Category: Bike stuff

Back in the saddle again

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
Miss Mia Sopaipilla inquires whether I plan to stick around for a few head bumps before pissing off again to God knows where.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla inquires whether I plan to stick around for a few head bumps before pissing off again to God knows where.

Nose, meet grindstone.

I pretty much plugged right back in after my little sojourn in the desert. Cranked out a column and cartoon for Bicycle Retailer, edited pix and video for Adventure Cyclist, bashed out a post and gallery for all y’all, delivered myself of a few quips on social media, replenished the larder, and got the Subie serviced.

The old rice rocket is still ticking along nicely after 11 years and 117,000 miles, and a few inexpensive repairs — replacing the cracked moon roof, reupholstering the driver’s seat and buffing the haze out of the headlights — should keep me off the car lots for a while yet.

The critters’ separation anxieties have all been soothed (I haven’t told them Herself will be pissing off to Hawaii here directly). And if I haven’t had a lick of exercise in three days, well, at least I’ve gotten a few things done.

After a heavenly week of shunning radio, TV and the Innertubez, I can’t say I’ve enjoyed catching up on the news, save for a bit of heehawing at Jeb (!) finally noticing all those loafer prints in his ass. How pleasurable it was to finally see a head roll in that dime-store dynasty, even with The Donald serving as executioner.

And speaking of The Mouth That Roared, that tale has pretty much stopped being funny. Over at MoJo, David Corn reminds us that the Rethugs have no one to blame but themselves for this billionaire buccaneer who sailed right into the middle of their tony fleet and let fly with broadsides to port and starboard.

At The Guardian, Jeb Lund distributes the credit a little more widely, observing that the courtier press is a bit too comfy in its own box seat at the opera to notice that the peasants outside are revolting (oy, are they ever).

Me, I think we all had a hand in the phenomenon that Charlie Pierce calls “He, Trump.” Or off it, as in abandoning control of our electoral processes to the pros, fixers and wizards.

This is one of the reasons I’m not sanguine about the idea of self-driving cars. If you’re not in the driver’s seat, you can be certain that someone else is. And they may be taking you somewhere you’d rather not go.

Sand bagging: Drifting through the desert

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

As promised, here are a few more shots from my all-too-brief sojourn in the Lower Verde Basin. I always intend to shoot more, but once I get into the saddle a certain mindset takes over and the camera stays parked in its jersey pocket. Clicking any image will open the whole shebang in gallery mode.

Tell me, who are you?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments

mcdowell-sunset

I took the Tube back out of town

Back to the Rollin’ Pin

I felt a little like a dying clown

With a streak of Rin Tin Tin.

—”Who Are You,” by The Who

When the machinery starts acting up, what’s the first thing the IT guy asks?

“Have you tried turning it off and then turning it back on?”

Well, I turned it off last Monday, but I didn’t get around to turning it back on until today. Sorry ’bout that.

I hadn’t had a good old road trip in far too long, so I took one. And I mean a road trip for me, one in which it was not necessary for me to be me for a few days. One must shut the fuck up from time to time, give the old pie-hole (and everyone else’s ears) a little R&R. Turn it off.

mcdowell-camp-dog
Camp Dog.

I suppose I could have taken a napping tour of Soho doorways, but that sounded a bit extreme, so instead I pissed off to McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, Ariz.

The park is a bolt hole I used for years, but hadn’t visited in a while, and it was a pleasure to return. The weather was stellar, neither too hot nor too cold; there were some brand-new trails to explore; and while plugging into the Innertubes is possible out there among the cacti and coyotes, it remains something of a pain in the arse, so I didn’t bother trying. I did check mail once, using my phone, to see if anything demanded my immediate attention. It didn’t.

Nobody gave me an Airstream Interstate Grand Tour EXT for solstice, so I used my old North Face Expedition-25 tent and a new REI sunshade for shelter. And as regards cooking mostly I did not, as like the daily parade of conspiracies on the Innertubes it had become something of a nuisance.

Instead, I noshed on bits of this and that — baby greens with avocado and tomato slathered in olive oil, Creminelli salami and Barber’s cheddar on crackers, fruit, yogurt, granola, LaraBars, rice and whatnot.

I did, however, brew the obligatory pot of powerful black coffee first thing every morning. After a cuppa and a LaraBar I went for a run, and after that it was another cuppa, some yogurt and granola, and a ride on one of the two bikes I’d fetched along. Lunch was either out of the cooler or at DJ’s Bagel Cafe, which to my surprise was still open — and still good — after all these years. For dinner it was back to the cooler.

Come evening I enjoyed the sunset, the moonrise and a brief coyote concert, then turned in, listened to a little Mozart from the Academy of St. Martin In the Fields, read a bit of poetry, and nodded off. Next day I did it all again, but on different trails.

It wasn’t all fun and games. There were notes and pictures taken, and video shot. But I did not publish, until today. And as you see, I have not perished.

marin-bags-granite
The Marin Four Corners Elite, tricked out with Revelate bikepacking bags.

The path is the way

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
The bike paths in these parts are better than the roads in some of the towns I've lived in.
The bike paths in these parts are better than the roads in some of the towns I’ve lived in.

Yesterday I decreed it would be Ride Your Own Damn Bike Day, and so I dug out the Nobilette, which has been neglected lately, aired it up, and took it out for two and a half hours of delightful sunny goodness.

The sprinkler system is A-OK.
The sprinkler system is A-OK.

No biggie — easy pace, just 32.5 miles on rolling terrain — but still, it’s refreshing to ride one of my own damn bikes* for a change, and for more than 90 minutes at a stretch, too.

There was only a little bit of old snow and ice hiding in the shady bits, mostly toward the end of the ride on the Paseo de las Montañas trail.

I’m guessing that’s where I picked up whatever flattened the front tire, probably a goathead thorn, though the culprit could have been some errant glass from earlier in the ride. Swear to God, it looked like someone chucked an entire case of Heineken out the car window on Tramway between Manitoba and Spain. There was so much green glass scattered around I wondered whether Ted Cruz had been practicing his carpet-bombing techniques in the Duke City.

It's a beautiful morning.
It’s a beautiful morning.

Today the weatherpersons are predicting a high of 62 (!) so I decided to power up the sprinkler system for the first time in quite a spell. Nothing exploded. This is what we sprinkler-system owner-operators call “a good thing.” Because nothing makes so much sense as a nice green lawn in the Southwestern desert.

Indeed, the forecast proved so enticing that Herself declared herself ready for her first bike ride of 2016. And just in time, too. There’s rain and gloom predicted for Monday and Tuesday.

* Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, it’s still possible to ride a steel bike with cantilever brakes and come to a stop without Flintstoning or caroming off cars, trees and light stanchions. I know, it’s against the conventional wisdom, but you can rely upon me. I’m in the media.

 

 

Chile, hold the snow

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
You can still find some snow around here, but nobody is duking it out at the grocery over the last can of Spaghetti-Os.
You can still find some snow around here, but nobody is duking it out at the grocery over the last can of Spaghetti-Os.

I bitch a fair amount (OK, so I bitch a lot, maybe even a whole shitload), but I’m having a hard time complaining about my lot in life today.

For starters, I am not in Maryland, where Herself is going toe to toe with Snowmageddon, various blood relatives and in-laws, and a vile case of gastroenteritis that has already felled 50 percent of her party.

The Four Corners Elite isn't your grandpappy's steel touring bike, nosirree. Now get off my lawn.
The Four Corners Elite isn’t your grandpappy’s steel touring bike, nosirree. Now get off my lawn.

No, I am right here in the Duke City, where today it was a balmy fiddy-sumpin’ and strictly blue skies as I rode the Marin Four Corners Elite around and about for a blissful 90 minutes, inspecting a bit of bike path with which I was unfamiliar.

The sonofabitch takes more inexplicable twists and turns than a Caribou Barbie speech, but the Domingo Baca eventually gets you there, “there” being the North Diversion Channel Trail, a major north-south backbone of the local trail network.

Once safely on the main stem I took my usual route back to El Rancho Pendejo, heading over I-25 and along Osuna to the John Roberts Dam, where Walter White caught his getaway ride in the extractor’s red Toyota Previa, and then riding the dirt trails behind the dam to the Tramway bike path and home.

I arrived back at the ranch just in time to receive a generous compliment on one of my videos for Adventure Cyclist — just call me Quentin Ferrentino — and now I’m cooking up a green chile stew by way of refreshment and celebration.

Tomorrow looks even better. And I won’t even have to cook the stew when I get home.