Once more up to Sauvie Island
Kevin Brightbill and I rode his Cuthbert Binns populaire today, and for once it felt like winter is coming along; it was chilly the whole way, with a cold south wind holding us back on the return from the Sauvie Island Road outandback and the loop around the south of the island. It’s gotten cold and damp enough so that I’m now layering something under whichever cloud chamber jersey I’m wearing when I go out (today I was wearing the black one) just to reduce the amount of rapidly moving air that makes it through to my body.
Not very many pictures, but I did manage to retrieve the punctured inner tube that fell out of the saddlebag when I last ran up to Sauvie Island (it was sitting on the gravel road up by the nude beach turnaround; it must have slipped out when I hit one of the gravel drifts and started fishtailing. I didn’t fishtail at all today, because I was riding even slower than I was last time and picked a line on the wrong side of the road, but Kevin hit a drift at 16-17 mph and his Hetres cheerfully started skating sideways across the loose gravel. I suspect that the only tires that wouldn’t fishtail on this gravel would be 23mm or narrower, which might just sink down into the gravel as if it was lumpy sand.)
And there were large quantities of no-handed riding while I was on the island. Maybe 4 miles worth? My quadriceps can take maybe a mile’s worth of no-handed pedaling before they start to ache from the unfamiliar sitting position, so I was doing a lot of popping up from the drops for a while, then dropping right back down after it became painful.)
4h23 (which feels slow these days) to finish the loop, and my ytd totals are: 10886 miles, 10680 RUSA km.