Last week, when I encountered the full bike racks at my part-time gig, I didn't have a camera. Well, today I brought my camera with me on my ride to work and...the racks were full again. Many of the same bikes I saw last week were there. But there were a couple of interesting ones that weren't there before, like this Pinarello cyclo-cross bike:
I certainly can do without that color: It just screams "1980's." (It just screams, period.) But it is otherwise a nice old-school European lugged steel bike.
Notice the low-rider pannier carrier on the front. I believe that for touring, the best thing besides a full touring or randonneur/audax bike might be a cyclo-cross bike. They usually have enough clearance for wider-than-normal road tires and fenders. Plus, they often have cantilever brakes, as this bike has.
That Pinarello is a far cry from my LeTour.
I was able to park it only by doing what I did last week: I emptied and folded my rear baskets in, which allowed me to fit the bike inside the inverted "U" shaped rack.
Campus security wants cyclists to park only in the designated bike areas. I asked someone why there aren't more racks. "Most days, it's not like this," he said. "The weather's nice today," he explained.
The good news, other than the fact that there are so many racks, is that they're close to the campus security station.
At the end of the day, I took a spin over to Fort Totten, which has become one of my favorite parks and bike-pedestrian trails in the city. As it was a warm, clear day, a lot of people were there. So it wasn't hard to find someone to take a photo of me.
So...a full day of teaching and about 30 miles of cycling, in total. When I got home, I indulged myself with a platter from the King of Felafel and Shawarma. Yum!
And now Charlie and Max are calling. At the end of a full day that included a full bike rack.
Pinarellos in the college bike rack. Definitely a different kind of place!
ReplyDeleteYes, Steve, it's a very different kind of place. I'd bet that some of the other bikes belong to people who, like me, have a bike or bikes that are nicer than the ones they're parking. And I did see a couple of decent mountain bikes (e.g., Jamis and Gary Fisher.).
ReplyDeleteBack in the day, we used to judge cafe's by the graffiti in their bathrooms. (That's the difference between the first and second incarnations of the legendary Greenwich Village cafe Le Figaro. Once they got rid of the graffiti, it was all downhill. But I digress.)Could it be that a collelge can be judged by the bikes--or lack thereof--parked on campus?
I was shocked to look at the post again today. I was tired--falling asleep, in fact--when I wrote it. That's my excuse for the missing words (e.g., a "been" after "has" and a joke that made sense to me last night, but not now!