A few changes have been made, so I’m looking for bugs..
I haven’t been on my mountain bike in a few days, my Truth is partially disassembled, my surly is in the same state, and my gunnar has a flat rear tire from the TdLA; I did repair my rear brake but I also need to pull the wheel and change the freewheel, so I’ll fix the flat then, actualy I’ll re-stans my wheel. So, I rode my cross bike which has also become my regular commuter bike.
This morning, I had a beautiful ride out through the back gate, past Bandelier, to the bottom of Ancho canyon, and back. There aren’t many roads in Los Alamos, but the few we have are exhilirating. It’s a great start to any day. The return trip was marred by an in attentive driver pulling out from the new(ish) Emergency Response Center at LANL. He had a merge lane, but he was immediately pulling into the through-lane, without checking for traffic (namely me). The intersection is on a downhill, so I was rolling pretty quickly, too fast to stop. Oncoming traffic prevented me from moving far enough left to avoid him when he completed his maneuver, luckily (for me) he finally looked to the left and saw me just outside his driver’s window. The look of surprise on his face was complete as he jerked his pick-em up truck back to the right. Hopefully, he’ll drive a little more carefully in the future because this road is really popular with local riders.
At the end of the ride, as I dropped into Los Alamos canyon to get home, I ran into a friend, and an other sser, Tarik. He was climbing out of the canyon to get to work, so I turned around to chase him down. It must;ve been comical to any onlookers (there weren’t any) because I didn;t think about downshifting before turning around onto a very steep climb in 48:12 gear. I had to turn back downhill, downshift and then turn back up to chase him down. It was all good though, and hopefully I scored some streamers for my gunnar. Tarik has a source for the best streamers, cloth streamers, not the cheap plasticky ones. I’m looking for some red/white/blue ones because the Firecracker 50 starts with the parade through Breckenridge and that would be a good place to display patriotic streamers. After bidding adieu, I dropped into the bottom of the canyon, and while going through the horsehoe shaped curve on the west end of the canyon, I heard a loud ‘Ping” and knew instantly that I had broke a spoke on my rear wheel. It was sdtill good enough to get home, and then to get me to work. Of course it was a driveside spoke. Lucky me, but not really unexpected. They are old wheels and have seen plenty of offroad abuse, giving me another project of rebuilding these wheels with new spokes and nipples. But for now, I just installed a new spoke.
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