One way to beat the heat

I can always tell when I am getting close to home on the evening commute since I start seeing the piles of free stuff people set out. You could call this a type of recycling or just pure laziness on the part of St Paulites who just can't bother to set up a garage sale (or have never heard of Craigslist). Anyway, sometimes you can find some pretty good stuff. I once got a full size ping pong table, including rackets, in one of these alley finds.

It has been hot here lately and I stopped by one house with a sizable pile of treasures and found this small clip-on desk fan. My initial purpose for grabbing this was to set it up at my desk at work both for cooling me down and helping air out the bike gear. Of course once I discovered this clip fit on the handle bars I got a kick out of mounting it on the front of the bike.

The obvious benefit is I always have a breeze to keep me cool even at those intersections with long red lights...

Just to set some context, you can see the temp on the bike computer at the far left of the display. It is tiny but this is one of the only times I recall seeing the readout go to three digits at 102. We will have a winter day when we drop to -20 which makes for a pretty impressive range. But for now, I am finding ways to manage in the heat.

That's what I call utility biking!

I was recently invited to a bachelor party for a friend who has a wedding coming up this July. Just to set some context, this is a party at my friend's house, it is on a Monday night, and the bride's father is invited. I don't think there will be a knitting contest but clearly this is not at the same level as a trip to Vegas.

Since this friend lives about 2 miles from downtown Minneapolis, where I work, I decided to bike to the party after work. The event is a BYOBBQ so I had to pack some food to grill and beverages. Fortunately, I have an old commuting pannier that did the trick.

I have the food supplies ready to go. This is 1 1/2 pounds of jalapeno peppers, 1 pound of beer brats, buns for said brats, and 3 cans of Great River beer.

What made this arrangement work was the soft-sided cooler that I could stuff into the pannier. I added a few ice packs for the trip to work, zipped it up, and stuffed it into the pannier. I didn't try to cool the beer instead waiting until I could put it in the fridge.

This is my version of a bike mullet: business on the left (work clothes), party on the right. It was a nice change to ride with a balanced load. I don't notice the imbalance riding with one pannier until I change the load and the second bag almost always makes it easier to ride.

The party was good: we gave the groom a good sendoff and there were no arrests or injuries. It was also another chance to prove that a bike is a great vehicle for everyday life and even special events.

Hot storms in the summer time

It has been cooking in Minnesota lately, and I don't mean on the grill. The temperatures have been warm and the air really humid. I need to set some context before I state the actual temperature, however. Minnesotans are known to put on shorts when the temps hit 50F (not pretty, by the way) and start to complain at around 85. We are just not used to hot weather. Still, we have been pushing the upper 90s and may even go over 100 tomorrow. This means the morning bike commute will leave your author a sweaty mess by the time he gets to work.

This morning, there was some additional interest on the bike trail: tree damage from a strong cell of thunderstorms that moved through this morning.

Most of the damage was to small branches. There were a couple of large branches torn down and one or two whole trees. The storm wasn't exceptionally strong so I assume these had weak spots in the wood.

This one was laying across the bike trail on the West River Parkway along the Mississippi. I had a brief bit of panic when I realized the trail was completely covered and I didn't have both hands on the handlebars while I tucked the camera in my back pocket. Some would suggest stopping but there isn't much sport in that. I did manage to get around the tree and just chalked this up to the hazards of working on the blog while out on the road. Oh, and of being impatient.

By the way, the city of Duluth, to the north of us, has had some huge flooding this past week. Doug, at MN Bike Commuter, has pictures of some pretty wicked road washouts from the flood. If you like the topic of winter bike riding, I recommend Doug's blog. He tries it all and posts some great pictures. But for now, it's summer.

Tunnel mystery solved

A few weeks ago I wrote about some mysterious tunnels that were being dug into the cliffs along the Mississippi. I have been watching the crew creating these with some fascination. The machinery, the ventilation systems, the precautions for rock collapse are all neat stuff. Doesn't this seem like an ideal construction site to explore after hours when the crew is gone? How cool to see the ancient limestone, hear the water dripping, and get a little claustrophobic? And of course, what an idea that your author would never, ever endorse.

Of course that doesn't mean a few pictures wouldn't help illustrate. Here is the entrance to one of the two tunnels showing the vent pipes that run down the sides of the tunnel. Each one is terminated with a round fan I suppose to bring in fresh air for the workers and remove exhaust from the machinery.

 Farther in the ground was really mushy and the air smelled of rusty water.The tire tracks are from a bobcat-size machine which gives a good sense for the tunnel dimension. This isn't a claustrophobic space although it gets dark pretty fast.

I learned later that part of the smell was coming from the sewer pipes the crew was repairing. The pipes were over 100 feet into the cliff and the only safe way to access was to bore a hole through the cliff wall. How do I know this? Meet Todd.

I was able to catch Todd while he was unloading his truck and he took a minute to explain the project. Apparently there are ways to access the tunnel from on top of the cliff but given the volume of sewage in the pipes it was not considered safe to send a technician. As Todd explained, if something happened and he got swept down the pipe with the sewage...uh, yeah, you can imagine.

I suppose it would have been even more true to the bike commuter spirit to have actually ridden in the tunnels. I did learn that bike gear, like clip shoes, is not well adapted to the tunnel rat environment. I got to work and the shoes needed some serious TLC. Not sure how the chain would've fared - maybe some day, I'll find out!

Back at it

Today, I was back in the saddle. A lot has happened recently but what prevented me from riding was trillions of foreign organisms invading my body. Even your intrepid bike commuting author can be distracted by this type of thing and has to take some time off. I wasn't hugely sick but it was enough to put me on the bus for a couple of days this week.

The day turned out to be a gorgeous Minnesota summer day: bright, 60s in the morning, 70s in the evening, tons of people out. It is a great time to see how nice summer can be and how desperate we all are to get out of our houses until the next blizzard.

Bike couriers vs commuters

I like to think that riding to work every day makes me a bit healthier and maybe even a little tougher. My co-workers even reinforce this idea. There are days when I get to work and people say, 'Dude, you are HARD CORE!' meaning that it was sprinkling outside and I must have gotten wet. This is obviously more of a statement of how easy it is to avoid going outside rather than a reflection of my inner Grizzly Adams. If you ride daily you are going to have days that are uncomfortable and, yes, sometimes really unpleasant. The unspoken secret among year round commuters is even the lousy days can be fun because...you are riding a bike. But I digress.

The true hard core folks in my mind are the bike couriers. These are professional bikers although they don't have the tight pants and workout coaches you are thinking of. These are people who haul stuff on their own two wheels, year round, hours a day, come rain, shine, or hail. If they have been in the job for a while they tend to look like a Grizzly Adams who has spent a few years living at your local bus stop.

This is a bit different in Minneapolis. Probably the most common courier you will see here is the Jimmy John's sandwich delivery guy/gal.

They ride year round but seem more numerous in the summer. These people often look like a cross between  a fixie-riding hipster and your typical midwestern college student.  This is probably because they are fixie riding midwestern college students. Still, they are out there in all kinds of weather delivering small orders of sub sandwiches. It is probably busy during lunchtime, quiet the rest of the day, and I can't imagine what kind of tip you get for delivering a sandwich and a soda. So, from a bike commuter: you may not be leathery and scarred, Jimmy Jane, but you are still a bike ridin' hero to me.

No tire will stop that

I ride with tires that claim to have some type of teflon material embedded in the rubber to help prevent punctures. This presumably works since I haven't had a flat since last fall, about 1500 miles ago. The difference between the winter and other times of year, however, is people. It seems that no one is out smashing beer bottles in the winter (do they just bounce?) or shingling their roof. This must change in the summer since this is the time when I get flats. Meet the enemy:

I don't know when I ran this over but only heard a click...click...click coming from the back of the bike. I didn't see anything stuck in the spokes and figured a flat would eventually make itself known so I kept riding. I made it over the Lake street bridge and up the hill on the St Paul side before the back end of the bike started giving me the classic wobbling feeling of a flat tire. I pulled over and started to remove the tire when I saw the nail was so far into the tire that it poked through the rim tape and into the underside of a spoke nipple. This got me thinking: what would the best way be to demonstrate how good is a tire's flat protection? You really don't know until it fails. In this case, probably only the solid rubber tire of a tricycle would have stopped it. I wonder if they make those in 700c wheel size?