Snow biking! The awesomeness continues!

No, I did not make any new years resolutions about blogging more — I’ve just been so gosh-darn excited about all these bikey things lately that I can’t help myself.

So! More snow excitement!

My normal workplace has been closed for the last three days, but today I had a different obligation with some non-employer colleagues who apparently don’t believe in snow days. So unlike the last many exploratory days, today I had a hard deadline at a specific place.

As much as I love that public transit is an option, I don’t really love taking it, especially when it’s running slowly and I have a deadline. So yesterday afternoon I decided that today, I would try to bike.

 

snow soma(not with my real bike though: this, from Tuesday evening when it first started to snow, is about all the snow I can really handle with my Soma)

 

In our basement, I have an old, old, old mountain bike: first, when I was in high school (maybe even middle school?), it was my dad’s, then my brother used it for many years, then it sat around my mom’s garage forever, and finally she brought it up to me in Portland since she figured I’d know what to do with it.

As it is now, this is not a bike that under normal circumstances I would ever ride. The headset has so much play it’s a wonder the whole front fork doesn’t fall off. The brakes work, sort of. The gears shift, as long as you don’t mind moving the shifter about 5 gears to actually move the derailleur one (and if you can put up with a near-constant chain rub). The seat is help together with duct tape. Until I fixed it yesterday afternoon, the back tire’s been flat for about three years. In short, it needs an awful lot of love.

But it’s perfect for a snow adventure! Especially a snow adventure where you’re going slowly enough that you don’t have to use the brakes too much, and where you just decide never to change the gears:)

 

snow trek(it LOOKS functional enough if you don’t look too closely!:)

 

After a test ride up and down our street yesterday in which I managed not to overtly fall off (never mind that I couldn’t actually make any turns), I decided that sleeping on it would confer upon me all the snow-mountain-biking skills I needed to ride the 8-point-something round trip miles to my work meeting.

And hey, it worked!

And I LOVE SNOW BIKING!!

Oh my gosh. It was so much fun to ride around with my very fat (for me) tires at super low pressure, laughing every time my bike tried to slide around and I either had to hop off or just roll with the slides for a bit until I could get myself back under control. I only actually fell off once, a super slow-motion back-wheel-slide-out affair when I tried to turn a little too sharply. Mostly, I biked around with a giant grin on my face. And felt more and more confident the more I rode.

This may be my favorite work commute ever:)

 

SE Ankeny(I always appreciate bike infrastructure, even in the snow:) SE Ankeny diverters here, that let bikes through but no cars)

 

I wasn’t really sure how long it would take me to get anywhere (especially if it turned out that I couldn’t bike after all and I had to walk;), so I gave myself oodles of extra time. The bonus of which was that both on the way to work and on the way home I had time to play in Laurelhurst Park. It’s kind of exciting when you can tell where some of the trails are, but not always, and sometimes not really at all. And that it doesn’t really matter, since you can bike through any of it.

 

Laurelhurst Park(this trail was pretty well defined)

 

Laurelhurst Park 2(here, not so much)

 

Laurelhurst Park pond(and here, I was just excited about the pond in the background being frozen enough that people had walked on it)

 

So, I continue to be pretty darn psyched about all this snow. Especially now that I know I can actually bike through it too. YAY WINTER!!

4 Comments:

  1. Bravo, petit vélo vert!! :-) Et sa maitresse!

    Très contente de te l’avoir amené. :-)

  2. Yay winter! Now give that ol’ Trek some love. It deserves it!

    • Man, it’s always a matter of whether it’s worth it or not. The reason it’s been sitting around for so long is that it needs so much work that I kind of think that it’s almost better to just give it to someone who doesn’t have high expectations for a bike and then if I ever decided I actually need a mountain bike just buy a new one. But then I can’t quite bring myself to do that, both because of the sentimental value and the fact that I hate getting something new when I have something that still works (though the boundaries of “still works” are, of course, rather blurry;) And in my indecision, it just sits around.

      Though I’m glad to have it right now:)

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