Out on the line
Today, I decided it would be interesting to hop on the bicycle and see just how far east I could go before I had to turn around and race the setting sun back home. The Women’s Forum seemed like it would be a good goal if I couldn’t get out of the house early enough to reach Larch Mountain, and I was delayed long enough by doing essential yardwork so there was no way I could have reached Larch Mountain and gotten back during (even nominal) daylight.
The Women’s Forum actually ended up being a little too far; I was figuring on two hours out, two hours back, and the Women’s Forum ended up being 2h10 out (and approximately 3h30 back, thanks to an unfortunately located tire-eater on Marine Drive, a not-quite-good-enough tire repair, and about a dozen stops to pump additional air into the slowly-deflating rear tire.) Bontrager “RaceLite”s claim to be pretty durable, but in the 2000km since I replaced the so-ancient-the-sidewalls-were-wearing-off old tires, I’ve had each of these new tires eat something that went right through the allegedly puncture resistant tires and into the soft skin of the tubes. Admittedly, the market choices for 700C×25 (or thereabouts; I could probably wedge up to 33mm tires into the existing front fork) touring tires is kind of weak, but these tires are just not doing it. Sigh. Time to round up some more computer components and sell ‘em on ebay – if I can get US$86 out of them, that will be enough to at the least go out and order a pair of Ruffy Tuffys from Rivendell.
I’d forgotten that the Crown Point Highway started climbing basically as soon as if passed the Stark Street bridge – I spent about a kilometer mashing along and wondering why this bit of level windless road was acting so slow before I looked to my right and realized that I was already a looong way up from the Sandy River. At least it made coming back down a bit more interesting (though it would have been even more interesting, and not in a pleasant way, if there had been a lot of traffic on the road – the verges of the Crown Point Highway are fairly minimal, and the crosswinds were fairly enthusiastic) even though I don’t think I managed to break any speed limits on the way down.