The Big Weekend

Wow - lots of riding and bike stuff the last few days:

Valerie came over for dinner on Friday night she decided to do some back exercises with my Swiss ball while I was cooking. Note the glass of wine on the floor next to her.




I got up at 4:00am on Saturday morning to meet my neighbor Christian and drive out to the T-Town fall bicycle flea market. I had loaded up all kinds of stuff that was cluttering up my apartment and was ready to sell! I took the first load down figuring that I would come back up for my cell phone and the rest of the junk for sale. Big mistake. I waited outside in the cold and light rain for Christian - I wanted to call but I kept thinking that it would be a big pain in the ass to lug everything back upstairs and get the phone then haul it all back down. About half an hour later I gave up on Christian and went up to get my phone. Sure enough - he overslept.




The flea market was a big success - I sold almost everything I brought with me and then unloaded the last few things on eBay over the weekend. Greg Lemond was at the flea market and I got to meet him, I also met Bobby Julich (charming guy!) and had a picture taken with him. The sky was overcast and grey - combine the grey sky and my grey hair and it looks like my head is disolving into the clouds. Vanity prevents me from posting this picture uncropped, but trust me, those are Bobby's eyes on the right.

Monday I decided to take a day off from work and do some riding and thinking. I took a trip to Nyack and had breakfast at the Runcible Spoon, a cyclist hangout in upstate NY. I ran into a new friend, Mary-Lynne, who races for the Champion System team, nice to have a lunch break that involved conversation! It was about 75 miles of riding all said and done - it felt great to get out and spin away some miles. In the interest of thinking the day was declared (in my head) "small ring day". My chain only saw the big ring twice - when I was going downhill at 32mph and couldn't spin any more speed out of the bike. A few seconds in the big ring got me up over 35mph - that speed slipped away into the blacktop as I went up the next hill, comfortably back in my small chainring. You can see my route, one way here. (Hint, click and drag to pan the map, Google Ped doesn't zoom so well right now - the map comes up at the midpoint of my ride, in Nyack.)



Sunday evening I hooked up with Roscoe and we did a little work on his KHS pursuit bike. Roscoe wanted to drill a hole in the BB to allow water to run out. This is a crackpot theorey, but what the hell. That orange bike of Roscoe's is one of my favorite bikes ever - he owns two of my favorite bikes, in fact - here is the other one.