Arizona bike ride

Video from our bike ride in Arizona, somewhat disconnected.

Around the Gila

Loaded Touring

"The pack mules of the two-wheel road, loaded touring bikes exhibit great stability and straight-line tracking, even with up to 40 or 50 pounds of [dog!] cargo. You can watch the scenery from aboard one of these without the constant fear of either meandering off the road or straying into traffic lanes. In addition, they are comfortable over rough roads. . . . This all adds up to a bike that's perfect, loaded or not, for those whose main interest is being there, rather than speeding on by." — Jim Langley, Complete Guide to Bicycle Maintenance and Repair

Renee's getting a new bike!

It looks like (Fay notwithstanding) Renee's new bike will be here on Wednesday.

Correction

At the end of the video it says loseyourcar.org, which is a domain we "own," but didn't work out the way we hoped. But we do love loseyourcar because, well, that's exactly what we think, but I don't know about the content of the site, because we decided to do bikearth instead.

Soldier meadows ride

This video is from my soldier meadows ride. It is an escape in a way, my spiritual if not quite exactly physical leave taking from the ranch to make this move to Miami from where we are now plotting another venture.

The route through Piute canyon is private, so the ride started the day before helping our neighbors with ranch chores (see the photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nevadadan/sets/72157602364947282/). Of course they would have let me go through anyway, especially if I had the sense to bring a bottle of whiskey as a gift.

The first part of the ride is along the main county road to Piute Meadows Ranch. I had my only flat tire about a mile from the ranch. I stopped to say hello and then started up the canyon--a green oasis under hanging red basalt formations and burnt brown mountains. The creek bottom eventually dried into a rock slide through which I pushed the Surly and Bob for a long while. Then I hit cows and dust, finally, a windmill with fresh water, and side detour as I explored options, not wanted to make the last climb I tried a side road, but no way, so more pushing, this time up a sheer ridge of white stone with a hanging spring, and then the top and bald round peaks of the Black Rock Range and a herd of mustangs running across the road in front of my strange apparatus.

Then a huge rutted downslope toward Soldier Meadows, riding now, but bouncing and bouncing and bouncing, stopping to refill the slow leak in my front tire I ended up strapping my tire pump to the outside of my pack. It came undone during the bouncing and I lost everything except the outer tube. I didn't even notice until after I'd climbed up the bluff above the road down the other side (where the video ends) and walked back down to my bike looking for a place to camp, and then no more air. That would have been a problem but I was close enough the ranch and guest house to get down on the about the minimum pressure by the bottom. Then of course no presta valves and I stopped and waited for rescue.

Morals of the story. Never attach pump to outside of pack. Always have a presta valve/schrader conversion piece (they could have given me plenty of air at the ranch). But I'm sure it was a first on a bike. Long and the short, it was a fantastic trip, but not for 700cc.