Monday, February 5, 2018
When life gives you lemons, make some lemonade.
I rode my bike today, and am looking for route options for my long ride. It was to be a ‘short’ and easy ride, so I took off the big Caradice bag that I normally carry and put my spare tube and tools in my jacket. Off I go.
At km 40, my bike began feeling funny but I pushed on, until I noticed my front wheel wobbling.
Now this bike (a Pinarello GAN) is new to me. In September, Jinhee and I had our best bicycles stolen from our storage locker in Toronto. This was my ‘quick’ replacement, and it has a bunch of technology on it that I am not familiar with. That is important for repairs on long rides, but I am learning.
The tire on this bike is much heavier than on my other bikes and so it took a lot of abuse, but it was flat. So I stopped and changed the tube. After, I climbed on the bike, and headed back. When you have just one spare tube and you get a flat, the safe bet is to head back. As I took my first pedal strokes, I realized that the bike still felt weird. My REAR tire was flat too!
I could write a long post on my recovery from this situation, and if this was a humour website, I might take a couple of hours to type a review of the following hour or so of my day, but in the end, after a lot of effort, I made it to a bike shop for some spares and ultimately back to the boat. In the end it was an interesting 80km and I didn’t learn anything new about my route for later this week.
On my ride I stopped by the Eleusis archaeological site, but it was closed.
I know what everyone really wants are photos, so I shall put some here.
As for my long ride that I planned for tomorrow, the weather has changed and Thursday now looks like the best day so I will focus on Thursday to do a 300km+ ride.
This afternoon while on my walk I took a moment to photograph some rowers. There is a rowing club at the end of our dock and most days you can see a wide variety of youngsters working out. Some just getting started and some look like future Olympians. This is not a great photo, but these young ladies looked very strong.
