Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Memorial Day Weekend


Mellow weekend. For the second Sunday in a row some friends and I have done the High Drive Churchin Ride. It's about an hour of tooling around the trails. Roughly it translates to 20 minutes of riding, 20 minutes of pushing bikes up steep hills, and 20 minutes of resting/panting. Then we go to the Scoop for coffee.

Sunday night, we did a dinner ride. We stopped and ate outside at Bangkok Thia (formerly: Riverview). Then we tooled around the north side. Then back over the river, where we ended up at the Elk for beers.

Taylor here is training for the Twilight Race Series. He mumbled something about how his body is a temple and how a high performance machine required high performance fuel -- as he gobbled down the "moon unit" and swilled beer after beer.

Not really. Liza bought that and we all ate it. I just wanted the photo op. By the way. Put June 17th on your calendar. That's the Lincoln Park Criterium. That'll be a fun one to watch. Races start at 6 PM. The upper piece of Lincoln Park is a natural race course. Short and fast.


Here we are grouped at Ruby. On the way to pick up Mike and Beth. Top right is Mike and Diane. They both recently got new bikes. This was Mike's inagural ride on his new bike.


My buddy Alex posted a bunch of pics of his Memorial Day cargo bike ride in Seattle. Among other beauts, there was a Big Dummy, with the blender attachment in action. An older Rock and Roll similar to mine. It's pretty much built up how I want to build up mine: drop bars in the front, bar-ends, mountain stoker bars, etc. Mine is on loan at the moment, but we're repo'ing it this winter to build it up for next year. Liza and I will be going for some land-speed-records on that.

I love this trailer. I like that the wheels are sort of protected from the load and that you can load over the wheels on the flat platforms. Smart design. I have a friend that may be able to help me build something like this. I like the small steel square tubing too. I wonder how it connects to the rear wheel?

Of course there was a Kogswell P/R. Nicely appointed and hauling a trailer. A Bakfiest with a Stokemonkey and this cool-ass, S&S'd cargo bike. I wonder if this is one by David Wilson?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

That blender attachment on the xtracyle is awesome. I love the mechanical simplicity of it too. Very clever. How many rpms do you think it can do?

John Speare said...

doesn't say on the site: http://www.xtracycle.com/accessories.php?subnav=sub#blender

the xtracycle people have a lot of nifty accessories

Anonymous said...

The blender attachment runs off of a tiny little wheel that rubs on the sidewall of the rear bicycle tire. I'd guess that the wheel has an OD of about 3/4". The tire is 26". That gives a multplier of about 34x compared to your cadence. So if you are pedalling at 120rpm you have 4000rpm of blending power. Not bad!

John -- the S&S cargo bike is a David Wilson. Daniel, the owner, is a good friend of David's.

13-b122 said...

I didn't tell you the real secret to training is blending a moon unit and a beer together and filling up your water bottles with it.

Speaking of Linclon park, I'm going to try and donate 20 bucks to baddlands so they can use it for a couple extra primes in the race. I hope they go for it. It should make the race more exciting.

amidnightrider said...

I too am a big fan of dinner rides. However things can get testy in the evenings. On the March Full moon ride two of us had our bikes taken away from us. Like when your friends take your car keys away.

It just happened to be Absolute Vodka promotion night. Who knew?

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