30 January 2015

Eat Your Croissants

According to a sign in my local Starbuck's, today is National Croissant Day.

I'd guess that the croissants are among the more popular foods with cyclists.  I've eaten them before and during many a ride.  



 


Now, they may not be a training-table food.  But a croissant has enough carbs to keep you going for a while.  And, when they're fresh, few things taste as good or have a texture that's as interesting and pleasant at the same time.

Plus, they're easy to carry in a jersey pocket or bike bag.  Speaking of the latter:  It's no surprise that Velo Orange's saddle bag is called the Croissant.

29 January 2015

Taking It All With You

Writing my post on Monday got me to thinking about the ways bikes can be made into utility vehicles.  I'm not talking only about riding from place to place.  I mean using bikes as real, viable forms of transport.

That, of course, means carrying things while riding.  There are many ways.  I've tried just about all of them.  I still use just about all of them at one time or another.   My method depends on what I'm carrying, how far (or how long) I have to carry it and which bike I ride when carrying it.

Laura Lukitsch's video shows a few of those methods.  Best of all, she shows urban riders who are not racers, hipsters or messengers using their bikes as the versatile urban transport vehicles they are, and can be:



28 January 2015

What Juno Actually Brought

Don't you love when "meteorologists" (i.e., newscasters who have been taught how to read weather reports off teleprompters) tell us that an approaching storm is "bringing" or "bringing with it" x number of inches of snow or rain.

The storm that first came this way the other day was supposed to turn into a blizzard in the wee hours of yesterday morning, "bringing with it" two, or even three, feet of snow.

What the storm--Winter Storm Juno, the first winter storm to have a name-- actually did was to drop about six inches of snow.  That's more than the average storm in this area, but still nothing that would bring the city to a standstill--and certainly a lot less than was forecast.

I think this bike brought more snow with it than the storm brought: