A while back, we reminisced on our evolution from childhood bike freedom to bicycle commuter to bicycle tourist (The Accidental Bicycle Tourist: A Life Journey). We left off looking forward to the next phase in our self-powered journeys, awaiting the arrival of our first new bike in 15 years, the Bike Friday Traveler Q.
The Green Machine - our new Bike Friday Traveler Q
Well, it’s here, at last. It will be a few days before we give it a test run, but we got it unpacked and assembled without too much confusion. It’s a well-made machine, designed to be packed and unpacked on tour to take advantage of planes, trains, buses, and automobiles without racks.
The new bike, disassembled, fits into a large pullman case that also functions as a trailer. It also converts to a single bike by removing the stoker’s section, creating a versatile travel solution. We’ll be experimenting with rack configurations over the next few months, as we plan our touring strategy and get used to the new machine.
We haven’t had it outside yet, but had to sit on it in the hallway: it fits just like the Santana–after all, it was custom-built, just for us, and has a nameplate on the frame with our names on it, giving new meaning to the bicycle as personal transport.
We’re putting our Santana, Leviathan, which has served us faithfully for 25 years, up for sale. It has a lot more miles left in it, but we no longer have the capability of transporting it other than getting on and pedaling. With upgrades and regular maintenance, it’s still like new. Santana still makes a fat-tire tandem, but has switched from the classic Arriva road bike frame geometry to the lower, bent top bar configuration modern off-road mountain bikes sport, and renamed the model Cilantro XC. But, the old Arriva XC is still an excellent back-roads touring machine. It served us well on the unpaved sections of the Galloping Goose Trail on Vancouver Island last year, and we have ridden a few miles of gravel road in Montana when that was the only option along the route.
"Alas, poor Leviathan, we rode thee well": Our Santana posing for its sales listing.
Spring finally comes to the Pacific Northwest on a clear, cold April day in 2011, overdue for the first bike ride of the season. I’m on the road at last, after a long wet winter that started with ice that cut short December riding in Montana, and heavy rains that discouraged riding in Washington. A couple of early spring trips to the gym to ride the stationary beast had at least verified that not all the strength and endurance had wasted away over winter.
This first ride is planned as an overnighter, to our son’s house in Olympia Saturday afternoon, then home on Sunday via Ruby Street Quiltworks in Tumwater, a total distance of 55 miles. It’s not exactly a tour, more of an extended commute: Judy, my life partner and tandem stoker, is off at a weekend weaving workshop in Olympia, while I had an afternoon writing workshop in Shelton: I plan to join her to babysit the grandchildren in the evening and to attend my meeting in Tumwater the next day, without driving separate cars, in the age of four-dollar gasoline.
The Bicycle Commuter, 2009
My steed these days is a 15-year-old Specialized Hard Rock, more suited to the short commutes to work for which it served for a dozen years or so than touring or long-distance training, but it’s what is in the stable now, for another month at least. The fat tires roll along at cruise between 12 and 15 miles per hour, for an average trip speed of 10 miles per hour, down a mile or two from when the bike and I were both younger, and much slower than my old road touring bike, which is still in Montana.
Grandson Ethan, ready to ride
The ride goes smoothly, following the gentle grades of US Highway 101 toward the city, then a few miles of quiet beach drive rolling along the inlet before climbing through West Olympia and diving down and across the city. The afternoon ride ends after a climb up the Woodland Trail, a rail-trail pathway parallel to Interstate 5. Grandson Ethan, 7, who rides the trail with his father, is impressed as I arrive, knowing it is more than 30 minutes in the car at freeway speed to Granny and Grandpa’s house.
Larye on the Hiawatha clunker, with Jane, 1953
It’s been 60 years since I, at Ethan’s age, pedaled away from my father’s steadying hand for the first time. My first–and, for the next 25 years, only–bike was an ancient Hiawatha one-speed with 24-inch wheels, fat tires, and impossibly wide handlebars. I rode mostly in the summer, and never to school or on my newspaper delivery route. A few of my more affluent friends had “English” bikes, with large, graceful wheels, skinny tires, dropped bars, and three-speed internal hubs. Mine wasn’t even a motorcycle-wannabe cruiser—just a clunker. I last rode it between my freshman and sophomore years in college, home for the summer with no job.
I was 32 the summer of the Bicentennial, living in Newport, Rhode Island, when I decided to try riding one of a pair of Sears folding 3-speed bikes to work, so the family could have the car during the day. The bikes were a legacy from my then in-laws, impractical monsters with heavy frames and 20-inch wheels that actually came apart rather than folded, held together by tab-and-slot and two large wing nuts on steel plates that joined the halves of the triple down-tube. Taken apart, the bikes would fit in the trunk of a very large sedan, but barely. The weight of the bike and years of pastries, cigarettes, and a sedentary desk job took their toll. My legs were so rubbery after the first 4-mile ride, I fell down when I dismounted at the bike rack at work. But, I persevered, continuing to ride except in the worst winter weather, and soon developed endurance of a sort.
I knew nothing about bike maintenance, having ridden the clunker of my youth so little it rarely needed servicing. When the tires wore bald on my commuter, I simply switched bikes, as we had two of them. After a couple of years of steady bike commuting, I decided I needed a better bike rather than repair the folders. I trotted off to the toy store (also knowing nothing about performance bicycles) and bought the biggest 10-speed they had, a powder blue C. Itoh, about three sizes too small. But, it was relatively light and vaguely resembled the European racers. I put several thousand miles on that bike, to the point where I would have had to consider a major overhaul, when it was stolen, the cheap combination lock-chain filed through while I was hoisting a few at the pub after work in the spring of ’79.
By this time, recreational bicycling and even racing were enjoying a resurgence in America, so I was aware that there were serious bicycles available. I also realized that, as an all-weather bicycle commuter, I was at least a semi-serious bicyclist. This time, I discovered actual bicycle stores, with light, strong frames sized to fit adult riders and “name brand” drive train components. I bought a new red Fuji Gran Tourer, with a six-gear freewheel for (theoretically) 12 “speeds” (actually, gear ratios).
The Fuji proved to be a wise purchase. A few months after I acquired it, my family packed up and moved to New Mexico. The bicycle became my only vehicle for the next year. Most of my riding was from wherever I was living to work, but I had ridden one of the old three-speed folders to the auto wrecking yard at the north end of the island for car parts once. With the superior fit of the Fuji, I began to ride farther, touring the city on weekends and making at least one 45-mile round trip to Massachusetts. I became interested in performance, charting the gear ratios and practicing step changes while keeping a steady cadence.
In the summer of 1980, my bicycle and I boarded a plane and headed for Bremerton, Washington for a new work assignment at the submarine base on the Hood Canal. With my commute extended from 4 to 15 miles, I outfitted myself with black wool cycling shorts (with the real chamois pad—no spandex in 1980), cycling shoes and toe clips, a helmet, fingerless cycling gloves, and, of course, for the Pacific Northwest, a cyclist’s rain poncho and ski underwear for chilly mornings. With no car, a new territory to explore, and some decent riding gear, weekend excursions extended to 80-mile round trips. The family joined me in the fall, but, with only one car, I continued to ride year around, even when my commute extended to 17 miles one way, from Bremerton to Poulsbo. With mileage increased to 3500 miles per year, I soon learned about bicycle maintenance. All-weather biking and long miles took its toll on the drive train, brakes, tires, and cables. I went through several sets of tires, tubes, and chains a year, and had to replace the rear freewheel gear cluster about once a year and the front chain rings every couple of years. Pedals wore out or got trashed in potholes. A rear axle broke once, three miles from home. I started carrying spare tubes after discovering repair patches don’t stick to tubes in the rain: it took three hours to get to work one rainy morning after puncturing on road construction debris, normally a one-hour ride. And, I got tire liners to keep glass cuts from slitting the tubes.
I didn’t ride much for recreation those years, though I did take the Boy Scout troop on Cycling merit badge rides and even made a couple of courier trips to Seattle to pick up package shipments. I also took bicycle commuting to the limits, packing the bike on the plane for a business trip to Minneapolis. I took a day off after the business meetings to ride to my parents’ house, 30 miles north of the airport. Returning to Seattle a day ahead of my colleagues, I rode home to Indianola, on the Kitsap Peninsula, via the Bainbridge Ferry, discarding the bike box at baggage claim. The only thing I didn’t plan for, arriving late at night, was extra batteries for my lighting system, which left me pedaling the 15 miles from the Bainbridge Ferry by starlight and the taillights of rare passing cars.
In the early spring of 1983, I had been the one to leave home as my first marriage finally unraveled.. This time, after bicycling everywhere became impractical, I bought a junker car that cost about the same as I had paid for the Fuji. No longer commuting to work, but with free time, I started training after work for long-distance rides, participating in the Chilly Hilly ride on Bainbridge Island in February and making increasingly longer rides, with my first “century” ride of 100 miles on Mother’s Day, 1983. I upgraded to aluminum wheels, replacing the stock steel wheels. On the summer solstice weekend, I joined a thousand other one-day riders for the 4th running of the 200-mile Seattle-to-Portland Classic,, which I completed in just under 14 hours, placing 750th. I was 39 years old. I had started riding at the same age that Lance Armstrong would be when he won his sixth Tour de France amid rumors of impending retirement, and I had graduated from city bike commuter to endurance cyclist.
That summer, after the double-century ride, I became a true bicycle tourist for the first time. I made several long-weekend camping tours, traveling as far as Victoria, British Columbia. A knee strain put me off the bike for a few months by late summer. Even so, I logged 5,000 miles that year. In the previous seven years, I had ridden far enough to circumnavigate the earth, and had the chiseled thighs and calves of a professional bike racer, if not the speed. In my one and only (unsanctioned) race, I came in next to last, between a guy older than me who recently had a knee replacement and a 5-foot tall woman on a bike heavier than mine.
In late spring of 1984, I was transferred back to Rhode Island, arriving as I had left, by plane with my bike in a box. I strapped it on the rental car, drove to Newport, dropped off the car, and settled in my new home, ten miles from work, a beach cottage at the extreme north end of the island. I rode the whole summer, renting a car about one weekend a month, as I had children visiting for the summer. When school started, I had one child at home yet. I bought another $300 clunker car, and dropped my son off at school on the way to work, putting the bike aside. When I transferred back to the West Coast in early 1985, I junked the Rhode Island car, getting my other junker out of mothballs back in Washington.
Judy and I married soon after I returned to Washington, becoming a two-car family, and I gave up bicycle commuting for ten years. She was interested in keeping recreational bicycling as part of our life together, rather than me spending all my energy commuting. But, like most adults then, she hadn’t ridden since childhood, and I was used to riding 100 miles before lunch. To even the field, so to speak, we ordered a Santana Arriva XC mountain-style tandem for our first anniversary in 1986. We took delivery of the “Leviathan”–as a co-worker christened our big black bicycle, with its oversized frame and fat tires—on Capitol Hill in Seattle, taking our first ride at a terrifying 25 miles per hour through downtown Seattle traffic to catch the ferry, stopping once to fix a loose handlebar. Amazingly, we are still married, 25 years later.
Deception Pass, MS Tour 2006
And, through those 25 years, the Santana tandem has served us well, through more than 10,000 miles, most in the first five and last five years. We rode the Seattle-to-Portland (the two-day version) in 1987. Over the years, we’ve toured the Flathead Valley in Montana, the San Juan Islands, Victoria, Hood Canal, Skagit Valley, Sumas Valley, and Bitterroot Valley. In 1988, we rode across Glacier National Park and through the Canadian Rockies from Radium Hot Springs, BC to Jasper, Alberta. The first years, we rode many of the big 50-60-mile spring classic rides in the Puget Sound area and joined group rides as well as making our own weekend tours. After a ten-year lapse, with few outings, we hit the road again in earnest after moving to the Bitterroot Valley. From 2005-2007, we rode the 100-mile weekend MS Tour in the Skagit Valley and Fidalgo Island, and the 2007 100km Ride the Rogue tour in Oregon.
Beginning in 2004, we rode my “birthday miles” on the tandem at the beginning of fall, as a training goal to break out of the short daily commute rut. But, in the last three years, I’ve been on my own, and now back in the Pacific northwest, I need a better bike. I keep the Fuji in Montana to ride to work when I am in residence, but 12 speeds just never were enough for modern riding styles and hilly terrain, even 30 years ago. The Hard Rock, which I acquired for commuting through the Duwamish industrial district in Seattle in the mid-90s and then rode through ten Montana winters, is, well, a low-end no-suspension mountain bike, not well-suited to the kind of road riding I do solo now. The three bikes have absorbed the bulk of the lifetime riding miles, now approaching 50,000, and are, while well-maintained and serviceable, no match for the currently available technologies. Also, both the Fuji and the Santana are designed around Suntour drive-train components, which have not been manufactured for 20 years and are getting scarce, not something one wants to risk failing on tour, with little recourse for repair.
Finally, in 2011, we traded in our 17-year-old Jeep bike-hauler, replacing it with a modern one that our venerable Yakima tandem rack won’t fit on. Bike-friendly buses and trains in the Pacific Northwest are great range extenders, if we could take advantage of public transit, and the Santana is just too big. We’d like to be more flexible in our options and be able to travel with our bike instead of transporting it. So, we’ve ordered a modern, light-weight take-apart convertible tandem/single system from the Green Gear folks in Eugene, Oregon. We expect to take delivery of our new Bike Friday Tandem Traveler Q model by mid-May, in time for our early summer Montana tour, and have it well-broken in for an Adventure Cycling early fall tour in Upper Michigan. What started as an expedient way to maximize utility in a one-car family 35 years ago has become a major life-style activity as we ease into our “golden years” and take more time for travel and to focus on keeping fit and healthy enough to enjoy watching grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow—and, maybe, to ride with them.
Emerson's first bike ride
Meanwhile, the season-opener weekend ride continues: in the morning, I help install a bike seat for two-year-old Emerson on his dad’s bike, and the four of us ride around the neighborhood before parting, me headed south toward Tumwater, and they north toward the bike trail. Of course, it rains, a downpour just ending as I start from Tumwater toward Shelton, prompting me to unpack the rain gear, then repack it a few miles down the road, but keeping it ready at hand as black clouds loom over my destination. The last mile, like the first, is in rain. I have a bit of post-ride stiffness, but not bad for a 20+ mile ride early in the season, and back-to-back riding days with no residual soreness. Bicycling is truly for all ages—the weekend is proof that, at 67, I’m in much better physical condition that I was when I started at 32, justification enough to invest in a new bike and keep riding.
The “10,000-hour rule” was coined by psychologist Anders Ericsson in reference to violinists, but popularized by author Malcom Gladwell to be more inclusive. The rule states, essentially, that mastery of a given field requires about 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. For musicians, this is certainly true, given the time it takes to understand the nuances of one’s finely tuned instrument, plus commit difficult passages to muscle memory and to correctly interpret the composer’s auditory vision of the score.
But, what of other professions and activities? What constitutes dedicated practice in other fields? The 10,000-hour goal in the world of work is about five years of 8-hour workdays. In most professions, five years is the entry-level experience for a “senior-level” position, what I would call “journeyman-level” in a skilled trade: someone who can handle routine tasks without supervision or guidance. The next level of performance is measured at the eight or ten-year experience level, given that probably a third to half of the average work-day is given over to socialization and the business of doing business, during which we are not practicing the skills of our trade.
For the profession of system administration and similar technology pursuits, the 10,000-hour rule is even harder to judge, since mastery of the art is a moving target. I personally have almost 30,000 hours of paid work as a systems administrator, of which we can apply about half, or 15,000 hours, to “practice,” plus a few thousand hours of actual practice and study specific to the skill, prior to and outside of “on-the-job” time. Any muscle memory part of the skill set is in keyboarding, which carries through, and the Unix philosophy set down by Thompson and Ritchie in the early 1970s remains to be thoroughly understood and practiced. The analogy to music further maps the idea of mastering a composer’s body of work to mastering the various “flavors” of Unix: Solaris, BSD, SVR4, AIX, HP-UX, and, of course, the varied Linux distros.
This analogy breaks down when we consider that the body of work refuses to stay static: Unix is a constant sequence of variations in the form of upgrades, after which the original is never performed again. Software and hardware are intertwined, where older editions of systems software can only be performed on obsolete and non-repairable hardware (though emulation can eliminate that obstacle), as if a particular work of music could only be performed on a single, fragile instrument. So, mastery of systems administration is a dynamic process: virtuosity requires constantly learning new works (software) played on new instruments (hardware systems). I don’t think 15,000 hours constitutes mastery of the art, divided as it is between several major versions, and with time split between straight system administration and programming, in an ever-changing environment.
Yet, mastery requires practice, meaning exercises in the fundamentals: in music, scales and fingering exercises; in systems administration, scripting, building kernels and applications from source, and testing. These activities are the muscle memory of system administration, the automatic responses that facilitate solving difficult problems that require planning and reading the manual–the ability to apply resolution promptly and with skill.
Which comes to the other side of expertise: in order to master a given skill requires physical stamina and flexibility, as well as a clear mind. For the past 33 years or so, my outlet to balance the rather sedentary computing life has been bicycling. Now, masters of the art like professional bike racers and world-class bike tourists accumulate 10,000 hours of practice within five to ten years. As a bike commuter and accidental bike tourist, a mere 50,000 miles–my estimated lifetime accumulation at present–at perhaps an average speed of 14 miles per hour, constitutes only about 3500 hours of practice, far short of mastery of the skill. Worse yet, the past year has seen the end of bike commuting, since I now run my professional practice from home. Now, I should be able to take my former commute time and recreational biking time and use it for practice, but the incentive just isn’t there. Until one realizes that, like system administration or music, regular practice is essential not only to achieving mastery, but to maintaining a reasonable level of competence.
A bit over six years ago, I was inspired by a true master of the sport, Shirley Braxton, who, with her late husband Sam, had owned a bike shop in Missoula, Montana, and, in the 1970s, did much to start the bicycle touring industry by building bikes designed for loaded touring. Shirley, then in her late 70s, made a practice of capping the bicycling season with a “birthday ride,” of length in miles equal to her age in years. For a few years, this was motivation enough to get out and train through the summer, building up to an early fall 60-odd-mile ride, even to the point of participating, as a training ride, in three MS Tours, a fund-raising ride to benefit Multiple Sclerosis–originally a 150-mile ride in two 75-mile stages, but, because of popular support from relatively new cyclists, has for a number of years offered 50-mile stages, which course we prudently chose. As with any pursuit of mastery of a skill, the tools and instruments are also important to achieving the goal. In our case [meaning, of course, the Nice Person and the Unix Curmudgeon], we ride a mountain-style tandem, which, like it’s single-seat relative, has a heavy frame and oversized tires, intended for trail riding rather than racing or touring, though we have toured with the tandem (see the other blog articles in our bicycling category). In any case, swift passage and high mileage are not the strong suits of such machines, though they generally come with very low gearing that compensates on hills. Or so we tell ourselves.
So, with advancing age, both myself and my ride–a 1996 Specialized Hard Rock, entry-level commuter/mountain bike, with fat tires, steel frame, and no suspension–together we’ve tackled the “birthday ride” solo for the past three years, the Nice Person having come to her senses about the effects of inadequate training, leaving the Unix Curmudgeon to huff and puff his way alone through what became the longest rides of the seasons by double. Without benefit of daily sprints across town to work, and with the last ride a month ago, setting out into the foothills of the Olympic Peninsula on a nearly 70-mile course was less a demonstration of ability and skill than a simple grueling test of endurance. But, some of the lessons of nearly 35 years of all-weather commuting and touring held forth: keep hydrated, keep fueled, put on rain gear when it starts raining, stow it when it stops to avoid overheating, don’t push too hard early on, and get off the bike for at least a few minutes every hour to eat, drink, and rest the legs a bit. Oh, yes, the thought of aborting the mission did occur, once or twice, but we can report mission accomplished: 69 miles in 7 hours 52 minutes, an average speed of 8 and 3/4 miles per hour, including pit stops. That’s just about the daily limit for a mountain bike, and one of the reasons we declined the 75-mile route on the MS Tours–there was an 8-hour time limit on that course, and it is important to finish. Reasonable goal-setting is also a part of developing mastery of a skill.
Next year, the goal is to ride often and ride long, work on a more balanced fitness regimen, lose a bit of weight, and get a lighter, faster bike. The rest of this year, the goal is to work more with server virtualization, hierarchical storage management, and keep up with the latest systems releases, on the work side. Practice, practice, practice. No matter how old you get, there is still more to learn, and roads to explore, perhaps at a more leisurely pace.
Today was the first nice day in a long time. It didn’t rain during the day, and the sun came out off and on, and the temperature hit 70F, after a couple weeks in the 50s. I didn’t mind the cold and rain so much while working on migrating a web applications server from Solaris 10 to Linux (CentOS5.5) late last week through yesterday. After replacing the SPARC binaries with Intel binaries for Linux, updating Ruby from 1.8.5 to 1.8.6 so I could load rubygems and the database gems, and adding the Perl modules needed for the spreadsheet generators, I tweaked the scripts and Apache configuration for the new disk layout and lit off the new system. It works! So, I decided to take advantage of the nice day and take an afternoon bike ride.
Working from home on hourly contract does have its advantages, one of which is being able to mow the lawn or go for a bike ride in the middle of the day. I’ve been having bike withdrawal lately. It’s June, after all: prime bike season in the Pacific Northwest, but colder and rainier than usual. Going to the gym and pounding on the stationary bike just doesn’t seem right in June, so the weight goes up and the leg muscles go slack. Time to ride.
Lately, I’ve been riding one-way, with the destination being somewhere my tandem stoker has gone with the car for some other activity, but the out-and-back in Montana a couple weeks ago whet my appetite for a round trip. Besides, the car went off too far today: she’s off to the islands for an overnight, so I’m on my own. There’s not a lot of short loops in our hilly town on the bay. I’ve been meaning to check out a relatively flat route between the Sound and the Hood Canal, so plotted a course for Mason Lake, a large fresh-water lake northeast of town, 17.2 miles one way to the county park at the east end of the lake.
I’m on my old commuter bike, “Rocky,” a bare-bones Specialized Hard Rock I picked up in ’97 to commute to my job in the Seattle industrial district and rode for ten years in Montana. It isn’t fast, but it handles hills and rough roads fairly well. A fast downhill into town, then a long climb traversing the north hill, and soon out in the country, on two-lane roads with fairly heavy traffic and no shoulder. I hug the fog line and roll with the hills. Past the congested Lake Limerick area, the traffic thins out and the road travels through the farmlands of Mason County, where the crop is Douglas Fir, and the growing season is 70 years. Between the mature stands and the clearcuts are the 25-year-old, recently cultivated fields of thickly-set poles.
It’s good to be back in the Pacific Northwest, where I put the bulk of my bike mileage behind me in the 1980s and 1990s. The summers are mild, if you don’t mind a little rain; the rich smell of the deep forest greets you in the shady stands, and sometimes the clearcuts offer views of distant mountain ranges. I haven’t ridden enough this spring, and the legs and seat start complaining about the 15-mile mark.
But, it is always so. Today’s ride, almost 35 miles, is the longest of this season, but I’ve found if you can ride 35 miles, the pain settles into a constant and your body adjusts to the energy output, provided you eat and drink moderately and often to match. I think about another day near the summer solstice, 27 years ago, when “Big Red,” my 1979 Fuji Grand Tourer, and I hung together as a transportation machine for nearly 15 hours, riding from the Seattle City Hall to the Portland City Hall, a bit over 200 miles on the back roads of Washington and east on US30 through Oregon from Rainier to Portland. Back then, I was a year older than Lance Armstrong is this year, but never a racer. I started commuting by bike half a lifetime ago, at age 33, and became an accidental bike tourist while training for the Seattle-to-Portland ride. After 33 years, bicycling has become part of who I am, and riding to the horizon and beyond is like walking out to the mailbox. You just have to keep doing it in order to be able to keep doing it.
Just about 90 minutes after leaving home, I arrive at the county park at the east end, after riding what seems endless road through the forest after coming to the west end of the lake. It is warm and sunny, and I take a few minutes to eat and drink, watching a couple of guys wrestle a power boat up the boat ramp. I’ve made it this far, now all I have to do is reverse course and ride home.
The fun part of out-and-back rides is you get to spend time admiring the scenery you missed on fast downhills and skip the scenery you spent too much time passing uphill on the way out. Somehow, the first half seems shorter, but then stretches out. In my one-way rides, I’ve taken the north route out of town several times, but this is the first time I’ve returned this way. On the dive down into town, I’m on par with the cars, and even have to slow down as I spot a police car ahead. The road is rough and grooved from the wet spring, so a fast downhill is a bit dicey; I catch the right turn on the yellow at the bottom of the hill.
Unfortunately, we picked a decidedly bike-unfriendly town in which to spend our golden years. Angry shouts from a couple of cars back greet me as I wait in the through-lane at the cross-town traffic light, “Get off the road!” It takes him almost two blocks to pass me. In Missoula, Montana, I used to be able to cross the city from east to west faster than the car traffic, by using bike paths and secondary streets. Still, automobile drivers are too often unwilling to share the road.
Across the Simpson mill railroad tracks, I shift all the way down and hit the hill head-on, but quickly grind to a halt on the double-digit grade. I alternately push and ride up the steeper fork of the Y, as the shorter route has no shoulder, fast, aggressive traffic, and blind curves, no place for a bicyclist to assert road rights. At the top, it’s a shallow downhill back three blocks to home and a quick left turn in front of the blind curve and the stop sign that no one actually stops at: most just slow down for a quick glance left, ignoring the driveways on the right.
One of these days, I may make it to our hilltop home on my wheels, but not today. But, at 66, with over 45,000 miles of road behind me since, I’m still stronger than I was that summer day in 1976 when I saddled up for that first 4-mile commute to work, after which I fell down when I got off the bike because my legs were run out. But, I got back on, and rode farther, until that day seven years later when 200 miles passed under the wheels before I was done for the day. Biking keeps you young. Today was a training ride, so this fall, I can hope to ride my birthday miles, as I have for the past five years–a one-day ride as many miles as you are years old. I haven’t ridden a full century ride since 1987 (We switched to fat tires in 1986, so a 60-mile day loaded for touring is like 100 on a racer, and we’ve done lots of 100KM days), but I’m working toward my next one, in 34 years. Maybe on a lighter, faster bike.
After three days of bicycling, covering a bit over 55 miles of trails and downtown Victoria streets, the fourth day dawns in gray, pouring rain. Forewarned by the weather reports, we had already planned a day out in the car, starting with breakfast.
Our goal today is a tour of Sidney, the main gateway to Vancouver Island, served by airlines and ferries. First, we open our tourist guide and pick a restaurant for breakfast closer to home that advertises crepes, in the nearby Oak Bay district. However, when we arrive at the address, the building is now a sushi bar, open only for dinner. Such is the force of growth and recession in an area of changing demographics and reliance on seasonal tourism. We continue on in driving rain, up route 17 to downtown Sidney, looking for Jazzaniah, a breakfast/lunch place that got mostly good reviews on the ‘Net. The GPS leads us to a parking lot, and we find the cafe nestled in the middle of a professional center, flanked by durable medical equipment stores, medical providers, and florists. Breakfast is standard fare, but prepared well.
From Jazzaniah, we walk several blocks down Beacon to 3rd, seeking out Fabric Traders, a quilt shop we had spotted while hunting for the restaurant. Andrea, the owner, runs a quilting service on-site and holds quilting classes. The store’s name comes from a unique concept we really liked: all of the fabric in the store is on exchange, like a used bookshop. Customers bring in unwanted fabric for credit, which they spend toward someone else’s fabric. Fabric that stays on the shelf too long or is in too small cuts ends up in chenille doormats, made with layers of print fabric sandwiched with muslin.
Sidney, as the ferry route hub of Vancouver Island, has seemingly curb-to-curb bookshops, which we struggle to ignore, but we do pick up some ferry-boat reading for our trip home at a charity thrift store. We then stop at Tulista Park, just south of the international ferry terminal, where there is an art show. To our delight, many of the pieces are fiber art–weaving and felting, and, as a bonus, we get to meet the artists. We also look up the two yarn shops in Sidney.
We’ve done enough toodling about in the car this week to warrant a fuel stop. A $20 bill nets us a bit over 18 liters, which translates to $4 US a gallon, compared with an average of a bit over $3 across the Strait in Washington State, and $2.839 at our last fuel stop at the Skokomish Nation on the way to Port Angeles. Bike travel, rain or not, is beginning to look better and better. No wonder we see so many Smart cars in Victoria, with their 40+mpg rating (though with premium 91 octane fuel). Incidentally, the wheelbase on a Smart car is only 6 inches more than the wheelbase on our Santana tandem.
By now, the rain has subsided some, and we take a more rural route back to Victoria, avoiding the busy 4-lane Route 17, taking time to explore the Oak Bay “downtown” a bit more, discussing precious metal clay work with the owners of a bead, jewelery, and antique store across from where the crepes restaurant used to be. Tomorrow, we load up and head for home, despite the continued civil disorder we hear of in news reports from south of the border, as we have business to tend to and the rain has settled in for the weekend.
