After Charles Pelkey and I wrapped up Live Update Guy’s coverage of Paris-Roubaix yesterday I pedaled off for my own little adventure.
See the cobbles off to the right there alongside Tramway? Those are the rare Duke City mini-cobbles. Some people might call ’em “gravel,” but they’re really cobbles. Itty bitty cobbles. You can trust me. I’m in the media.
Goddamn acid flashbacks. Where the hell am I now? Xanadu? Hobbiton? Oz? Oh, whew, just the back yard. I was afeared I’d stumble across Ann Coulter with a house on top of her.
Daylight-saving time is still messing with my mojo.
I’m not a morning person by nature, but I do like getting my daily exercise in early-ish. But since the early-ish temps have been a little brisk lately, I’ve been waiting until afternoon to crack a sweat — my least favorite time for that sort of thing.
Still, there’s no denying that it’s warmer at 3 p.m. than it is at 10 a.m. And apparently I’m not the only person who likes it that way, because by the time I hit the trail on the old DBR mountain bike yesterday everybody and his grandma was out there, too.
I hadn’t ridden this bike in, like, forever — it still sports some reddish mud that may come from the Monument Valley Park trail back in Bibleburg — and it took some getting used to. If you consume a steady diet of rigid, drop-bar, disc-brake 29ers, well, a front-suspension, flat-bar, V-brake 26er is gonna feel a little weird.
And I was never much of a mountain biker anyway. Ask anyone who ever saw me ride one.
So, anyway, after dodging a metric shit-ton of oblivious pedestrians, off-the-leash dogs and other mobile speed bumps, and nearly stuffing it in a tight, downhill, left-hand corner, I said to hell with it and headed for home.
Rolling toward Piedra Lisa I pulled to the side of the trail to accommodate yet another parade of folks, this time a string of mountain bikers, and one said, “Hey, nice Diamondback!”
Dude either knows his vintage machinery or has the telescopic vision of a young Superman, because the only identifying decal on my 1995 DBR Axis TT is at the base of the seat tube, and its only remaining stock bits are the AC crankset and XT derailleurs.
Speaking of bike bits, Nick Legan, the tech editor for Adventure Cyclist, has a new blog going when he has a moment to catch his breath. You should check it out.
It was a quiet St. Patrick’s Day around El Rancho Pendejo, as you might expect from my previous post.
We had the previous owner of the place over for a glass of wine with Herself — Kathy is the green-thumbed person who planted the lovely flowers that are just beginning to pop up for a look-see — and we caught up on this and that, discussed the parlous state of the Republic, and in general had a delightful early evening.
I’d had a pot of Irish stew simmering on the fire, and invited Kathy to join us, but she had other plans. So it was just the two of us nibbling away in front of the tube — season one of “Orange Is the New Black,” which is OK but so far no “Breaking Bad,” thanks all the same. (Yeah, we’re late to the popular-culture party again.)
Today I need to log a little saddle time, if I can ever stop blowing my nose (honk). Still, could be worse. Here the temps may inch up toward the 70-degree mark. Back in Bibleburg, it’s snowing.
Mad Blog Media 