Less than a week before we head east, and a bit over two weeks before our bike tour begins, we are out on the bike again for a training ride. We were planning to go on Thursday, but too many things going on: work, late reservations from bike tourists on the Adventure Cycling Association’s Pacific Coast Trail, etc. Friday, of course was out of the question. So, here we are, Labor Day weekend, on the road.

Our destination today is Mason Lake County Park, at the north end of Mason Lake, 34.5 miles round trip. I had made this trip last year solo, and we had been to Lake Limerick, a bit more than half-way, earlier in the season, so it’s another comparison of our training progress. We got a late start, and it is supposed to be sunny and warm, but we need to get used to riding through the afternoon for our tour later this month.

First, a stop at the Shelton Saturday Farmer’s Market for some cookies, then dismount behind the library and push the bike up the steep switchback trail. This is safer and less traumatizing than riding up Old Olympic Highway in heavy traffic with no shoulders. We have also taken to riding the walking/biking trail from Mason General Hospital to the Island Lake road, as the car traffic takes more kindly to us if we don’t ride in the road, some of which is narrow one-lane boulevard with no shoulder.

Once out on Brockdale Road, there is a shoulder, of sorts. We turn on McEwan Prairie Road, which is relatively flat but a token half a foot to the right of the fog line. The Shelton-Bremerton railroad line crosses at a slight angle, so we check traffic and zig-zag to square up the crossing a bit.

A left on Mason Lake Road at the end of McEwan Prairie takes us to the Lake Limerick store for water and sports drink and necessary stops. The rest of the ride is rolling, climbing to an elevation of 280 feet east of Mason Lake before gradually dropping to the lake level at 200 feet elevation.  This would be an ideal country ride except for the thick coat of chip seal on most of the length of the road, that favorite treatment of Washington highway departments that vibrates the bicycle, robbing power and numbing every body part in contact with the bike.

The boat ramp is busy on this Labor Day weekend. Fortunately, one of the two picnic tables is available and we drag it into the sparse shade at the lakeshore to eat our boiled potato and banana lunch. Soon, we head back toward home, retracing our route. Only a few hundred meters into the chip-sealed section, we need to stand on the downhills and steering, shifting, and braking are visual and from the shoulders, clumsily pushing numbed digits against the levers.  The new bar ends help relieve the numbing somewhat. Despite the annoyance of riding on deliberately roughened roads, we are much stronger now than just a month ago, and only the longest and highest hills demand the lowest gears.

But, despite our respectable speed on the rare flats and gentle downgrades, a pair of heavily-loaded bicycle tourists overtake us before the Lake Limerick store. We stop briefly and move on, this time taking the walkway as low speed down the Old Olympic Highway hill downtown to avoid the deep ruts in the roadway pavement. A favorite stop at Urraco coffee roasters and espresso bar fortifies us for the obligatory push up the busy and winding hill home. I think we are ready for tour. Maybe one more long ride just to keep in tone before our long car trip.

Here’s the link to the map of our route.

August in Puget Sound is an idyllic time that fools Californians into moving here just before the start of the 10-month-long rainy season.  The forests are still green, The Mountain (Rainier) is “out” most days, visible from most of the populated areas where buildings have replaced trees, and you can even see Mount Baker, the northernmost of the major Cascade volcanoes, more than 100 miles away, from Hoodsport on clear mornings.

August, for the denizens of Chaos Central, the Unix Curmudgeon and the Nice Person, had been intended as intensive training time for our upcoming September bicycle tour.  Yes, training.  Most people planning a vacation prepare by buying traveling clothes, sporting goods, getting an overhaul or detailing the motor home, etc.  But, for bicycle tourists, planning to ride your bike long distances involves, ah, riding your bike long distances. Several times a week, for months, before riding every day for a week or two or more.

But, this being Chaos Central, August was a flurry of activity other than biking.  First, we finally sold our former domicile in Montana after a 25-month ordeal.  Then, because we are members of Warmshowers.org, the bicycle touring housing exchange, and this being middle of the not-so-rainy season in Puget Sound, we get a lot of bicycle tourists on the the Pacific Coast tour route through our fair city.  Some of them stop, which is sometimes good, because we can make excuses to ride with them for 20 or 25 miles before reversing course for home and other responsibilities.

Those other responsibilities include (since this is the Unix Curmudgeon’s Blog, after all) grinding code and tweaking remote client systems.  A lot.  As it turns out, the end of the government fiscal year brought a  surfeit of piled-up work, the result of hiring freezes and threats of shutdown, etc.  And, the Nice Person has a few quilts left to finish for snowbirds passing this way next week.  So, we work early mornings, evenings, and weekends to be able to ride during the week, when traffic is a bit lighter, during the mornings and early afternoons before the temperature shoots up into the high 70s and becomes unbearable for us web-footed rain forest dwellers.

We’ve been riding, and sometimes touring, together for 25 years as a tandem team, and the Unix Curmudgeon has been a bike commuter and accidental bike tourist for 35 years, racking up nearly 50,000 miles on two wheels, including the 10,000 or so tandem miles.  So, we should be at least used to the conditioning routine, and we are hopelessly behind, though in better shape for this tour than in some years.

During this month, we have managed to ride at least 10 miles on busy days, and have worked up to 20 miles, then 40 miles when we can spare the time, and ride at least twice a week.  On this, the next-to-last-day of the month, a little over two weeks from the start of our tour, and a bit over a week from our departure date, we matched our 40-mile distance from a couple weeks ago with a “commuter ride.” We had received an escrow refund check from our house sale earlier in the month. It wasn’t a lot, but nearly enough to pay for gasoline to drive to our bike tour starting point and return (5000-mile round trip). We decided to deposit the check by riding to our bank, which is in Olympia, 20 miles away.

After our Tuesday morning yoga session at the Senior Center downtown, we headed up Railroad Avenue to U.S. 101, which becomes a four-lane freeway south of town. We exited at the interchanges and crossed over to the on-ramp, to avoid merging with 100-Kph truck and car traffic. Conversation on the noisy highway is impossible, but the breakdown lane is at least wide enough to keep the juggernauts a safe distance away, though dodging chunks of bark dropped by logging trucks is a matter of constant vigilance. We got a brief and serene respite from the traffic by following a short loop of the Old Olympic Highway at Oyster Bay, then found ourselves back on the freeway for a long climb up yet another of the ridges that climb up 80 meters (i.e., equivalent to more than 22 flights of stairs) between the many inlets.  At the Steamboat Island Road, just inside Thurston County, we exit, stop for an early lunch at the small commercial strip, then dive steeply down to Madrona Beach Drive, which rolls gently several miles to Mud Bay Road, which crosses the muddy end of Eld Inlet, filled with water only at high tide.  A hard steep climb up to West Olympia, then onto Cooper Point Road, which has no bike lane and is constantly congested at Black Lake Boulevard.  We survive the intersection, conduct our business, then turn back left on Cooper Point out of the parking lot, a difficult maneuver in a car, and death-defying on a bike.  Other cyclists are on the sidewalk.  Later, when mapping the route, we find that Google will not let you map a bike route on this stretch of Cooper Point Road.  Not bikeable.  I believe that now, but years of commuting on Aquidneck Island (Rhode Island) and through Bremerton, Seattle, and Missoula have dangerously dulled my fear of traffic.

Fortified by a quick visit to Starbucks, we retrace our route home.  The sun burns through briefly, so we hunt for our sunscreen at Steamboat Island Road and visit with bike tourists from Oregon we overtake at Subway.  They step in for a late lunch, we continue on.  We do not see them again.  Approaching Shelton, we exit at WA 3, take a right, then U-turn on Arcadia to get left across a constant stream of uphill traffic and a left turn signal that won’t switch for bikes.  Zig-zag through the hillside above our house, and we are home.  Total time, 6.5 hours, total distance, 40 miles.  Not good, but probably not bad for old folks on Medicare, and we did conduct business, visit, have lunch, and answered email over coffee.  A good day. Are we ready for 55-mile days back to back three weeks from now? Maybe. We hear Michigan is flat, and the U.P. is relatively low-traffic. Later this week, we plan to reprise our trip to Hoodsport of a couple weeks ago, and maybe one more long ride before we pack the bike next week. Now, back to writing Perl code to deliver a beta test release before our trip east.

Here’s a link to a map of today’s route.

When we set off on Tour 2011 Part 2 in early July, we had our summer and early fall fairly well planned out.  Well, life is what happens when you are making other plans.  The Tour turned out to be a frantic race, and Chaos Central became even more chaotic on our return.

We did combine business with pleasure, spending a week in Montana working before we continued on to Minnesota for the high-school reunion.  We even got in a couple of bike rides in the evenings.  The big news was, we got an offer on our Montana house while we were in residence.  This, of course, changed everything.  The Minnesota trip went mostly as planned: we camped, got rained on, dried out the next night in a motel, and continued on into the start of the mid-summer heat wave that discouraged biking and even site-seeing.  We got word during our travels that the house closing was to be moved up, so our plans began to change.

On our return from Minnesota, in a couple of long mileage-eating days, we stopped in Montana, dropped off our bike and camping gear. loaded up some of the belongings we had left in the house while it was still our “business lodging,” and raced home to Washington.  We unloaded the car, took care of appointments at home, then headed back to Montana to finish clearing out the house and sign papers.  Little time for work this time except for a short meeting with the client: trips to charity thrift shops, trips to the dump, a load to the cabin, a short bike ride, and then load up the car with bike, camp gear, and remaining belongings, leaving behind what wouldn’t fit as a “gift” to the new owners.  The financing bank, of course, fumbled, so the closing was delayed, almost to the original date.  Meanwhile, the debt limit crisis came and went, but the country didn’t collapse, so we got our payout, finally, down to one mortgage payment after two years.

Now, we thought, we will be able to focus on training for our September bicycle tour, a.k.a. our “real vacation,” for which we had scrimped and saved and bought a new bicycle (the Green Machine, see earlier posts) and paid our non-refundable full fee.  Ah, but life is what happens while you are making other plans:  the client workload suddenly increased; the sudden influx of funding from the house sale made possible scheduling long-delayed home repairs, hopefully before our trip or at least before the fall rainy season sets in.  Chaos Central truly is living up to its name.

We’re still hoping for a reasonable training schedule: we’ve made a few 20-mile fast runs, alternated with 12-mile dashes, but no day-long rides to get used to long days in the saddle coming up.  We’re members of Warmshowers.org, a bicycle tourist lodging exchange.  Since we’re on the coastal bike route between Vancouver, BC and San Francisco, we’re getting a lot of bike tourists through the area, and hope to tag along with some of them as incentive to get our riding in before we head east.

We’re also still finishing up the shakedown period on the new bike, even after a couple hundred miles.  My left pedal seems to have a flaw that only appears under load, an ominous “click-snap” at top and bottom of the stroke, so we have approached long rides with trepidation until we resolve the problem.  Hopefully, it is the pedal and not the bottom bracket or worse.  Fortunately, we have a stable of bikes from which to mine spare parts.  We’re also still collecting gear for our tour, deciding we need a different arrangement for day rides and supported touring than the expedition panniers we’ve used all these years.

And, the work projects pile up, with new clients on the East Coast, juggling time zones means early to work, missed lunches for mid-afternoon (EDT) meetings, and fitting in house and lawn projects with work time and finding time to ride the bicycle times and routes to avoid heavy traffic and allow plenty of time before the next appointment.   Now, to make sure the Netbook computer fits in the new panniers…

2011 seems to be the year to travel. We started in January with a new car and a trip to California, Arizona, and New Mexico; a short trip to Vancouver, BC (via Birch Bay, WA), a Linux conference in Bellingham, and the Conference Marathon in June, hitting the ANWG conference in Salem, Big Sky Fiber Fest in Hamilton, MT, and back to Oregon for the USENIX Federated Conferences Week in Portland.

Along the way, we ordered our long-awaited replacement for the HPV Leviathan, the trusty Santana Arriva XC tandem bicycle we’ve been riding for 25 years, and signed up for an Adventure Cycling supported camping tour in Upper Michigan in September. Over the 25 years, we’ve strapped the big fat-tired tandem in the back of a pickup truck and, later, on a roof-top rack, variously on the pickup with canopy, on a Nissan Sentra, and, for 17 years, on a 1994 Jeep Cherokee. When we traded in the Cherokee on a new Jeep Patriot, a wee smaller vehicle, the tandem rack no longer fit. Also, as we found out back in 1988, it is very difficult to box a full-sized tandem so that the airlines and rail lines will accept it, and, lately, if you do meet the size requirements, the oversized baggage fees (special for bicycles) are prohibitive.

Our new ride, a Bike Friday Project Q, which has been featured before, is a bit lighter, uses a bit more modern technology, and, most importantly, breaks down into luggage-sized pieces, so it can be checked as ordinary baggage on public transit.   We initially ordered only one case, a modified hard-shell Samsonite pullman case that converts to a trailer, but found getting even the single-bike conversion mode into one case was problematic.   So, a second case was ordered, which comes with a stacking attachment that allows it to swing out of the way for access to both bags when configured as a trailer.

And, here it is, packed and ready to be transported.  With both cases, there is room for additional bike gear: shoes, helmets, tools, and bike clothes.  The various bike components–tubes, seats, pedals, etc–slip into felt bags.  The brown blankets are spread out on the ground or floor for assembly/disassembly and the bike held together with slip joints and clamp screws.  The front half of the tandem is on the right, and the back half is on the left, along with the trailer components.

So, we’re off again for Tour 2011, part 2, which will take us to Montana, where we plan to reassemble the bike and ride some of our old familiar routes around the Bitterroot Valley in the evenings: it’s a business trip, with a few days at the customer’s site.  We’ll spend a day or so at our cabin in the Mission Mountains, but probably no time for biking, before heading farther east to Minnesota, where the Unix Curmudgeon plans to attend a high school reunion for the first time, having avoided previous ones for the past 50 years.  Depending on weather, we might or might not break out the bike in Minnesota, as we’re only there for a few days before racing back west to Chaos Central to train hard for Tour 2011, part 3, which will be in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in September.  So far, we’ve put less than 50 miles on the new machine, in a series of 6-12 mile rides, part of the break-in period with frequent adjustments plus learning to break it down and assemble it quickly.  Stay tuned.

As we noted in our last post, the Green Machine arrived on schedule.  The Bike Friday Project Q was chosen for several reasons:

• We needed a tandem bike that could be transported easily in any car, on trains, buses, and planes
• Sometimes I need a single bike
• Quality is important

To get all of these qualities in one machine, one has to make some compromises.  The bike either has to fold, or be easily disassembled.  And, it needs to be convertible from the tandem, two-seat configuration to a single bike.  And, it has to be compact for transport.  The Q is all of these.

But, with any “some assembly required” product, there are adjustments to be made and a learning curve to get the bolt torque right, to get the alignment right, and to set the adjustments right. The plan of action here was to come up with at least an abbreviated version of the Phase I testing that our homebuilt aircraft will need to go through. The first ride must be solo, and not stray far from home base.

So, after having assembled the bike, the next thing, after installing luggage rack, was to disassemble the bike, at least partially, to convert it into its alternate configuration, from the Mean Green Machine to the Lean Green Machine. This entails essentially removing the center section of the bike, with the stoker seat, crankset, handlebars, and the two main frame tubes, along with the shift and brake cables that pass over them. This was fairly simple, and before long, the Lean Green Machine appeared.

Since we live on a fairly steep hill, the test area was chosen uphill, or, more specifically, working around the ridge to the south and east that juts between Hammersley Inlet and Little Skookum Inlet. A brief familiarization with the shifters put the bike in uphill mode and off we went. After a short steep climb and a dip, the route ran downhill at a fair grade for a few blocks, with a stop in the middle. Applying the brakes firmly, I forgot the machine is designed as a tandem. Riding solo in short-wheelbase mode, the front binders grabbed smartly; the rear wheel came up off the road. Fortunately, the old biker still had quick enough reflexes to avoid an endo, and we (the machine and I coming to an understanding as a result of this bonding exercise) proceeded.

At the top of the next uphill jog, I noticed a tendency to slide off the front of the saddle. Ah, fear of overtorque results in looseness. A quick stop to adjust and tighten the saddle and we’re off again. Once out on rolling Arcadia, the shifting becomes second nature. The best choice in the Q Project is Bike Friday’s Dual Drive option, with a three-speed rear hub and a nine-gear freewheel cassette, giving an honest, usable 27 gear ratios. Even with the 20-inch wheels (necessary for transportability in disassembled mode), the gear range is surprisingly close to what we’re used to on the Santana, with nine more absolute gears and a whole lot more usable (generally, with a front derailleur, only about half of the gear ratios are actually usable, due to the cross-over between the front and rear gears).

A few more steep hills and we reverse course (avoiding a Rottweiler loose in the road at the top of the next hill) and head for the barn. The only other item of note was a knocking under load in the last half of the ride, with a definite thump in the right pedal, that needs looked at, and might be movement of the pannier on the rack, or pedal adjustment. Next time out, we need to convert back to tandem mode for Phase II testing, then disassemble for the all-important packing test, to see if we can fit the components into the shipping case (which converts to a trailer, for total self-contained travel).