Flèche 2013 - Café Loiterers

Last year, I tried to convince my Flèche teammates to do the Provincetown to Portland Flèche on fixed. It was a perfect fixed route, I said, but the Misguided Angels were having none of that.

As the night and day wore on, they all seemed to agree that it really was a fixie-friendly route, and next year would be a fixed year.

Bike Friday Tikit Give-Away

In a purely shameless attempt to increase the readership on this blog (from my two loyal readers to maybe 4 or 6), I am going to give away my Bike Friday Tikit. If I can't increase blog readership based purely on my riveting stories, maybe I can buy it :-)

But first, let me say thanks to Velouria of Lovely Bicycle for helping me out with this shameless promotion and for taking all the awesome photos below.   

Do you want the Good News or the Bad News?

"Do you want the good news or bad news?"

This is what Fear Rothar said as he came upstairs just before we were to load the tandem into the car to drive out to Westfield for the Bash-Bish 300km brevet.

A few weeks before, while cycling out in the Catskills, we noticed that the rear tire on the tandem was rubbing the fender a bit. These darn aluminum fenders are such a pain. We supposedly have the right sized fender for our tires, but like Dr Who's Weeping Angels, if you look away, bad stuff happens! Or if the tire isn't perfectly round... or seated just so, bad stuff happens. The Grand Bois Hetres that we use on the tandem seem to have a reputation for fiddly mounting, so the plan was to remove and remount the tire, or just put on a completely new tire. I was supposed to do this, but my brand new belted fixed gear bike showed up a few hours prior, and I had to go for a ride first. I mean it would just be inconsiderate to the builder not to take the bike out for a ride as soon as I got it, right?

Domestique to a Brand New Randonneuse

The greatest blog post ever written was almost ready to be published when I added one more link and lost the whole thing! Darn auto-save! I've tried to rewrite it, but it's not as good. What follows is the 2nd attempt... 

I met Constance Winters about 18 months ago on a Thursday morning ladies rides from Ride Studio Cafe. I was made aware of her very popular blog a few months prior and had become a fan. Constance is actually a pseudonym, and since she introduced herself with her real name, I didn't make the connection right away. But as we were riding along, I realized that I was in the presence of a celebrity, and suddenly blurted out, "Are you Lovely Bicycle?" To which she shyly replied, yes. We continued riding and chatting until we got back to RSC. Finding we had some common interests, we decided to get together again for more rides.

Climbfest in the Catskills - Part 3

The smoker's cough seemed to be getting worse. Almost to the point that John considered passing on the planned long ride for Friday. I'd initially plotted out this brutal century route, but also created a shorter option with a remote start.

Just as I had the car packed up and was about to leave, I convinced John to come, so we put his bike back into the car and headed out a little later than planned. We drove out to Phoenicia where we are becoming regulars at Mama's Boy Coffee Shop. After a quick coffee, we headed out on our bikes.

Climbfest in the Catskills - Part 2 - Nectar for the Honeybees

We had a couple of goals for our week in the Catskills. One was to do lots of climbing, and trust me, we did not suffer from any lack of hills. The other was to make full use of my new Honey All Roads and find some good dirt roads. We'd found a little dirt in our initial rides, but not quite as much as I was hoping for. So I sat down in front of my computer and typed the words, dirt and Catskills into the search box on ridewithgps, and found this route created by somervillebikes. I've never formally met somervillebikes, but we have a mutual friend, Velouria of the blog, Lovely Bicycle. In the week before we headed away, Velouria had mentioned that somervillebikes had a holiday home and some good dirt road routes in the area. So I had great confidence in this route when I found it. But then I noticed a level of detail rarely seen on routes one might randomly find online. He had color-coded the route to show what was dirt and what was paved. And every cue was annotated with additional details. This was very promising indeed.