2K on the Surly

This past October, a month after my second son was born, I bought a new bike. The Bianchi was a great start, but I wanted more and finally settled on a touring bike. I didn't know much about the mechanics of bikes at the time, so I decided to buy a complete bike. I thought about the Trek 520 and a couple others, but I finally decided on the Surly Long Haul Trucker because my bike shop actually had one in stock to try. Most touring bikes you need to special order, and then if you don't like it, things could get awkward.

I love the Surly. It has 26-inch wheels, so when you load it up with panniers or a kid in a seat or a trailer or what-have-you, it feels even better. Under the tutelage of my coworker Darrow Montgomery, I've moved away from what I guess you could call an REI aesthetic (hideous rain jacket in this photo aside) to one more informed by people like Chris Kulczycki at Velo Orange, who sells bike parts that invoke a golden age of touring cycles. That may or may not be real; I'm always suspicious of nostalgia but the important thing is that he sells really nice stuff.

One frustration with the Long Haul Trucker is its extreme geometry. I bought some fenders a few months ago from Wallingford Bicycle Parts, and they're just beautiful, a key component of my transformation to gentleman cyclist. And I cannot get the goddamn things on to save my life. I've spent God knows what on brackets, etc., and countless hours trying to get them right. I know a lot more about how bikes work and can perform basic maintenance but these freakin' fenders were way beyond my weight class. I should have just bought the plastic ones from Rivendell, but now pride is involved and I am going to pay someone to install them.

Last weekend I changed the handlebar tape to cork, which I whipped with hemp twine at the ends and then shellacked. It came out pretty nice.

And yesterday I rode my 2000th mile on the Surly. You can see here the beautiful spot where this occurred.

I ride pretty much every day, no matter the weather, though I make exceptions for snow and ice, which I'm not comfortable with yet, and high winds, which are depressing. Since I started riding a year and a half ago, I've lost weight, developed legs like bridge cables, and started eating better. It's the best thing that's happened to me since I met Ewa and the births of our two kids.

In the next year I hope to start doing some long-distance touring. My buddy Mark Nelson and I have talked about riding to Richmond next time he's back East, and I'd really like to ride from one end of Britain to the other. Time, time, time. Maybe someday. But the corollary of time is distance, and at least I can achieve that, albeit in 20-mile bursts.

The Long View

I hate working late. Unfortunately, I've chosen a career that often requires me to be at work at unreasonable hours. Fortunately, I ride my bike to work. And some nights I remember to stop after I cross Memorial Bridge and take in the view. It's really quite remarkable to see this vista every day. I hope I never stop appreciating it.

(I mostly blog at work these days. Here's where to find me.)

Red Dirt

I went to Texas and wrote about a music festival. You can read about it here.

Sony TCM-359V, 1995-2007

DIED, this morning at 11:17 a.m. of unknown causes, my trusty, longtime companion, the Sony TCM-359V, or "my tape recorder," as it was affectionately known. It was used to record and transcribe hundreds of interviews in the years since it first went into service, as a gift from my parents upon entering the field of journalism.

On the recorder's back is an all-access pass from a dEUS/Mano Negra concert in Nice. Despite the TCM-359V's owner's policy against keeping work souvenirs of any kind, this sticker, with the words "Tous Acces," seemed like something worth keeping at the time.

It will be replaced not by a digital recorder but with another Sony cassette recorder, the TCM-200DV, whose microphone I can only hope is as uncannily adept at zeroing in on soft-spoken subjects in noisy rooms.

It leaves behind a looming deadline, an eight-pack of Energizer AA batteries (with free Shrek the Third Ogre-Vision Viewer) purchased in the vain hope that it was my batteries that had collapsed, and a man more bummed out by the loss of an inanimate object than seems appropriate.

Two thousandth mile

I have a bike that retails for $300. I bought it almost exactly a year ago. This spring I committed to riding in to work, 10 miles each way, as long as it was arguable that I might get in. Fortunately I live in an area that has pretty good weather, despite the odd freak summer thunderstorm with raindrops the size of babies' heads.

My route is mostly on bike paths. I take the Mt. Vernon trail, which I pick up a little more than a mile from my house, then cross Memorial Bridge, then take the Rock Creek Park trail up to Woodley Park, and then it's a quick jog to my office in Adams Morgan. It's one of the best parts of my day.

The trails are crowded when the weather's good, so I almost prefer when it's really hot, or lightly raining, or a little cold. Mostly I think cyclists and runners get along fine on the trail, though I must confess I get a little frustrated with the walkers, simply because so often they're not paying attention. You know where's an excellent place to amble slowly with your shirt off, your sunglasses on the top of your head, and a cell phone glued to your ear? The side-WALK.

For the past couple of months, the National Park Service has done everything in its power to ruin my commute, changing the course of the trail on a weekly basis to make it easier for its workers not to do any construction. There's an official detour through Georgetown, but that keeps changing, too, and I've found it's better to take as little of the detour (which calls for riding the wrong way up 31st Street, a one-way street, which is generally not a problem for the Venezuelan diplomats whose embassy is around the corner, though, in my experience, they're usually driving in reverse) as possible.

My bike wasn't made for this kind of use. It's a town bike, meant for getting around campus, say, or running quick errands. With the rack that holds my son's bike seat, my two water bottles, my "rack trunk"---holds my clothes---and my lock, it's laughably heavy in serious-cycling terms. Still, I'm gonna ride this thing till it falls apart.

Today I rode my two thousandth mile. I stopped and took a photo with my camera. I tried to get the Washington Monument in the background, but it was too bright to see the screen very well. I think it came out pretty well.

Blowing the dust off

Not dead, not too busy, but doing most of my blogging these days at work. Check there first.

The snooze world

Wow, I'm incredibly shocked that tickets for the Jamestown 400th-anniversary celebrations aren't selling. It's almost as if pinning the economic hopes of a region on a historical commemoration--glassblowing! talks! geneological research!--was a completely freaking stupid idea.

Here's the best part:

So far, about 37,000 of the available 90,000 single-day tickets have been purchased, the vast majority of them by Virginians, said Kevin Crossett, a spokesman for Jamestown 2007, the state organization coordinating the event.

When I lived in Richmond, the Jamestown anniversary was touted as impetus for all sorts of Springfield monorail-type projects. The one I got involved in was a proposed performing arts center that, despite the handicap of its organizers constantly lying about how much money they'd raised to built it, planned to use this anniversary as a sort of rebirth party for Richmond, with a gleaming arts center at the center of an event that would draw people from around the world. Seriously.

Well, that didn't really work out as planned, and I'm proud to have played a small part in that saga. I don't really have a lot of time to follow how things are going down there now, but I understand that the city's getting involved in reopening the Carpenter Center. I've got mixed feelings about that, not least because the phrase "Richmond government involvement" doesn't exactly engender feelings of confidence.

In a sick way, I think the smoking ruins of that plan are a good thing for the city--the hole in the middle of town (the Virginia Performing Arts Foundation's oh-so-poetic legacy) should remain there forever, a monument to the jackassery that created it as well as a reminder that history, while not an especially great draw, does have a few lessons to teach.

Image taken from Mountain City Elementary School, Mountain City, Tenn.