Last Saturday was definitely a fender day. Sadly, I have not yet equipped my bike with fenders.
Last Friday I stopped by the bike mart to sign up for the Richardson (TX) Wild Ride, looking forward to another bicycling adventure covering a metric century. As I was leaving the shop, an employee who was stocking a SAG vehicle for the event said that he hoped that there'd be no rain on the morrow. Consequently, when I got home I checked the weather forecast and saw that there was a 60% chance of showers on Saturday, with the biggest chance for rain coming between 4am and 8am. One of my hobbies is Amateur Radio. Several weeks ago I got an antenna to put on my bike which would provide my hand held v/uhf radio with greater range. (For any radio geeks reading, it is an Arrow J-pole antenna secured with hose clamps to a garden hose covered wooden dowel, which itself is secured to the rear rack.) While this increased the range a tad, the 5W transmitter was still a little deficient. So, I'd recently tried using a mobile v/uhf radio. Unfortunately, this mobile radio requires a bigger battery (12lbs). With both the base unit and battery on the back, balance on the bike was getting a little unwieldy (standing up made the front end very wobbly). So, Friday night I spent some time trying to shoehorn the base of the radio into my Bilbo Baggins bag on the front rack. This has been my first year riding in bike rallies, and for some reason I always have trouble getting to sleep the night before. Indeed, the first few rallies of the year, I didn't get any sleep. Friday night was no exception. I woke up at 3:30am to discover lots of rain. When I turned on my ham radio to see if there was a Skywarn net, I found a couple of other folks discussing the rain. One of them reported that he'd lost his power and had experienced some hail. As a result, I never got back to sleep. In the morning, I listened to the ham radio operators prepare for the event. (They'd be providing communications for the SAG vehicles as well as communications between the event organizers and the rest stops.) With it now raining cats and dogs I expected to hear that the event would be called off, much as the ms150 from a few weeks earlier had been called off at the end of the first day. About this time, I began to seriously wonder if I should take my mobile radio with me. After all, the radio, battery, wire and antenna added about 20lbs to my bike, and the last time I'd tried riding 40 miles with it, I was dog tired. Moreover, my mobile radio, unlike my hand held radio, was not waterproof. So, in the end I decided to ditch the radio and the lightning rod. At 7am I threw the bike in the car and headed off to participate in the Wild Ride. It was still raining, but all the Rest Stops continued to communicate their readiness to the net control. I was thinking to myself 'boy, this is going to be a fun ride.' In the parking lot, I could hear lots of people discussing whether or not to go for a ride. As time passed, some cars did leave, but most of the riders stayed. Eventually, I hopped onto my leather seat (which lacked a seat cover), and headed off to the starting line. When I biked up, I heard the national anthem being sung, and rolled to a stop. I contemplated taking off my helmet, but I remembered one time that I had fallen over while at a stoplight, so I declined to do so. (The voice singing had a nice Texas accent.) Because of my tardiness, I had to start at the end of the pack, behind all of the 40 milers and 16 milers. The first 20 miles of the ride was a mob. Over much of the early part of the route we had multilane roads all to ourselves. For once, it was nice having to worry about bicycles, rather than cars, running into me. As I watched the riders in front of me, I thought that rainy days are a really bad time to draft off of the folks in front of you, given the rooster tail of water streaming behind each bicycle. It was at this point that I realized how nice it would be to have fenders on a bike. Just before I got to the Lake Lavon dam, I happened to look off to the left and saw something interesting: there were about 50 people dressed in lycra pants, all of whom were doing leg lifts. I found this to be a somewhat surreal vision in the rain. I wish that I'd had a camera. After having crossed over Lake Lavon dam (it is only open to cyclists for this event), I stopped at the second rest stop, and the turnaround point for folks doing the 40 mile route. By this point in the ride, I didn't care about standing about in the rain. I was drenched, my shoes were full of water, and the cookies were soggy. The folks handing out sustenance were huddled underneath the tents; they looked more miserable than the folks who were biking. God bless them: without them and all the other volunteers, the ride would truly have been more onerous. (At a later rest stop at the site of a school, there appeared to be some cheerleaders cheering all the riders on. They'd modified their cheers to include 'biker' in place of--I'm guessing--player. The cheers were heartwarming.) Riding out in the country, I was assaulted by various scents, sometimes there were horses nearby, with the faint whiff of horse manure; once I detected a skunk; there were some pigs lurking somewhere; and on occasion I detected a bit more noisome smell. I've read a lot on the rivbike website, so I wondered if I was picking up something from my synthetic biking togs. But the scents always went away, so I figured it was just a part of the Texas environs. If you'd like to see some pictures of the wet rats, I mean bikers, you can look here: http://www.k5rwk.org/wr. At this bike rally each year, the ham radio operators set up a high speed multi media network with point-to-point links using linksys routers and big directional antennas. (Can you tell I'm a geek?) At the start/finish line is a video monitor which displays pictures that have been taken at the rest stops. The pictures are passed over the wireless network to the server at the start/finish line. Two of the links pass over Lake Lavon and are over 5 miles in length. (Pretty good for a little blue router, hunh?) Anyway, after passing beyond the second rest stop I finally caught a glimpse of a sensible bicyclist. He was big, riding in an upright position and a fast cadence. And wonder of wonder, he had some nice silvery fenders. I think that those were the only fenders that I saw on the entire ride. (I mentioned how nice they looked in passing, and he said that he was surprised there weren't more in evidence.) From time to time I'd lose him, and then catch him at the rest stops. As time passed, I saw (or realized) more characteristics: big fat tires which looked much wider than my Jack Browns; big reflector vest; reflectors on his ankles (the only others that I saw besides my own); a nice blinky light on his rear fender; and at the final rest stop, when I was feeling a little dazed, I realized that his bike had a head badge, and a double top tube. It was only at this point that I wondered if I was looking at another Rivendell, but I was too tired to wander over to ask. The ride ended with little fanfare (5 hours after the start). The last miles I saw few riders. With the exception of the police that I saw at many intersections (I felt guilty when many of them hopped out of their vehicles into the rain to stop traffic at both small and big intersections for lonely ol' me), I saw few others associated with the ride. And while the Wildflower Festival could be heard in the distance, in spite of the rain, all I wanted to do was wring out my socks and crash at home. On Sunday, I realized that I'd left a synthetic shirt in my car. Grant's right: that noisome smell in the countryside was me. :( Even if I do live in Texas, I'm going to start wearing the seer sucker shirts with a wool, sleeveless undershirt. And the plaid, bamboo MUSA shorts look very stylish. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. 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