I hadn’t been on the Roadini in a little, but I corrected that yesterday:
When putting this bike together, the idea was to take everything I love about my other road bikes and combine them into one lugged steel superbike, and I have to say I really nailed it:
Though I guess Rivendell deserve a little bit of credit for, you know, actually creating the bike.
Even so, I’m disappointed–not in the bike, but in myself. See, I figured once I had my superbike I’d be totally satisfied and could move on to other things, like parenting and home improvement and finally working on that wine blog I’ve been meaning to start.
Maybe I’d even get rid of some bikes and create some additional room for my expanding wine collection.
But no. Here I am a year and a half later, and instead of paring down I’m buying aluminum bikes with skinny tires on Craigslist, and instead of moving on to other things I’m spending all my spare time scouring the globe for tiny parts for them:
I suppose I need to accept it, and to tell myself it’s okay. Yes, I wish I could be like Jobst Brandt, who only owned one bike, which left him with plenty of time to insult people online–and sure, I’ve been insulting people online for nineteen years now, but if only I’d had Jobst Brandt’s capacity for austerity I could have insulted so many more:
But that’s not who I am. I’m not an ascetic like Jobst Brandt, and I cannot transcend my fascination with the physical object. But it could be worse. At least I’m fixated on bikes and not something truly self-destructive, like drugs or gambling or analog audio equipment.
[This makes all those super-expensive plastic gravel bikes seems reasonable.]
Speaking of toys for adults, on my ride I found myself behind this vehicle:
Please note I’ve obscured the license plate out of consideration for the driver, though in post-congestion pricing New York it would not be at all surprising to see one fully whited-out like that.
Anyway, while waiting for the light I happened to notice the license plate frame:
“Oh, interesting,” I thought. “I guess BMW still makes cars with stick shifts.” But when I got a little closer I saw the car wasn’t a stick shift at all. Now, it doesn’t matter to me what kind of transmission people order with their sports cars, and what a man wants to do with his right hand while he’s driving is his business. (At least as long as he’s not within 100 yards of a school.) But I admit I did feel a little cheated by the license plate frame…unless I’m misinterpreting it and it’s a boast about having an automatic transmission, which I guess makes sense, since you don’t shift it yourself; rather, the shift just happens.
Moving back to bikes, the bike industry keeps creating new categories, and Allied recently introduced a new bike specifically for “roads that kinda disintegrate into dirt.” I don’t know about any of that, but it did occur to me that the test of a good all-around road bike is that you can happily ride it entirely on the road without so much as thinking about the dirt (or “gravel” as it were), and yet you’re just as happy to take an off-road detour on it when one presents itself. That’s not the case for, say, the now-departed PRJCT GRVL bike, which was…fine on the road, but a whole ride without any dirt on it felt like a day at the beach without going in the ocean:
Conversely you have bikes like this one, where if you ride past a trailhead you just look away and keep on going, like it’s a bakery during Pesach:
But the Roadini meets that all-around road bike critereon, which is to say I did cut through the woods Just Because. And I’m glad I did, because I got to enjoy a ‘pecker sighting:
Unfortunately by the time I extricated my phone it was too far away and I only managed that fuzzy pinch-zoom shot, but if my research is correct that’s a pileated woodpecker:
[Photo: Joshlyamon via a popular user-edited Internet encyclopedia]
Then later I was riding along the mighty Saw Mill River when in my finely-honed peripheral vision I noticed something lurking beneath the surface:
This photo’s even worse than the ‘pecker shot, but it’s a very large turtle:
Here’s another on the other side of the river:
I’m reasonably sure those are snapping turtles, which have been known to tear a René Herse tire completely off the rim:
[Also from a popular user-edited you know the rest]
That’s why the snapping turtle is widely known as “Nature’s Tire Lever.”
Finally, I guess there’s a new handlebar mirror from Spurcycle, and so far I’ve come across not one…
But three stories about how they’ve made handlebar mirrors cool now:
To wit:
Installation is tool-free, and swapping between bikes is incredibly easy. It fits 14–20mm drop bars, and each one is backed by a lifetime warranty. Spur has really thought of everything with this, and for just $69 USD (nice), safety just got a significant dose of cool.
To be clear, I like Spurcycle. They’re the Chris King of bells. I have several of them in fact, both the original and the less expensive compact–which I actually like a little better, since while the original is both nicer and louder it’s a little bit too loud in quiet settings. Like, it’s hard to give a gentle little “ping” when you’re on a trail like the one where I spotted that ‘pecker. But obviously if you need lots of tintinnabulation it’s the way to go.
Furthermore, while I don’t use a bar-end mirror, I have nothing against them, and certainly don’t think they’re “uncool.” Certainly I could see a near-future in which I do use one…though not on the Roadini, since that’s where the shifters go. But if the Spurcycle mirror is as good as their bells then it’s sure to be a fine product.
Nevertheless, having checked out the other mirror offerings, I’m simply mystified why this mirror is somehow “cool” whereas the others are not. Like, why is it cooler than this one?
Or this one?
Or even this one?
I guess they all just must have read the same press release.