Sure, I could ride directly to the big big store, but where’s the sport in that?
This is, more or less, my traditional route to the store. It’s almost a kilometer and a half, and it’s got approximately 2 meters of elevation gain. It’s short enough so I can hop on my bike, zip over, shop, and get back in half an hour if I stick to my shopping list.
But it’s really short, I’ve ridden it a bunch of times, and I need to cross Tacoma St (not as insanely trafficy now that it’s been reduced to a 2 lane street, but still quite busy) to get to it. So how do I avoid crossing Tacoma St on my way to the store?
If, instead, I turn right onto the Springwater trail, take it to the Steel Bridge, cross over and take I30 to the St. Johns bridge, then cross back over, proceed up to Marine Drive, ride east to Troutdale, then return on Halsey, the I84 bicycle path, the I205 bicycle path, the Springwater trail (again), and up 13th, I avoid having to cross Tacoma during a busy part of the day.
Sure, it did take 6 hours to ride that 100km (and the 25-40km winds out of the gorge for the 24 or so km from I5 out to Troutdale didn’t really help. There’s something about cold headwinds that redefines “exciting” in a particularly baleful manner,) but those are mere trivialities that aren’t even worth mentioning.
And, yes, of course I rode my xtracycled bike. I’m not sure if I’m ready to ride brevets, but the Trek certainly is. The panniers on the thing sit closely enough to the ground so they weren’t noticably blown sideways by the ridiculous winds out by Troutdale – I was the only object high enough in the air to act as a proper sail, and if I was in slightly better shape I could have kept the ridiculous thing moving faster than 15km/h on the long long long long long cold drag east from I5 (being blown west uphill along Halsey at ~45km/h was nice, but by that time my legs were unhappy enough with the whole idea that they just sort of noodled along for the trip back to the I205 path.) And being able to shovel a bike lock, my purse (with the Pentax and the 50mm Super-Tak,) spare clothes, and a fistful of cloth grocery bags on top of the packet of snacks and tools that I carry in case there’s a hardware or wetware crisis is pretty much an unqualified good thing (there is the issue of the 20pounds of extra weight, but if I can drop *my* weight to 165 pounds I’ll have made that up, won’t I?)
I need to work up some more hilly rides on this thing. I suppose I could go to the big big store via Skyline one of these days.