This past weekend I stopped for, uh, important reasons and noted a strongly-worded sentiment as well as a crude rendering of a hand with five fingers and no opposable thumb making an obscene gesture:
Really? Who could feel that way about a world so beguiling?
Though maybe he was just referring to all the mindless sheep who live in it:
See?
As lovely as this day was, it was also bittersweet, as I was taking a farewell ride on the carbo-tanium LeMond…or so I thought:
I told myself I’d finally return it to Classic Cycle once the Roaduno arrived, since I could really use the space:
[I have so little space I had to cut the legs off all my pants.]
But by the time I returned home I’d changed my mind yet again.
Bikes have a funny way of making you find both space and money for them that you don’t actually have.
Another way to free up some space would be to return George Plimpton’s Y-Foil, a.k.a. the Charity Ride Destroyer, a.k.a. the Pumpkin Spice Nightmare:
Arguably nobody needs even one wildly extravagant bike from The Great Trek Bicycle Making Company, let alone two. But I suppose it was only a matter of time before I turned into the Lone Wolf:
I also derive a sense of satisfaction from riding a joke from my own blog come to life, which means my next Trek will have to be the World’s Greatest Madone:
To this day it remains both the greatest commuter bike ever curated and the rolling embodiment of the Just Buy A Rivendell Already ethos…though arguably it’s not really a JBARA bike since it doesn’t even have a stem riser on it:
A true JBARA bike has at least that, and usually an adjustable stem, too:
As we age our bars gradually skyward in a process similar to phototropism.
I realize I should also stress that I’m only kidding about wanting a real-life World’s Greatest Madone:
After willing the Plimpton bike into reality I should probably be extremely careful.
Of course the Plimpton bike has its share of quirks, such as the Zero Gravity brakes:
Few components could be less relevant in the age of discs than a pair of aftermarket weight-weenie brakes, back in the day people used to actually pay big money for stuff like this, and I enjoy learning their quirks:
So dainty are these brakes that I was watching a video about how to install them and you’re not even supposed to squeeze the pads together with your fingers. Instead when you’re centering them you’re supposed to do it like this:
Apparently squeezing the pads together can damage the titanium spring, which…how is that even possible? Anyway, I’d stopped to make a brake pad adjustment, hence the above photo, and as you can see the bolt for the pad is so tiny I didn’t even have the appropriate size on my multi-tool. So I figured I’d swing by the handy public repair stand to see what it had:
And it had no hex keys at all because someone had stolen them:
Must have been the “Fuck The World” guy.