Today I rode the longest distance I've done on the cruiser I borrowed from my parents' neighbor: 52 miles. Given that it's designed to make the rider feel as if he or she is sitting on a sofa chair while the boardwalk goes clack-clack-clack under the tires, I feel good about the ride.
The bike I rode is certainly nothing like these, which I saw parked in front of a convenience store near the Old City:
At least, I got to St. Augustine faster than Ponce de Leon did when he was looking for the Fountain of Youth.
And I will say that even though I wrecked the original rear wheel, the bike is sturdy if flexy.
If it had been about fifteen years ago, I would have tried to ride the bike across the moat just below the castle. After all, there's no water in the moat and no water=no alligators.
There is a dedicated bike lane for much of the length of A-1A. One way in which drivers--even the transplanted ones--here differ from the ones in New York is that they don't use the bike lanes to pass or double-park.
Plus, the beaches, inlets, dunes and ocean are beautiful. Here is a view from the bridge over the Matanzas Inlet:
Check out this formation on a nearby beach:
St. Augustine, in addition to the tourist traps one would expect, has some interesting establishments. At least, the spirit behind them is not what you'd find in New York:
A Giggling Gator? I'm having a hard time picturing it. However, I have to love a place with a sign that says "Open when we get here\ Closed when we leave."
All right. So I've slowed down, and I can't blame it all on riding a cruiser. I also won't make the excuse that I'm enjoying the sunshine, blue skies and surf, although I am indeed reveling in those things.
I won't even blame the not-much-longer-than-my-hand lizards that darted across my path in Painters Hill. I must say, though, that I found myself thinking of Geico commercials, even though I have absolutely no reason to buy auto insurance.
However, there is one thing I can blame for slowing me down momentarily.
This adorable (in his/her own way, anyway) creature wandered into my path after a few lizards played chicken with my wheels. What he/she expected to find in the path, I'll never know. That particular stretch of path is bounded by tall grass that ends on the banks of the Florida Intracoastal Waterway, which parallels the Atlantic beaches on the other side of the path and Route A-1A.
Perhaps my armored friend was confused or trying to evade a less likeable creature. Or, perhaps, he/she didn't find any edibles to his or her liking, and thought that a cyclist might be carrying some tasty carbohydrates. In fact, I wasn't, as I was trying to burn off the lunch I had with Mom and one of her friends, and build an appetite for dinner, which would consist of leftovers from Easter dinner. Fortunately, said dinner consisted of foods that taste better the second or third day.
Mr./Ms. Tortoise rowed along the path on front legs that were more like flippers, and back into the tall grass. Then the lizards darted out, and the ocean seemed to deepen in a shade of turquoise at the end of a surprisingly desert-like dune.
Another holiday with parents in Florida means...another ride on the borrowed cruiser.
A neighbor of my parents bought the bike years ago. Now, at age 85, arthritis and other health problems keep her from riding it. Now the bike's riders consist of me and a couple of her kids and grandkids. However, I think it hasn't been ridden since I rode it at Christmastime. That's the reason why she was surprised when I told her I'd done some repairs, including the installation of a new rear wheel.
Last time I was here, I rode a few miles on a flat because I was nowhere near an air pump. I'd been riding a stretch of A-1A along the ocean, past Gamble Rogers State Recreation Area and a bunch of foreclosed-upon or otherwise-abandoned houses. I once had a wheel from which spokes flew off at high speeds; I didn't have to ride at such high speed for them to fly off the wheel on that bike.
Plus, the old rear wheel had one of Shimano's old coaster brake/3-speed hubs. It's one of the worst Shimano parts I've ever used or worked on: the gears never adjusted quite right. If you've ever had an out-of-adjustment 3-speed (Sturmey-Archers made after about 1970 never stayed in adjustment), you know that's not just an inconvenience: You're pedalling hard or spinning fast, and all of a sudden, you find yourself in "neutral." You push a pedal forward and your face hurtles toward a very close encounter with your handlebars. Or, worse things can happen.
Plus, as a long-ago shop mechanic, I learned that hubs have to make up their minds as to whether they're going to be coaster brake or internally geared. From what I've seen, a hub can't do both well. Usually, it's the gears that suffer. At least, that was the case on the Shimano, Sturmey Archer and Sachs coaster brake/3speed hubs.
To my knowledge, Shimano doesn't make such a hub anymore--or, at least, not the model that was on that bike. SA stopped making them, but have started making them again since the takeover by SunRace and the move to Taiwan. Sachs, after taking over Huret, Maillard, Sedis and other French component manufacturers, was in turn swallowed up by SRAM. I don't think they're making internally geared hubs with coaster brakes.
Anyway, the bike now has a coaster brake rear hub, an Alex rim (not as good as Mavic or Velocity, but better than what was on there) and DT spokes. Plus, it has a Michelin mountain bike tire, albeit one of the cheaper ones.
So far, so good. But now I'm going to reveal that I've spent too much time around messngers, hipsters and wannabes.
Actually, I installed that pink chain as a bit of a joke. I don't know whether the nice (She really is!) old lady from whom I borrowed the bike, or her kids or grandkids, will notice. If they do, I hope they share my twisted sense of humor.
How many of you rode "leather hairnets"?
I never did, and never had any wish to do so. I never saw the point of them.
Now, how many of you rode this helmet?:
If you did, you remember that it was the original Bell "Tortoise Shell." Actually, I'm not sure that was the actual model name, but that's what everybody (at least, everybody I knew) called it.
When it was introduced in 1975, it was as much an advance over the leather hairnet as a Commodore computer was over an abacus or a slide rule. I finally started riding with a Bell about seven or eight years after it was first introduced. My mother gave it to me.
A few years later, I replaced it with another Bell. By then, the "Tortoiseshell" seemed like a dinosaur: My new Bell had more ventilation, was lighter in weight and offered even more protection than my old helmet.
And, most important ;-), it came in a dazzling array of colors: black, yellow, red, blue and white. The original Bell was the photograph negative of the Model T: You could have it in any color you wanted, as long as it was white.
Believe it or not, every once in a while I see someone riding an original Bell. They were indeed well-made. The thing is, I get sweaty. Plus, if I'm going to ride more than a couple of hours, the weight of the helmet matters.
Still, the original Bell helmet is one of bicycling's evolutionary "leaps," along with Mavic's hook-bead rims, the slant-parallelogram derailleur and sealed bearings.
I know a mouse and he hasn't got a house.
I don't know why I call him Gerald.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Would you believe the above stanza is from a song about bicycling? Well, it's sort of about bicycling, anyway.
You wouldn't need to believe it--you'd know it--if you were a Pink Floyd fan. What's more, you'd know that Syd Barrett was probably the only one who could've pulled it off. At least he could before the drugs destroyed him.
I heard "Bike" today for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long. It doesn't, like most of PF's music from their early (pre-Dark Side of The Moon) albums, doesn't get much airplay these days. One reason, of course, is that it doesn't have the polished, orchestrated sound of the songs on DSTM and later albums. Also, I think this song and others from The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn are even more surreal, but not dreamier, than other psychedelic music of the time. It's not the sort of thing people tune into "Golden Oldies" or "Classic Rock" stations to hear.
All right. You didn't come to this site to read half-baked commentary about music. The reason I'm mentioning Bike is that hearing it made me realize how few songs (popular ones, anyway) there are about bicycling. It seems that about the only one most people know is Queen's Bicycle Race.
I wonder why that is. After all, there's a pretty fair amount of visual and graphic art, as well as literature, about cycling. Or, at least, bicycles or bicycling are at least part of the material for those works. As I'm not a musician, I couldn't make a song about two-wheeled trekking. I have written a couple of poems about cycling; I suppose I could write one that someone could set to music.
I know that many cyclists (I include myself among them) are avid readers and writers, and I know of at least a few (including Lovely Bicycle's "Velouria") who are photographers, painters and artists of other kinds. So it seems natural that we'd have literary and visual works about cycling. However, I've known more than a few cyclists who were musicians, and Eric Clapton is known to have a passion for cycling. So why the apparent dearth of songs and music about cycling?
What do you think, dear readers?
