Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Dust. Big trucks. The best food-like product ever. And the bike swap. In reverse order.

Glen (nose and arm pictured, far right), Matt (not pictured), Justin, Pat, and I (not pictured) hung out at the Spokane Bike Swap last weekend. It's always rad hanging with these guys, but I'm thinking we need to figure out a different plan for the swap next year: one that only involves one day. 

This is it. My desert island food. Good god. Mother of pearl. Just f'ing buy some and eat it. Mrs. Renfro's Ghost Pepper Nacho Cheese Sauce. The review: it's hot fat. And it's sublime in its fatty sweety cheesy heat. 

Two halves of an Elephant. Glen is bullish on the Ritchey coupler system. He likes smart shit that performs well and is a good value. Hard to argue with that. I think I still prefer S&S for its compactness, though from anecdotal accounts, it sounds like airlines don't measure luggage anymore, they just charge you if you have it. In that case, the benefit of the 26 x 26 x 10 case of the S&S may not matter anymore.

This dude was rad. He's in a monster semi-truck and to keep the dust at bay, he made a point of slowing way, way down about 1/4 of a mile back from me. I'd say he passed me at about 10-15 mph. This was on my commute home from EWU yesterday. I've noticed that in these parts, most folks don't make this kind of effort to reduce the dust when they pass you. In Ferry County -- I've noticed that pretty much everyone makes an effort. That makes sense to me. In Ferry County I don't think bicyclists represent the urban/suburban/exurban encroachment on the rural lifestyle that we seem to represent around here. That's a theory I developed when I was an exurbanite in Duvall over a decade ago, where the drivers were homicidal in the way they shaved your arm hairs as they squeezed past you in their SUVs on two-lane roads at 65 MPH.

Dust.

Lake. Well... probably a pond, technically speaking.

2 comments:

amidnightrider said...

I'm finding more and more drivers giving plenty of room for bikes. We are no longer anomalies but part of traffic.

Stephen said...

I have discovered that the drivers around here have been pretty decent to me as well. There always seems to be those one or two a month who feel that I don't belong on the same street as they do, but when that happens, I remind myself that is only a single motorist out of the thousands that I interact with to and from work on my daily commute. Some places, I just wont ride anymore, not necessarily because of belligerent drivers, but merely the volume of traffic and the speed. Indian Trail comes readily to mind, I've given up riding the 1/4 mile of road and simply walk the bike on the sidewalk to the single track into my neighborhood; the pucker factor is just too much for me!