Tireless...

The new wheels before I gummed them all up.  It's amazing how carefully adding a half tube of rubber cement, just the way it's meant to be done; an interim step in the life of every tubular rim, can be so aesthetically alarming.

Of course, that's nothing compared to seating the glued up tire on the glued up rim:  a physical conundrum as opposed an intellectual issue.  It seems to me that anyone who rides enough to benefit from tubular wheels can't possibly have the upper body strength required to seat a new [freshly stretched] tire.  I had to enlist my sixteen year old son to help get it in place and we still struggled.  On the up side, I'm a lot less worried about rolling it in a race.

Vacation

Vacation.  It takes a good week to get everything in place to go away and then it takes another good week to recover and do all the things that got pre-empted by the preparations.  And then the kid's activities start...

I am very thankful to have gotten daily rides in throughout.  Much like my lawn, the unusual bits of life that flash by a speeding bicycle do not take a vacation.  Here are some from the last month:

• the well dressed young man keeping watch over a wallet placed in a Roxbury crosswalk on a bright Sunday morning.
• the extreme flatness of New Jersey's Pine Barrens
• the expression on a rotund Costco sample wrangler as I clicked past in full kit and an armful of bananas.
• paper flat snakes and chipmunks and nearly flat turtles in the roadway.
• the dump truck driver who slowed and waved me across Main Street in Acton after I had sat and watched an endless stream of traffic pass.
• the return of giant black beetles and wooly catapillars that have to cross the road.
• the fully loaded lumber truck that I drafted from Eastham to Wellfleet on Cape Cod.
• tiny frogs that would fit on your thumbnail.