off-road goodness to be had near downtown Hartford. What better way to cap off the workday than a knobby-tired happy hour?

Here's mud in your eye!

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Hartford 'Cross II

So, I was lukewarm about doing another 'cross race, because it was a lot of work. But, it was also pretty cool. In that spirit, mark your calendars for October 24. Bikereg registration will be up soon as I finish the flyer.

I did some more GPS experimentation yesterday on a ride with Dario. Apparently, we did a lot of riding in the river.

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Calories and stuff

Calorie deficits are weird. You do something that uses of a lot of calories. You're not hungry while you're doing it, but then you're hungry for the next three days.

you can buy this cd. it's got music by me on it.

Anyway, there's another catalogue this weekend. It's a tag sale and you can buy art for $5. Some details:

Hello All,

Reminder: August CATALOGUE event, Original Art Object Tag Sale:

Saturday, August 28

From mid-morning onward

342 Oakwood Avenue, WH CT

This is an opportunity to:

Make money

Get your work into the community

Get rid of old objects that someone else might love

Purchase art objects that are worth more than $5 for $5

Drink lemonade

True-no-foolin' tag sale. It will take place beside the road and contain a million art objects. This is the goal. We do not have a million yet. Many, but not a million. Everything will be priced at $5 and will come with a CATALOGUE tag of authenticity, signed by the seller. The seller will take home all earnings! There is no limit to the amount of art objects you can offer. Come and sell things. Come and buy things.

Contact Nick or Joe at CATA.info.LOGUE@gmail.com to arrange drop-off and to sign tags by Monday, August 23rd (so that the work can be organized, photographed, and arranged by the 28th).

Signed,

CAT

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Spitting Swap

Early this past Sunday, I took a rainy ride to the New England Muscle Bicycle Museum in Bloomfield for their last "Northeast Bike Swap Meet" as this under-the-radar display of awesomeness is pared down and sold off.

I rode the Yuba to help deter myself from loading up on too many bikes, and it kind of worked, though I did pass up on a heartbreakingly cheap old Schwinn tandem. I did pick up a couple of wheels, tires and cranks for bikes I'm working on, stuffing some of them into a nice Dahon bag to ride up front as I slogged home. Also, in the spirit of the trendy new minimalism, I picked up a unicycle. I got somewhat wet riding to Bloomfield (I brought a spare shirt) and thoroughly soaked coming home in time to get a flat right in front of my house. I was glad that didn't happen en route, as changing the rear tire by the side of the road in the rain would have sucked.

The museum is like a secret wonderland of 60's pop culture. My favorite was the red George Barris-branded bike with mags and a surfboard rack! There are some vintage motorcycles there as well, so I got to ogle and pine for an old Triumph again.

I don't know the full story of how much or how quickly they are winding things down, but you'd do well to have a visit if you get a chance.

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Wet Feet

sorry for being out for so long. tons of changes at city hall, summer vacation, blah, blah, blah......

looking for suggestions on this the first of several rainy days in a row and with wet fall and winter coming up. what do all of our readers (and fellow bloggers) do to keep their feet dry? neoprene socks, waterproof shoes (if so, which ones), shoe covers? what?????

as you may be able to guess i have not found a solution, but i would really like to! Read more!

Bikes Outside: Mad About Uconn

In the spirit of spending more time in different neighborhoods, this Monday marks the first time I have featured a Bike Outside in the West End. I don't spend much time in the fancy-schmancy part of Hartford. I like that it's fancy, mind you, but sometimes I find it uncomfortably schmancy. This Schwinn Madison was tethered to the rack at Uconn Law School. I'm pretty sure this is the first Madison I have seen that hasn't been messed with (outside of new one at a bike shop). The color-matched rims are still there and the bike has intact drop bars and two, count 'em, two, brakes. This, plus the near-mint condition and cheesy clamp-on reflectors make me think it is a recently-made purchase. Is it just me, or was there an excessive amount of mid-paragraph dash-usage there?

The Madison is a good-looking bike. I'm a sucker for chrome on bike frames, and the part-chromed fork and rear stays win points in my book. Schwinn has been mining its aesthetic past for a while with a variety of retro models. As it happens, they have a long and storied past full of many handsome machines, so that plan has proven reasonably successful. Schleppi's Jenny was parked at the same rack for a double-dose of old-school at the law school.

The Madison seems popular with the cicada set as well.


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D2R2'd

Early yesterday day morning, I picked up Dario, with whom I was wearing a matching jersey, and set for the great bicycle summit at D2R2. To get pumped, I played some François Couperin for the ride up. We arrived, did some bathroom work, messed with bikes, shook hands with Sandy (who invented D2R2s and hails from West Hartford), Dario wrapped himself in a tubular, we signed in our start time (6:41am) and we were off.


Our plan was to go slow, so we went slow. The staggered start of this year was nice, because we stayed out of a group, creating little impellment to attach oneself to a group and ride their pace.
The first section to the top of the hill in Heath has a lot of climbing, but nothing super steep until the hill up to the first check point. It averages 15% for like a mile or something crazy like. I was worried that I was overgeared with my lowest ratio being 34:32 (with 700x32c wheels, that's a 28.7" gear), which for most people is pretty low, but is it for a weakling like me? It was ok: I found that if I maintained a bit of momentum and stayed on top of the gear that I could work it. It was still pretty difficult, though.


My brush with mechanical problems also came during the first section. There was a "thump thump thump" coming from the rear end of the bike, whose frequency was related to the bike's speed. At first I thought I'd picked up a pebbled and it was hitting the chain stay, but upon investigation, it appeared that a knobby had partially detached itself from the tire. We asked a couple riders if they had a any glue and one nice had some rubber cement. He was in a hurry, so he gave us the cement and rode off. I glued it on and it held for awhile (about a mile). I glued it again and the realized there were other knobbies falling off, and to some extent, my rear tire was falling apart. I glued what appeared to be the other worst one, but was fairly certain that this was futile. Another mile and the "thump thump thump" returned and then after a big descent it ceased because the knobby had fallen off and I was riding on the patch of casing underneath. With the thumps gone, the tire problem wasn't distracting me anymore, so I was able ride normally. I returned the rubber cement to its owner at the check point. And, by the end of the day, learned that you can ride pretty far on casing.


When you get back on your bike after checkpoint 1, you learn whether or not you were pushing yourself too hard at the beginning. I felt great, unlike last year. Royer Road comes pretty soon after the checkpoint, which is the closest thing to mountain biking on the route. It's great. Section 2 has Archambo Rd (the 27% gravel wall) and Hillman Rd, which along with Patten Hill at the end, are the hardest climbs on the route. Archambo is a pretty crazy little road, as in, why did they construct it without a switchback? Even the other side of it, which is paved, is very steep. It can't possibly be drivable ever in the winter, but people live on it. Almost immediately after Archambo is Hillman Rd., which is deceptively difficult because it's gets steeper in 200 yard stages (for about a mile) and each stage has a looser and looser road surface. There's some descending, a final climb up Franklin Hill Rd. and then some more descending to lunch.

Lunch was great this year! They had an excellent vegetarian sandwich & pasta salad for me and roast beef and ham for meat eaters. No cold baked potatoes (as I've often queried, what's up with Vermont (the lunch stop is in Guilford, VT) and cold potatoes on bike rides?) this time. I also ate a bunch of cheetos.


At this point, I had ridden considerably ahead of Dario and when he arrived, he was cramping up considerably. Sandy gave him a bunch of salt, but things looked dire. Intelligently, unlike me last year, he decided to take Green River Rd. back to Deerfield and confine himself to 80 miles for the day. I was sad that I was now the lone snail.

After lunch is when the true D2R2-ness of the D2R2 sets in. Everyone is spread out and the roads start to feel lonely. Maybe it's just the contrast from the lunchtime hubbub or maybe the roads really are lonelier, but for either reason, when you meet up with the cop in Leyden who's handing out water and Gatorade, you're pretty sure that the Leyden Police Department is comprised of the world's greatest public servants.

You go up and you go down, then you hear some bagpipes playing at a wedding. I caught back up with the Rapha guys, who seemed to be having some kind of problem on the side of the road, but they smiled and waved off my offer of assistance (when I saw them again at the finish dinner, one guy had a torn jersey, so maybe it was a crash or something). I got to the Green River water stop and then went down a section of Green River which was one of my favorites from last year. But, this year, I guess we've been having a big drought, because instead of being verdant, it was totally parched. I ran into Joe from Enfield, whom I met earlier in the day because he recognized me from this blog.


There are a couple of switchbacks off the river, when I (and several others) cramped up last year. Not so, this year!

Things flatten out for a few miles in Colrain before the intimidation that is Patten Hill. Going down Deerfield Rd. into Colrain, I drafted and then passed a Jeep. That was kinda cool.

And, then there was Patten Hill: the source of so much agony and angst for me. I mean, I've thinking about this hill all year, to the point that when I got to it I realized it existed in my mind more as myth than reality. Don't get me wrong, it's a really nasty hill. It starts off with pavement at like 15% or something, then flattens out on dirt, the steepens up again progressively until the top-- whereupon you eat salted watermelon and pickles.

But, I cleaned it and I cleaned all the hills this year, and I finished (complete with corn maze). Except for a chaffed but, I felt pretty good. I couldn't think of a better reason to get up at 4:00am and toil for twelve hours.


One final thought, with the weather so nice this year, I wonder if anyone set a new course record. Read more!