Time for Spring Planning

We had a bout of faux spring here in Northern Illinois last week - multiple days in a row with temperatures in the 60’s and low 70’s (F). Predictably, that has turned out to be just a tease (projected high today of 36°), but it was enough to allow for some longer rides, which gets me thinking about what sort of riding I want to do as the weather warms up in earnest.

Something that has been on my list for a long time is to do some type of trike packing - e.g. a trip covering some distance, with overnight camping stops along the way. And despite the fact that the onset of spring turned out to be a lie, it’s gotten my wheels - my mental wheels, anyway - turning on what goes into such a trip.

Where to Go

My first area of consideration was where I would want to go. I do most of my riding out of my own driveway, on the backroads of northern Illinois. But while this is a pretty friendly area for the riding itself - generations of sharing the road with slow moving agricultural equipment makes for people who are pretty accommodating on the tarmac - it’s not a region that offers much by way of camping opportunities off the side of the road. The land here is generally privately owned, and engaged in active farming use.

This led me pretty quickly to trails, which then leads me to the Hennepin Canal Trail.

Val @ the Hennepin Canal

It’s a place I’m already somewhat familiar with (at least along the eastern end). It’s a state park, and it has designated camping sites along the route. Most of these are pretty rustic, but there is one site along the way, outside the town of Geneseo, that has showers and similar facilities. And while the teenage boy inside me loves the idea of the adventure of rough camping, the middle-aged dude typing this post knows that having a place to shower and plug in his stuff is going to make things a lot nicer, especially for a first time out.

Exploring more of the canal trail in general has also been on my list, so this gives me an opportunity to kill two goals with one ride (I may have mixed - or possibly butchered - that metaphor a bit…). This has, of course, led me to spending time poring over the trail map on Google Maps and I think - if I plan it right - I could actually make this a ride from the trailhead in Bureau Junction to the end of the trail, and include a side trip up to cross over the Mississippi into Iowa.

The total distance from start to finish in Iowa - one way - is about 80 miles. My longest single ride distance to date was just over 75 miles, which was at the hairy limit of my conditioning, even after several weeks of training. Given that, I’m looking at probably two nights of camping, breaking the 160 miles across three days of riding. This makes for three days at just over 50 miles (53.33333…). Thanks to The Hilly Hundred, I know that this should be doable for me, especially since the canal trail lacks the hilly part. And it should mean that I can ride with an eye towards enjoying the trip, with plenty of time to stop, take pictures, and generally enjoy the nature as opposed to trying to push to reach a given goal or destination.

Equipment

The other question is what to take along. My Catrike Expedition is definitely up to the task - it’s right there in the name, after all. And this sort of riding is why I chose the Expedition specifically. I’ll want to make sure everything is in good working order, of course, but that is something that should be done on a fairly routine basis anyway.

I’ll need equipment to support the trip as well. Among the things I’ll need to take along will be:

• Tent
• Sleeping bag & mat
• Change(s) of clothing
• Towel
• Food & water
• Tools and tubes
• Battery packs for the phone and lights

And this, of course, is just my initial list. I’m absolutely sure there are things I’m not thinking of yet. Some of these things I already have, of course. Others I do not - I don’t have a one-person tent yet, for example (but I’ve wanted one for a long time, and here’s my reason to get it).

The next question that pops up in my head is how to carry all of this. Essentially there are two options - I can try to get it all into my panniers and/or on the rear rack, or I can pull a trailer behind me.

Part of me likes the simplicity of just using the bags and rack on the trike. I know that the trike can carry a fair amount of weight on the back - I’ve managed, for example, to haul a full grill-size LP tank on the top of the rack with my regular backup gear still in the bags. And I am not currently using most of the seat pockets - the zippered containers on the back of the Catrike seat - because I have always had plenty of space in my bags. If I plan for efficiency, I might be able to just haul it all as a self-contained unit.

The alternative option is to use a trailer. I do have one - I built a flatbed trailer out of the frame from a very run-down kid-carrier and a selection of palettes I had at the Homestead. It works well, and can carry a fair amount of weight. I’ve carried up to 80lbs on it - that being softener salt from the hardware store. But while I’m somewhat proud of my DIY trailer and it’s capabilities, it is… shall we say, it isn’t a dainty item. I’m not sure exactly what it weighs, but I’d guess it’s in the neighborhood of 20-25lbs unloaded, and I’d need to add a container (more weight) to it to use it. I’m sure to feel that on an extended ride.

Which then makes me think about buying something like a Burley Nomad. These are lovely little trailers, clearly well designed and specifically built for the sort of thing I’m trying to plan. And, at 17lbs, almost certainly lighter than my DIY trailer. The big “but” in the room, tho, is that you definitely pay for that special design and lighter weight. And to be clear, I think they are worth what they are asking. But I’m not sure I want to make that kind of investment for my first time out - I might find, despite the inner teenager, that the middle-aged dude doesn’t like camping out any more.

So - my plan for now is going to be to optimize my use of the storage space on the trike and see whether I can comfortably haul what I need that way, and take a few longer practice runs like that. If that works, great! If not, then I’ll start to work in the trailer and see how much it impedes my progress.

Got Your Back

Comfort is one of the hallmark features of riding a recumbent trike. When one moves from an upright, or Diamond Frame (DF) bike to a recumbent trike, one of the things one realizes fairly quickly is all of the things that don’t hurt anymore when riding. Your hands aren’t numb from resting on the handlebars, your neck and shoulders aren’t sore from being hunched over on the road bike, and the idea of chamois butter never occurs to you any more.

For this reason I was rather surprised this summer when I started to experience pain in my lower back on a ride. I was on what is, for me, an extended ride of about 50 miles, but the pain started about 25 miles in. I took a couple of breaks on the ride to get off and move around, which did help, but the issue kept recurring. As I thought through it while riding it finally occurred to me to consider that the seat mesh might need to be tightened. So I found a spot to pull off to the side of the road and I gave them a yank, and sure enough, I was able to tighten them and regain the lumbar support that the mesh seat had lost. The seat instantly felt better, and I was comfortable for the remaining 8-10 miles of that ride.

Seat straps

But while I initially thought all was better, what I found was that it was now a recurring - and seemingly worsening issue. Over subsequent rides I found myself stopping at least once or twice per ride to adjust it, and during the Freemondo I had to stop and adjust it at least four times over the 63-mile course. Given that I had other extended rides coming up, I wanted to find a way to address the issue.

My Catrike Expedition is only three years old - I received delivery of it in July of 2019 - but I have put over 6000 miles on it since it arrived. It seemed that I’d perhaps reached the lifespan of the original seat. Before I made that assumption - and dropped the $200 or so for such an item - I decided to take the question to the Catrike Owners Group on Facebook. I got several suggestions for addressing the issue - means for repairing rather than replacing the seat, and multiple suggestions for a product that I’ve seen referenced before - the Ventisit.

But one suggestion (thanks John!) struck both my curiosity, and my simplicity and cheapness genes all at the same time. The idea was to take bits of pool noodle and cut them to size to put inside the seat in the general lumbar region. This idea was not only inexpensive and easily obtained (e.g. Amazon or swing by your local big box store), but actually, for me, free and at hand as my offspring had brought home a batch of them a couple of years ago. They’ve been occupying space on the back porch for a while now - I figured I might as well put one of them to work.

This was a simple operation - I got a noodle and a utility knife, eyeballed the size of the space between the space frame bars on either side of the seat, marked it with my thumb, and cut it (yes - you should probably measure twice before you cut once, but I was rich with pool noodles, so I threw caution to the wind). In eyeballing I did make it a little long, figuring it was going to need to press against the bars to stay in place.

Eyeballing things

Once I got it cut I inserted it into the space between the front and back of the seat. I had to loosen the straps just a bit to do this. I positioned it in the general lumbar region by feel, getting on and off the trike a couple of times. Once it was in place I tightened the straps back up and took it out for a ride.

Noodling it into place

That first ride was a bit of a revelation - it felt much better! But over the next couple of outings I began to notice that, after a few miles, the noodle was acting as a pressure point. Now instead of a dull ache I had a sharp pain in that spot, which was not a reasonable trade-off. I tried moving it up and down a bit, which helped, but only temporarily. And stopping periodically to move the noodle wasn’t really any better than stopping periodically to tighten the straps.

What I reasoned, though, was that it was becoming a pressure point because it was too small - a bulge in a single, small vertical area. So I went back and cut a second section of noodle to put in with the first one. This made for a larger lumbar area, and reduced the amount of pressure on any single point in my back.

You can see where it falls for me on the seat - the noodle is where you can’t see thru the mesh:

The non-see-thru part is where the noodle is at.

All of this experimenting happened between the Freemondo and TŌSOC, so that second extended ride through scenic Ogle County was the testing ground for this approach.

The long and short of it: It works!

I got through the 62-miles of TŌSOC without any significant back pain, and without needing to adjust the seat. The noodles seem to stay in place without issue, so once you have them positioned where they work for you it seems to be essentially a set it and forget it arrangement. And it’s far less expensive than alternative solutions.

TL/DR:

In sum: If you are finding that you are experiencing lower back pain while riding your recumbent trike, you may be able to address the issue quickly and inexpensively by cutting pool noodles to size and inserting them in the space between the front and back sides of the seat. Some things to be aware of with this:

• There are different sizes and shapes of pool noodle. I used ones with a sort of clover shape to them because those were what I had at home already. You may find that a different size or shape works better for you.
• You may need to insert one or more of them into the space depending upon your height and how the noodle impacts your back.
• Expect to spend a bit of time adjusting the location between and during rides while you dial-in the correct position for you.
• The trike I did this with is my Catrike Expedition. It’s clear to me that it would work nicely with other trikes of a similar frame and mesh seat design - for example, I can easily see using this on my Catrike Pocket if I needed to, as it’s a very similar design. Your mileage may vary depending on how your machine is designed.

Maintenance Day

Rolling past the end of June puts us at the mid-point of the calendar year, and it happens, here in the US, to be followed by a holiday weekend (at least this year). This seemed like a good point to take a day to do some routine maintenance and reflection on how my cycling year was going.

When I say "maintenance", I mostly mean that I decided to take a day to address issues that I’ve noticed while riding over recent weeks (maybe months) but have mentally set aside in favor of riding. This is not always ideal, but I am certain I am not the only person who does it.

Top on my list was addressing front end alignment. I’d had an issue with tire wear back in April, and I’d purchased new tires and re-set the alignment following the instructions in the Catrike Manual. Now - about 700 miles since putting the new tires on - I was noticing somewhat uneven wear on the outside edges of those tires. I’d gone back and forth on this in my head. First I questioned whether I was really seeing it, and when it became more undeniable, I debated whether to take the trike in to the shop to have it - and any other maintenance - addressed.

This debate occurs in part because, although I’m getting better at it, I am still not a confident bike mechanic. In many ways, the ways of cycle repair and adjustment seem a black art, with myself but a novice, and afraid that I will accidentally summon a demon if I recite the incantation incorrectly.

Or something like that. I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on in the back room of the bike repair shop - probably summoning Balrogs. I hear Balrogs do bike repair...

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The thing is, the bike shop is almost an hour away and, in our troubled times, requires an appointment be made in advance. My trike would likely be gone at least two days, possibly three. I do have an alternative to the trike, of course, but I don’t want to use it. And so I remind myself that these are the reasons I’m learning to do it on my own.

Alignment isn’t hard work, but it’s fiddly. And, of course, it seems like my first go at it either wasn’t quite right, or perhaps it had worked it’s way out (though the nuts around the adjuster bar were still quite tight). At this point it appeared I had too much toe-in, so I worked it back out a bit. This required a lot of moving back and forth with my measurement tool - a bit of telescoping curtain rod - but I think I have it set better now. Time will tell (and I think I’ll order a second set of tires just in case).

The other area I wanted to address was either an issue with the chain length or the derailleur, and I wasn’t sure which. I have been having trouble getting the Expedition to shift into the big ring on the back. Sometimes it would go, but others it would do that characteristic clattering sound that is the functional equivalent of the trike saying "I’m trying, Boss, I’m trying", but with no joy. The chatter is there for other gears, and I’d been having issues with single clicks of the shifter periodically jumping two gears at a time. More recently, I’d also been having some issue with shifts into higher gears simply not grabbing at all for several seconds.

This latter issue is particularly concerning when it happens just as you are shifting up to pull away from a chasing canine. Which is, of course, always when it happens.

I’d adjusted the boom in just a bit a few months ago due to some issues with knee pain. It was a small adjustment - I really just needed to make up for the difference in length needed to accommodate for winter clothes and boots - but it made me wonder if the chain was now too loose (remember - dark art). So my next task was to take a link out of the chain.

This I’ve actually gotten pretty good at, using a wire to keep the two ends nearby, and popping those pins in and out with the tool. I did quickly discover that my workbench was not at the ideal height for this particular task, requiring a little more bending than I’d prefer, but I got the link removed, got it all back together, and ran it through the gears...

...And it was clear, as I hit the two big rings together - twenty-first gear, I believe - that the chain was now too tight. It would still spin, but it was very taught and rubbing tightly against the lower chain tube.

So I muttered a few less-than polite words to myself and Calamity Jane, my trusty sidekick for the day, and went and put the link back in.

This meant that I was going to have to fiddle with the derailleur. To me, this particular part always seems the darkest of the black arts, and if I’m being honest, part of the reason I started with adjusting the length of the chain was in hopes that I wouldn't have to interact with it.

Fortunately, Utah Trikes has a very nice video laying out how to adjust the derailleur. Five minutes into it I was able to get the chain to reliably move to the top ring of the cassette. The adjustment to address gear skipping took a little longer, but I think I’ve got it sorted out now. I say "I think" because I definitely got it to stop happening on the work bench, but I haven’t taken it out on the road yet. That - which will probably happen later today - will be the ultimate test of my conjuring.

While I was at it I cleaned the chain (wiped it down anyway) and re-oiled it, and wiped everything else down as well. I did brief checks on the brake connections and made sure the wheel skewers were properly tightened down. I have come to realize, as my riding time goes up, that I need to do this sort of thing more regularly. I was able to more or less get away with annual spring tunings at the bike shop with my Cannondale. But my highest mileage year on the Cannondale was about 750 miles, and I’m already well past that now for 2020. More riding means more wear and tear, of course, and that means more maintenance. Plus, while I love my trikes, they are mechanically more complicated than the Cannondale - one extra wheel, 18 more gears, and much more chain, among other things, makes for more to keep track of.

As I’ve hinted, I didn’t go for a ride after completing my maintenance. Working on the trike was actually my second project of the day (the first involved putting a swing, which had been the victim of the prairie winds, back together), and it was relaxation time by the time I got everything back together and my tools put away. So I put the Expedition back into the Mobile Trike Garage, locked everything up for the night, and consulted with my beer fridge.

But today? Today I’ll test it all out. Today I ride.

Alternate Cycling Universe

As the world continues to struggle with the ongoing pandemic there is ongoing discussion about the changes that it is and will cause to our lifestyles. The nature of shopping, social gathering, and working are all seeing changes.

Transportation is also being affected. Bike shops are running out of inventory as people look for a means to exercise in the out of doors and for an alternative to public transit. We see cities making changes to the ways that streets and byways are used, closing spaces to automobile traffic in favor of human-powered options.

I often find myself wondering what our society’s would look like in terms of transportation if things developed along different lines - if the development of the internal combustion engine hadn’t come along when it did, spawning our embrace of, and dependence upon, the automobile. And lately I am wondering if we might not be starting to see a bit of what might have been.

A few years ago, inspired by reading David McCullough’s Wright Brothers biography, I put together a timeline analysis of bicycle adoption. To sum it up briefly, the development of the safety bicycle - essentially our modern bicycle - happened so closely in time to the automobile that, in my humble opinion, cycling never had a chance to take hold before people had a motorized option.

What if that hadn’t happened? What if, say, the internal combustion had never been invented or perfected to the point that it could be made in a small enough package to power personal transportation?

It does seem that, prior to the introduction of the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the world was not necessarily expecting such a thing to develop. A trip through cycling history sites shows that there was considerable effort in the 1800’s to develop human powered vehicles. Yes, we all know about the penny-farthing bikes of the 1870’s, but things started ahead of that...

Folks were clearly pretty inventive. They didn’t yet have the key developments - pneumatic tires, effective gearing, lightweight materials - that make our modern machines so capable, but they were clearly on the path. If those inventions had come along earlier or if, as we said, the internal combustion engine hadn’t, I suspect our transportation sector would look very different. What would that alternate universe look like?

I don’t think anyone would argue that human-powered vehicles would be routinely used for long-distance transport. I suspect we’d see rail heavily employed for that purpose. While it’s sadly insufficient here in the United States, rail is still a primary transportation mechanism in many countries around the world. Early locomotives were, of course, built on external combustion engines, so they fit with our thought experiment. Many trains now are electrically powered, and we’re going to assume development of electric systems would have progressed as they have in our current day. For the US this would be a significant change - we’d likely see railroads in the place of our interstate highway system, connecting our cities and towns, probably with express routes between major cities supplemented by regional and local lines.

I’ll pause here let my fellow US citizens picture that - it’s a mental image that takes a little while to absorb. No highways.

It would also mean no heavy motor vehicles - no long-haul or short trucks, etc. The US used to be covered with rail lines and spurs to facilitate local movement of heavy goods like grains and coal. Cyclists in the States are already familiar with that fact, at least obliquely - it’s the bulk of what Rails to Trails was built on, recovering the land from defunct rail lines.

Or - perhaps by the equivalent of current day in our alternate universe it would be more accurate to say: there would be no heavy motor vehicles with internal combustion engines. It might be the case that electric vehicle technology would have evolved sufficiently for short-haul heavy vehicles (range being a long-term problem for electric vehicles we are only now starting to solve). So - perhaps electric farm equipment, and electric trucks bringing loads to the local depot for rail transit. But I suspect that our alternate universe would have relied on animal power for moving heavy loads for much longer than our actual one did.

For virtually everything else - for short distance transportation, certainly, and possibly medium distance as well - I think we’d be looking at human-powered vehicles. After all, cycling is the most efficient known form of human transport.

One of the things about this aspect that fascinates me is trying to consider the form those HPV’s would take. I don’t take it as read that we’d all be tooling around on a typical upright, diamond-frame bicycle at this point. In our alternate universe the HPV is the primary means of transportation, and would have had nearly 200 years of development with that as a focus. In our actual universe cycling has been somewhat sidelined as a recreational activity and/or as a transportation option for children and for those who cannot afford, or are not allowed, motorized alternatives (when I say "not allowed" I am picturing the men you see riding an old bike wearing work clothes and smoking a cigarette - I suspect we all know what’s going on there...).

Without that sidelining our alternate universe might well have seen cycling technology advance at a much more rapid pace. Consider, for example, that the first derailleur system was developed between 1900 and 1910, but we didn’t really start to see bikes with multiple speed gear sets here in the US until the mid-1960’s. Now we have cycling machines with extensive gear ranges - I’ve got 30 speeds on my Catrike Expedition, for example - but those are relatively recent developments. I suspect they’d have happened sooner in our alternate history. Similarly, we’d likely have seen the adoption of more exotic materials - aluminum, titanium at least - earlier on to reduce weight.

I mentioned above that I suspect we - or at least, most of us - wouldn't be riding around on upright two-wheeled bikes. While I obviously have a bias here towards recumbent trikes, I come by it honestly. Some people come to trikes because, for one reason or another, they aren’t able to ride an upright. While there’s nothing wrong with that - I love that trikes let people continue to ride - I came to trikes because I think they are cool. Since I first saw an article on a Greenspeed, probably 15 years ago (possibly longer), I’ve wanted one. And one of the first things I thought about it was: "that is the natural evolution of the bicycle". In addition, with HPV’s being the primary form of transportation we wouldn't have been as likely to see the ban on recumbents by the UCI that is felt to have propped up the upright bike over recumbents in the 1930’s.

Not to say that I think our alternate universe denizens would necessarily be riding about on Catrikes and HP Velotechniks. Actually, I suspect people would be mostly moving about in something like a Velomobile. Particularly in less weather friendly areas, an enclosed human powered vehicle would make more sense, and riders would benefit from the aerodynamic advantages as well. I suspect they’d be somewhat different than what we see now - there would likely be a need for better cargo carrying options, though perhaps that could be managed with trailers or similar systems. Pulling a trailer is an acquired skill when it’s behind a motor vehicle. It’s considerably less intimidating a task when it’s attached to an HPV.

We are in the middle of an e-bike boom in our our actual world, and one suspects that would have happened much sooner in our alternate world. Having battery support would be needed to operate mechanical systems - wipers and ventilation systems, for example. And while it took a very long time to get electric cars with ranges that match gasoline vehicles, that range wouldn’t be necessary in our alternate reality. But having the battery support would make our HPV’s practical medium-distance vehicles. No train to the next town? It’s only 30 miles - let’s just take the Velomobile...

There are other implications as well. Streets would look different - there would be considerably less need for traffic controls - stop signs and such - and probably no need at all for stoplights. The Dutch have already demonstrated this to a considerable degree. Road surfaces would last longer without the constant pounding of one- to three-ton machines. Pedestrian injuries and traffic deaths in general would be far, far lower. People in would be far more fit, on average, given the routine cardio workout involved in traveling from place to place. Not to mention the lack of issues surrounding air pollution and all of the problems with finding, securing, drilling, refining, and transporting oil.

Will our world look more like the alternate universe we are considering here going forward? It’s hard to say for sure, but the opportunity appears to be there at the moment. The effects aren’t simply academic. Multiple European countries, particularly (but not exclusively) Denmark and the Netherlands have seen many of the benefits listed above with their focus on cycling, and we’ve already seen an improvement in air quality with the reduced automotive traffic during the shelter-at-home orders. And one expects the changes, to the degree they occur, will be seen more in the cities than in rural areas, particularly here in the States - there’s a lot of territory to cover, and that old train network is long gone. But I still enjoy the idea...

Re-Tired

To start here, let me note that I am a person who firmly believes that, even if you have some fancy book learnin’, you should still be able to work with your hands.

From about age 12 up to and through college I worked summers for my Dad’s contracting business as a plumber’s helper. That experience, even though I was a essentially a glorified gopher (or maybe not so glorified) has been invaluable through my adult life - it has made me willing and able to do things for myself that I would otherwise have to bring in - and pay - someone else to do. That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes pay other people anyway, but it means that I often at least have the option.

That being said, I remember the day clearly when, as a young adult, I was opining about the possibility of not going on to school and finding other work. I was saying this to my father, and then I watched his his face as he clearly looked back in his memory and began to recall my handiwork on previous projects before he said: "Son, you should go to college."

It was said with love, and he was right.

This memory comes back me any time I take on something like putting tires on my trike.

Last time I wrote about the rapid deterioration of the front tires on my Catrike Expedition, and how I was fortunate to have made it back without encountering a debilitating failure. But while I’d made it back, having enjoyed one more ride, it was clear that the trike was going to be out of commission until A) the new tires I ordered from Utah Trikes came in; and 2) I could actually get them put on.

The getting them put on was going to be the more challenging part given that, as indicated above, I am someone who’s skills at technical labor indicated that I should go to college... It was also slightly complicated by the fact that I had another issue to deal with. Shortly after I posted that story last week several very helpful folks in the Catrike Owner’s Group on Facebook pointed out that I needed to check my toe-in.

Like my father before them, they were right - shout out here to everyone who offered the idea and suggestions, but especially Jim Aliano, who brought it up first and had multiple helpful suggestions, as well as Bob Richardson who’s practical solution was invaluable.

And I did go out for a ride that day, pressing my trusty 1987 Cannondale SR400 back into service. A little air in the tires and I slid my feet into the stirrups and she was off, ready and raring to go...

...and all the ride really accomplished was to make me miss my trike. It’s honestly the first time in a very long time I can remember being ready for a ride to just be over. It’s not the Cannondale’s fault - she’s doing her best. Its not her, it’s me.

All of which meant that, when the tires arrived this past Wednesday I jumped at the chance to get them on the trike. It also means that Wednesday was when I was once again reminded of my skill level when it comes to working with my hands.

To begin with, I started out with the worse of the two tires, the right side, which had the tear and the bulge in it. In the intervening time between the end of my ride on Saturday and getting to the repair the tube - which had miraculously held while I was riding it - had given up the ghost. I could hardly blame it, so I thanked it for its service and pulled out my spare tubes.

I had three - two new ones, and one that I had patched last summer. But I had one flat, one intact tube on the other wheel, and two new tires. So all good, right?

As I set to getting the old tire off I started by setting the trike on its side and removing the brake caliper, figuring that was the first step towards pulling the wheel off the trike. However, after I did this I realized, looking at the trike sitting sideways, that I didn’t need to remove the wheel. So I stopped with that approach and decided to work with it _on_ the trike.

The old tire came off relatively easily and getting the inside bead set for the new one went by pretty easily as well. I put one of the new tubes in, and then went to getting the outside edge on to the wheel. And that - as always - is where the challenges began.

The recommendation is always that you set the tire in the wheel by hand. I understand the logic behind this and, while I’ve seen it done on multiple occasions by the skilled technicians at bike shops, I lack either the hand strength, the technique, or perhaps both, to do it myself.

So I employed tire levers. Well, if I’m being honest, I employed tire levers and a prodigious amount of swearing. Rosie - who is my frequent companion when I am working in the garage - may have learned a new term or two that evening. Fortunately, she generally keeps these things to herself.

With the levers and the swearing dutifully employed I managed to snap the tire on the wheel. I pulled out the pump and...

...you already know what’s coming right? The tube gave a disheartening hiss as the air came out of wherever I’d managed to pinch a hole with the tire lever.

There may have been more swearing at that point. I think somewhere in there Rosie actually covered her ears with her paws.

But I still had one new tube, and one patched tube to work with so, swearing aside, it was all fine. Just fine.

It becomes a bit of a blur after that, but suffice it to say that I ended up putting a hole in the second new tube, and somewhere in there I managed to snap a plastic tire lever in half (lots of swearing then, let me tell you) and had to default to steel levers and the patched tube to successfully replace that first tire.

That’s right - the first tire.

But there it was, now, mounted on the wheel and holding air - success! However, it was also the case that I’d mounted only one of two new tires, and I had no more spare tubes. Sure, the tube in the other tire was still intact, but given my track record on this task, I was not confident that I’d end up with a new tire on with an inflatable tube.

So I made an executive decision. The tire on the other wheel was worn, but not nearly as badly as the one I’d already replaced. The center was bald, but none of the cord or Kevlar was showing. So I decided to leave it, figuring it would be good for a couple of rides while I waited for more tubes to arrive.

I’m sure that’s the sort of decision that would make some people’s teeth itch, but I’d already been several days without a ride because the Expedition was out of commission and because the Cannondale and I are broke up. I’d reset the toe-in, and though it was an ugly solution, it would get be back on the road.

Itchy teeth or not, I’m pleased to say that this worked out just fine. I was able to get rides in on Thursday and Friday. And Saturday, the tubes arrived:

I wanted some insurance, and hopefully to have tubes left over to put in the pannier bags for another day. And now that the tubes were in, I went ahead and changed the other tire.

Astonishing to no one more than it was to me, I managed to get it in one - and that using metal tire levers. So now things are even again - new shoes on both fronts.

None of this is to say that the struggles will dissuade me. I realized a couple of years ago that, if I was going to keep increasing my riding time I was going to have to build my skills as a bike mechanic. Our nearest bike shop is twenty minutes away and, while they are always very helpful, they do not sell trikes. The nearest trike dealer - Meads Bike Shop - is also very helpful, but it’s an hour one way for me, and so not ideal for everyday problems. The reality is that rural cycling - like many other things rural - means learning to do for yourself.

Tired

I am running just a little shy of 1400 miles on the Expedition since I got it last July. I noticed, as I was extracting it from the mobile trike garage the past couple of rides, that the front tires were starting to look pretty worn.

(With Shelter in Place orders, the mobile trike garage doesn’t go much of anywhere lately, but I’ve found it’s easier to just leave the trike in the Subaru than to back the car out in order to get the trike down from its hooks. I’ve definitely been riding more than driving).

In fact, I’d been noticing the progressive loss of tread on the fronts for the past month or so, but I figured they still had some life in them. By yesterday, tho, it was starting to look pretty bad.

Still, I wanted to ride, and all a blown tire on a trike does usually is strand you - unless you are going very fast downhill there isn’t the risk of wipeout there is on an upright machine. Besides, right now both My Lovely Wife and my child are, like most of us, perpetually at home. A rescue mission would, instead of a hardship, likely seem a welcome opportunity for some variety .

So I rode.

I rode 16 miles out and back, give or take, and rolled back into the driveway without a hint of a problem. I did my usual tear down on the trike - take off the flag, remove the lights to put them on the charger, fold the headrest forward - and put the Expedition into the back of the Subaru. And then I did a tire inspection and found this:

So: It didn’t fail, but failure was imminent.

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It was clear that I was going to have to get new tires. These are the original tires the Expedition came with - Schwalbe Marathon Racers 20x1.50 - and I’ve been pretty happy with them. My criteria for tires is not terribly strict, but I haven’t had a single flat (including, by some miracle, on this last ride) since I’ve gotten them, which wasn’t true on the Pocket with its Marathon Plus’s.

My localest bike shop (about 20 minutes away) doesn’t sell trikes, and so typically doesn’t carry tires or tubes in trike sizes, and they are currently open only by appointment. The closest shop that does carry trikes is an hour away.

So I went online.

A search on Amazon for these tires was... frustrating. Even with the full name of the product and size entered, it was difficult to find an item that was clearly the correct size (e.g. with too many different pieces of information in the description), and the search still returned multiple items that were not matches. Obviously you can return things if they aren’t right, but I really didn’t want to risk waiting through multiple purchase cycles to see if I had the right items.

So I went over to Utah Trikes and ordered them there. I could have tried cross shopping at other online bike shops - I’ve done so for other cycling items I’ve purchased to be sure - but I was A) already frustrated from trying to find things on Amazon; and 2) the information on the Utah Trikes page was extremely clear about what I was ordering; and besides: iii) they were cheaper than on Amazon even with having to pay shipping, so...

And so now I wait, Expedition grounded. I gave brief consideration this morning to applying duct tape across the bulging section - it’s what Red Green would do, after all, but I suspect I used up all of my good fortune on the last ride. The Norns have already smiled upon me, but they are fickle - no need to tempt them further.

It’s a bummer, of course, but I do have options. The Pocket is still here - it belongs to MLW now, but she might let me ride it if I ask nicely. However, I’d have to re-set the boom and re-size the chain to make that work. I also still have my Cannondale road bike always at the ready to ride if needed. I’ve actually gotten fairly good at re-setting sizes on the trikes with practice, so I’m confident that I could do that with the Pocket fairly easily, but the lazy guy in me ensures that I’ll go with the Cannondale first. All I have to do with that is take it down and pump up the tires.

Sometimes people think that they will gain a renewed fondness for a thing that they’ve stepped away from and are now returning to. I’ve been a victim of that impulse in the past, but I’ve been through this with the Cannondale since getting trikes - I already know it won’t happen.

Still, I guess I’ll struggle thru (I can just feel your - understandable - lack of pity for me). Now it’s time to ride... something.

Hindsight with Clarity

A few weeks ago I had the brief opportunity to take a ride on the Withlacoochee Trail in central-ish Florida. I live, shall we say, slightly north of Florida, and so instead of riding my faithful Catrike Expedition I rented. My rental ride was a HP Velotechnik Gekko in a bright yellow/green.

I really like my Catrikes, but my experience with other makes is extremely limited - my first trike was a Pocket, and while I’ve been cycling most of my life, that’s the Pocket was the only recumbent trike I’d ridden, and I’d bought it without a test ride from a man on the internet (on eBay). I did get a chance to ride an Expedition before buying one, briefly, at the bike expo in Milwaukee, but that was honestly just to be sure I liked the additional size. I was already hooked at that point.

So the Gekko was somewhat of a new experience for me. I described most of the details about that experience in the Withlacoochee trail post, but there was something I noticed about the Gekko that I left out of that post.

I was in a hurry to get riding on the day that I went out in Florida, so aside from a quick look over to familiarize myself with the location of the controls and the in-seat storage, I decided I’d have to learn anything else about the trike on the go.

The thing that stood out the most was how startlingly clear the view to the rear of the trike was.

The mirror on the Gekko is a teardrop-shaped, heavy-duty affair that gives the impression of durability and quality. It also seemed extremely stable and vibration free.

My Catrikes, like most, have the round Mirrycle mirrors on them. These are small, inexpensive mirrors that do give a view of the activity to the rear, but they are extremely subject to sympathetic vibration with road imperfections. This can be controlled for to some degree by removing the vertical section of the mounting system, which I did on my Pocket. However, that seems to be less of an option on the Expedition, as the position of the mounting post and the fenders make things a little more intimate on that machine. Even with that change, tho, the improvement is incremental - the vibration is reduced, but not gone. This means that you can see things coming up behind you, but details are not available - it’s hard to tell a car from a truck from a wildebeest (big wildebeest problem here on the roads of Northern Illinois, don’t ya know...).

And that was the difference here. While there wasn’t any worry about motor vehicles approaching from the rear - the Withlacoochee is a recreational trail - I was still surprised at how well I could see riders approaching from behind, for example, or the receding image of people that I passed. The difference was stark.

Stark enough that I asked the very helpful woman at Trailside Cycles about the mirror. She went out to look at the trike, and indicated to me that it was a HP Velotechnik mirror (which made sense at the time - more on that below). She also had one in stock.

I asked if she thought it could be mounted on a Catrike and she thought it could, pointing out that it mounts to the head tube.

The price on the package - $69.50 - was not insubstantial, particularly compared with what I was accustomed to spending on Mirrycle mirrors, which can be ordered from Amazon for less than $13. I gave thought to taking a picture of the package and looking it up online later - this is often a fairly decent strategy for saving a bit of cash on a purchase. However, I am loathe to do that to a small business in general (but hey, suck it Wal-Mart!), and the folks at Trailside Bike had been very kind and accommodating to me, so I thought it only fair to buy it from them. In deference to the price, however, I bought just the left side mirror.

As is often the case, it took me a while to get to mounting it to the trike. In this case the primary impediment was that the bolt that came with the mirror - as well as the one already in the head tube - was too short. I didn’t have a longer one at home, so it had to wait until I could make it down to my localest bike shop.

I was a little concerned that what looked so clear and vibration free on a Florida trail might not contend quite as well with the weather-challenged byways of rural Illinois. Since the new mirror mounts to the head tube, and the Mirrycle mirror is mounted to the accessory bar, I left the old mirror on so I could do a direct comparison.

Yeah - it’s better, even in Illinois.

The Mirrycle’s are convex mirrors, which adds a wide field of view, but makes everything in the mirror smaller (objects in mirror may be...). By contrast, the flat display on the HP mirror provides for a larger picture, and while it does have a reduced field of vision, what it offers is more than sufficient to see the road behind.

While that’s good, the more vital detail is that it is stable - virtually vibration free, even on the Northern Illinois asphalt. This leads to a clear picture of what is approaching from behind, which can be more important than you might think. Wildebeests aside, the whole idea of a mirror is that you can glance into it periodically to see if something is coming. The small, unclear image in the old mirror would sometimes appear to render immovable objects - trees over a hill, for example - as things approaching from the distance. Sorting that out sometimes takes extended viewing and processing time, all of which is time not looking at the road ahead.

When the thing in the mirror is an actual vehicle, it’s good to know the type, at times. While I firmly believe in taking my lane, how one handles approaching farm implements is still different than what one does for automobiles.

So - in short, I like it. The price is rather dear, to be sure, and if I had just been looking at it on a website instead of having used it on the rental trike, I can just about guarantee that my cheapness gene would have won.

Which brings me around to the type of mirror, and where one can find it. It turns out that researching the mirror for this post - and for consideration of a right side mirror for myself later on (I like symmetry) - was a bit confusing. If there is a way to order it through the HP Velotechnik site I was unable to find it. Even doing a site search for "mirror" turns up nothing related to mirrors. So I looked over the package from Trailside Bike for information, and it has has two labels on it:

I started out with the larger label, and then when to the smaller one. I should have started with the smaller one. Using "HP Velotechnik Mirror" got me to Industrial Bicycles. You can also find them at Utah Trikes (of course) under "B&M Head Tube Mounted Mirror". In both cases they are slightly cheaper (by 50¢) than I paid at Trailside Bike, but shipping from the former is over $20, and for the latter is $13, so I got a pretty good deal buying it on site (makes that cheapness gene unclench just a little bit).

What oddly didn’t occur to me until later was to look up and see whether Trailside Bike had a means to order one. They do - and they’ll ship it via US Mail for as low as $5.27.

So that’s where I’ll go to get the right-side mirror if I can get that cheapness gene to unclench the rest of the way. After all, I like symmetry, and I want to be able to see the approaching wildebeests from all angles...

Riding With Rosie

One of the things that has been on the longer list of my things to do with the trike is going out more regularly with Rosie, our Australian Shepard.

This is not a new idea, of course. People have been riding with their dogs in one way or another probably since the modern safety bicycle was invented. Heck, maybe even before then...

Back in the old days, of course, people had a more laissez-faire attitude towards their companion animals. If the dog would run alongside you that was great, and if it wouldn't - if it took off or ran after others or disappeared you’d assume that it would find its way home. If it didn’t, well, it wasn’t a very good dog, then, was it?

Nowadays, as a general rule we keep our canine companions a little closer and, ideally, safer, but this does mean it can be a bit of a project. For smaller dogs you have to figure out a way to contain and carry them on your machine - there’s a delightful group on Facebook called Dogs on Trikes that provides a plethora of examples of this. For larger and more active dogs it means finding a way to attach the dog to the trike that is both safe for the dog and safe for the machine.

It’s not my first rodeo on this front. When I was younger (circa late 90’s and early oughts) we had a couple of very active dogs - one a border collie mix named Dax, the other an industrial-sized Australian Cattle Dog named Sisko. Dax was mine, while Sisko was MLW’s companion.

Each dog has its own attitude and comfort level with cycling machines. With this in mind, when I first introduced Dax to the bike (and it was an upright back then) I was very cautious. I walked him over to sit near the bike, and I petted him. Then I moved the bike back and forth a bit by him, and I petted him. I rolled it by and leaned it in towards him and...

...and he gave me a look that I swear said "Dude! What I see here is: I can run as fast as I want, for as long as I want. Is that right? Then let’s stop messing around and get going!"

(If you’ve lived with a herding dog you have probably seen a look like this before.)

So I hooked him up and we went. It was magic - he took to it like he’d been born to do exactly that. He was so eager, in fact, that I’d have to watch carefully to catch his energy flagging, and periodically make sure he wasn’t overheating, because he wouldn’t slow down unless I did. We rode together for years.

Rosie is an Australian Shepard mix, with a similar personality type and energy level, though thankfully a little more subdued than Dax was (he was well matched to a young man in his late 20’s and early 30’s, but I’m slightly more seasoned now). She’s always eager to come along in the car (and often seems to think she should be there, even if it’s not convenient to the moment).

When I say get out "more regularly", what I mean to say is that we’ve done it exactly once before. A little while after I got the Catrike Pocket I took her out along one of the wind turbine access roads as sort of a test-run. I wanted her away from traffic, and I wanted to be sure that she’d be able to keep herself out of the front wheels.

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That might actually be mental overkill, and I don’t think I’d ever even considered it as an issue with Dax. But the fact that she’d be running right beside the front wheel of the trike concerned me a bit with respect to the idea that she might step into that wheel. That would be a bad day for both of us (but mostly for Rosie).

I chose to go back to the same wind turbine access road, again to stay out of traffic. I had given consideration to going into town and riding around the lake, which wouldn't have been entirely traffic free, but would have been paved. Still, the access road is closer, and this was an experiment of sorts, so why not?

This is why not:

It hasn’t rained or snowed recently, but we did still have some snow on the ground, and it was a nearly 60° day, so it was... soft.

I realized this when I got there, and looked at it all for a long while as Rosie waited in the hatch (did I mention she likes to be in the car?). But ultimately I figured I was already there, so we might as well make a go of it. After all, this was really more of an experiment of sorts - just to get out and do a practice run to make sure she would handle it ok.

I needn’t have worried.

We went slow - in part by design, to get her used to it, and in part because soft is slow - and went a little less than a mile - the distance of the access road there and back. Aside from a couple of attempts to go the wrong way - e.g. backwards - she did just great! Her response wasn’t quite as eager as Dax’s back in the day (I suspect that’s a once in a lifetime sort of thing), but she really did seem to enjoy it, and did well with it. A good time was had by all.

...And then I went home and cleaned the mud off the trike and out of the car.

Finishing February

There is just something about February.

Even though I am, and have been, a routine winter rider, over the past few years February has routinely turned up as my least active month for riding. It is tempting to blame this on the fact that it’s the shortest month, but let’s be honest - those two or three missing days aren’t the issue. It’s not like I was planning going to go out and ride the last couple of days in the month, only to suddenly discover that they weren’t there...

I think, ultimately, I have to blame the weather. Winter cycling aside, in northern Illinois, (and I think this is true for the upper Midwest in general) February is simply the least cooperative in terms of cycling friendly weather. Looking back across the calendar over the past three years or so it’s the month typically with the lowest number of rides, as well as the lowest distance. Lower distances make sense - my rides are typically shorter in the winter, as I try to make loops that keep me closer to home in case I need to call for help. But the smaller number of rides are the things that point to the weather.

As I discussed a couple of weeks ago, poor visibility conditions and freezing rain (and lightening, but that’s not much of a problem in the winter) are about the only things that will keep me off the trike. When I look back through the calendar, my usual ride days in February are missing ride events. Sometimes there are things to explain it - I missed a Sunday this February because we were traveling down to Florida, for example - but often the ride that should be there just isn’t. And that suggests something prevented me from getting out, which suggests weather.

Fortunately, if I isolate February from other months, and just compare them, it looks like the pattern is improving. The graph below shows my mileage for the past four Februaries - 2017 thru 2020:

I rode once in February 2017, three times in February of 2018, and six in both 2019 and 2020. In fairness to 2018, I also went cross country skiing on two occasions, so I did have five outings for the month. And even though the number of outings is the same for 2019 and 2020, the distance has increased.

The big change from 2017 to 2018 was the acquisition of the Catrike Pocket. I had been thinking about getting a mountain bike to better handle both gravel and snow, when it occurred to me that a trike would also be good at those surfaces (or at least much better than my Cannondale road bike), and that I’d wanted one for a very long time. And I did discover, after my two outings on the skis in 2018, that I preferred winter riding over skiing - at least on the type of snow that northern Illinois has been offering over the past several years. Those two outings in February 2018 are the last time I’ve done XC Skiing.

Admittedly, some of this is not new information - there are certainly other examples here of me discovering that: you know what? I like riding trikes! But when I look at that comparatively low number for February and start to feel a little down on myself, I find it helpful to step back and look at the bigger picture. In this case, that picture is: Yeah, February sucks, but at least it’s sucking less than it used to...

And, of course, now it’s Not February (also known as "March"), so it’s about time to go out and ride...

Withlacoochee Trail

The events of the past week found me and mine shedding the bonds of rural northern Illinois in favor of the sunnier - and mostly warmer - embrace of central Florida.

This was a family trip, and as such was primarily centered around what you’d expect of a trip to the Orlando area. While we aren’t, as a rule, fans of the corporate mouse, we do all enjoy the creations of George Lucas and of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and crew; and there is a significant subset of the family partial to the Potter that is Harry. But all that being the case, it seemed like there should be some opportunity in the week to squeeze in a ride.

Several years ago I’d realized, in part by chance, that there are often places in well established communities that will rent you a bike if you are looking for a ride and did not happen to bring one along. That first opportunity was in Arizona - Scottsdale, specifically - and was prior to my triking days. But I figured since I was heading to the homeland of Catrike there was a fairly good chance that I could find someone to rent a trike once I got there.

We drove for this trip (in fact, we are on the way back as I started writing this post, tapping away in the passenger seat as LB pilots the Mobile Trike Garage), so I did consider the option of simply taking my Expedition along for the trip. The Outback handles the trike just fine on the roof, and I could have pulled off the seat mesh and bags to improve mileage on the drive. But I was less concerned about getting it to and from, and more with what to do with it during. This was a week-long trip, and the riding was incidental. I love my trike, but they are somewhat cumbersome. I wasn’t sure if we’d have space for it in the room at the resort, and I didn’t want to leave it exposed on the roof for the week. I suppose I could have stored it in the car when we weren’t using it, but I suspect that would have involved a lot of moving it back and forth like, say, every time we wanted to carry people the car.

So: Rental.

I tapped into the Recumbent Trikes Group on Facebook for thoughts on places to try, and helpfully got a couple of options. I went with Trailside Bikes in Floral City because it is right beside - and I mean literally right beside - the Withlacoochee Trail, and also because Trailside Bikes did not require a deposit. They also did not take reservations, so I was taking a chance that they wouldn't have anything for me. I timed my arrival to just before the shop opened and crossed my fingers.

The trail was about an hour and a half from where we were staying in Kissimmee, and the route the map gave me was almost entirely two-lane roadways. I quickly began to realize that absolutely no one in Central Florida appears to be in much of a hurry to get anywhere. Fortunately, things did move along at something approximating the speed limit, and I got to the shop a couple of minutes before opening time.

The shop was already open, getting things set up for the day, and there was already a line for rentals (three groups, including me) - and this was a Tuesday morning!

Trailside was very much like any small bike shop, making it familiar territory, with the exception that it was literally full of trikes. Catrike, HP Velotechnik, Ice, were represented in the shop, as were a couple of other brands.

The rental group was small, but with some choices - the gentleman ahead of me, for example, was specific about wanting to rent a full suspension trike and wanted an ICE, which wasn’t available for rental, but chose an HP Scorpion FS instead.

I was offered an HP Gekko. There were other models to choose from, and it was clear I could have asked for something else, but I was looking forward for the opportunity to try something different from my usual.

Once selected, there was a brief set-up - mostly sizing - that I was assisted with, and I was ready to go. I had brought along my SPD sandals in anticipation of needing them, but all of the rental units were set up with flat, heel-sling supported pedals. I am certain someone out there will know what specific model of pedals these are:

While it wasn’t what I expected, it immediately made sense to me. If you are renting trikes, you can’t count on the average, curious weekend or vacation explorer bringing along foot retention. The pedals lacked the top of the foot retention that I use on my Expedition, so you only get to push, not pull. All-in-all, though, it seemed a reasonable compromise for a rental.

Renting also meant that I didn’t have mounting points for my phone (for ride tracking), nor were there pannier bags and such. However, many trike models, if not all, typically have some sort of storage built into the seat. On the Gekko, it turns out, there is a zipper pocket right at the top of the seat, and it was more than large enough for my phone, wallet, and keys.

The Withlacoochee Trail

Once I was all set up I hit the trail, which is, as previously mentioned and as implied by the name on the sign, quite literally right beside the the shop.

My time on the trail was limited - I was squeezing this ride in ahead of going to see the Star Wars exhibit at Disney Hollywood Studios, and I needed to get in, and get back, by noon. Ultimately this gave me just over 50 minutes and 12 miles of experience with the trail itself. In order to keep myself cognizant of the time without my phone easily accessible I set a timer for the halfway point in terms of total time, and wore a single Apple AirPod Pro so I’d be sure to be able to hear it when it went off. Yes, I hear you saying, a watch would have been a simpler solution, but I don’t own one. Also, I was more concerned about getting lost in the enjoyment of the ride and forgetting to check the time. I probably would have set the timer even if I’d had the phone mounted in front of me.

I started out riding south of Trailside Bikes for a little over five miles. This direction, as indicated by the helpful folks in the shop, was more rural, while the northerly course was through more settled area. The trail itself was asphalt, and in excellent condition (a very different experience from the asphalt trails - or roads, for that matter - in Illinois). The Withlacoochee is a rail-trail, so it bears the familiar signs of that type of setup - it is flat (although, so is most of Florida), and runs mostly in a fairly straight line. It’s separated from the roadway, and has vegetation barriers on each side, giving it a somewhat isolated (in a pleasant fashion) feel.

The vegetation is, of course, Floridian in nature, with Spanish moss in the trees, and other items of a rather tropical nature...

The sign for the trail indicates there are no horses allowed on the pavement. There is a grass strip down each side of the trail, however, which would imply that equestrian use _is_ allowed along that portion of the trail. I did not encounter any horses on the trail itself, but I was treated to this sight along the way:

My alarm went off just a little past the five mile mark, so I turned around and headed back. Looking at the map, this meant that, while I was in a fairly rural area, I didn’t reach the Withlacoochee State Forest, nor had I come across the portion where the trail runs along the Withlacoochee River. This was ok, and consistent with what I had expected, given my limited time. Still, if a future opportunity presented itself, I think I’d set things up to ride further to the south.

When I got back to the starting point, however, I found that I still had a little bit of time to work with - I was riding pretty vigorously, trying to make the most of the workout opportunity. So I set another, shorter timer and rode about a mile or so to the north of Trailside Bikes.

This area was more settled, and in fact there were a few businesses along the way:

In addition to the Fruit Stand there were a couple of taverns just off the trail with varying levels of entryway from the trail to the parking lot. If one were taking the time to ride the entire trail one could probably find a stopping point for some lunch and a beer.

This was an active trail. As I noted above, I was riding on a Tuesday morning, and there were multiple cyclists on the trail, as well as the occasional walker and/or jogger. Most were pleasant and returned a wave or a "good morning". Especially fun and interesting for me was the one thing, aside from the vegetation, that made it clear that I was in Florida: the sheer number of trike riders I encountered.

Some of this was to be expected, given that there were folks renting ahead of me, and I did encounter those folks. However, I also came across at least a half-dozen other people out on their trikes on this lovely morning.

This is a special delight for me, given the number of trikes I typically encounter when riding in rural northern Illinois (for those playing at home the number you are looking for rhymes with "Nero"...).

All in all it was a good ride, and a pleasant trail. It’s a little away from the Orlando area, but worth fitting in to a family trip. To be clear, a look at Google Maps with the bike trail settings turned on will show many bike routes available closer by Orlando. However, none of these are nearly as long, and most, if not all, seem to have an urban or suburban orientation, with several running at least part of the time on City streets. Good enough for exercise, but not what I’m looking for from a trail. Plus: Bike rental appears to surprisingly limited in the Orlando area, and trike rental even more so. Having a shop renting right on the trail is a major bonus. If you are going to be in the region and want to ride, I’d suggest checking it out.

The Gekko

My steed for this brief journey was an HP Velotechnik Gekko - I believe with a 26" rear wheel. My usual ride is now a Catrike Expedition, and previously a Catrike Pocket, so those are what I have to compare the experience to.

The Gekko seems to sit a little higher than the Catrikes, though not to a disorienting degree. The spec sheet on HP’s website indicates it’s about two pounds heavier than the Expedition, but given that it was bare - no rack or bags or cargo of any kind - I suspect it was comparable to my Expedition as it is currently kitted out. The Gekko has grip shifters instead of bar-ends, which was a nice change - I had them on the Pocket, and miss them a bit on the Expedition, though I’ve since adjusted.

Overall, it was a very familiar experience. I was cautioned to stay out of the little ring when it was being set up (I suspect to avoid dropping the chain), which was not a problem on the flat trail. It spooled up quickly and was a comfortable machine. I did find myself leaning in to turns more, I think as an artifact of the increased ride height. This was a felt need - at no point did the trike tip. Speed was good - my average speed for the ride was 14.42 mph over 12.31 miles, and my top speed was 26.31 mph. These are good numbers for me, and comparable to my summer speeds over... similar terrain. I say similar here because I don’t often ride trails, and those in my area are neither as smooth or as flat as the section of the Withlacoochee Trail that I rode. People think Illinois is flat, but Florida could teach Illinois a thing or two on that topic... in any case, the trail conditions abetted higher speeds.

Probably the only area of noticeable difference was the steering. Catrikes have direct steering, while the Gekko has indirect steering. This seemed to allow for a tighter turning circle, which I appreciated when I did need to turn around. Otherwise, it also seemed a bit more disconnected and less immediate, and on occasions where I had to take my hands off the handlebars while moving, it shook a bit in a fashion that doesn’t happen on my Catrikes. I don’t know if this was an artifact of this particular trike (maybe something was a little loose) or more broadly due to the type of steering, since I’ve never ridden an indirect steering trike before. However, I found the difference to be minor. Overall, I was glad to have the experience - the relative paucity of trikes in my area limits opportunity.

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And that was my Florida ride. People sometimes bemoan returning from winter vacation to the cold northlands. For myself I’d normally write here about how I enjoy winter - and I do - but it’s 43° here in Northern Illinois now, working its way up to a high of 51° (F). We had a beautiful week during most of our stay in Florida - highs in the 70’s and 80’s, including the day of my ride - but our last two days were in the 40’s, so coming home wasn’t much of a transition at all.

And - of course - a high in the low 50’s along with sunshine means today is a great day to ride...

Keeping All Your Eggs In One...

When I asked MLW what she wanted for Christmas this year, she requested a fancy countertop egg cooker. This is a thing that makes hard boiled eggs, soft boiled eggs, poached eggs, omelettes, scrambled eggs, pheasant eggs under glass... (not sure about the last one). Seemed a perfectly reasonable request, so we ordered one up.

...and sent it back to exchange for another one that worked. And when the new one arrived we were missing one key component to egg making happiness: the eggs.

For me this presented an opportunity to kill three birds with one egg - I could make my sweetie happy, get in my Sunday ride, and get an opportunity to use my trike as transport and see how it would handle fragile items across the six miles or so of country blacktop between home and town.

The fragile part was really the only question in the mix. I’ve done multiple cargo runs into town on the trike, and carried some heavier items as well, but I wasn’t entirely sure how this one would go. My Catrike Expedition is a capable machine, but it has nothing on it resembling a suspension. And the roads here aren’t bad, but they do have their fair share of expansion joints and other imperfections to contend with, and I can confirm that my tuches is familiar with each and every one of them.

Still, I figured the worst that could happen would be needing to clean out a pannier bag and then having to drive in and shell out cash for more eggs. Seemed a reasonable risk, so off I went.

When you live out in the country the tendency is to purchase things in bulk. No one wants to discover that they are down to just one of anything - sad when it’s eggs or lunch meat, terrifying when it’s toilet paper. So that meant I was going to be carrying back three dozen eggs in two 18-packs.

I put them in my pannier bag with the old zip-neck fleece pullover I carry for temperature emergencies as padding. What I didn’t adequately prepare myself for was the change in perspective that occurred for the ride back.

Literally every bump, crack, frost heave, or other tarmac imperfection became locked into my visual radar, and each time I chose poorly - each time a bump smacked harder, more smartly than seemed ideal - I winced in sympathetic, anticipatory pain.

This also had the effect of slowing me down markedly. The wind was not against me, and my load wasn’t heavy - it’s two cartons of eggs, for goodness sake - and yet my average for the return trip dropped to something south of 10mph as I gingerly picked my way back across the prairie landscape.

When I got back to the garage I pulled out the cartons and contemplated opening them there to see how I’d done. However, I have a personal tendency towards tragic mishap when it comes to interacting with fragile and/or fluid containing items, and raw eggs, it seems to me, fit in both categories. As I considered it I could picture myself opening a carton, having carried it all the way home on my trike, and then unceremoniously dropping it’s contents on the garage floor.

Hell, I figured I was going to be fortunate to just not drop them while carrying them in to the house.

So I carefully picked them up - with both hands, just like Grandma Marie taught me - and took them inside. I set them firmly on the table, ensuring they were securely placed before I opened them. And:

There you have it. I suspect I was being a little over the top in my concern on the way home - I’ll be more comfortable next time. But I’ll still carry them in using both hands.

2019 Cycling Year in Review

So it’s that time when we look back at the year that was and consider where we’ve been, what we’ve done in regard to our goals, and consider where you’d like to go from there. And here at Applied Life it’s now an annual tradition. You know, cuz I did it once before, last year.

We’ll set aside the fact that there’s nothing actually special about the end of the month of December, and further set aside the fact that a more reasonably designed calendar would end the year either on the winter solstice or the vernal equinox. But that’s what you get when you have a calendar designed by committee, so, you know, I won’t even bring that up here.

As always, it is always important to remember to compare oneself to oneself, not to others. I periodically have to remind myself of this, particularly when undertaking something like this. With that in mind, what follows is a look at _my_ year in cycling.

Distance

My goal for this past year was to get to 1500 miles. This seemed a reasonable, achievable increase from my ultimate 2018 total of 1372 miles (well, technically 1372.14, but who’s counting...).

That won’t seem like a huge increase - 1372 to 1500 - for some people, I realize. In the cycling groups I follow there are people who literally have tens of thousands of miles per year. But keeping in mind that adage of comparing oneself to oneself, it seemed reasonable at the time.

I may have undersold myself. I met the goal this year, and then sailed past it a bit, to hit a year end mark of 1722.34 miles.

In terms of the how and why, according to Cyclemeter I rode both more often, and for longer distances per ride on average. Last year I managed 106 rides, with an average distance of 12.94 miles. For 2019 I came in at 121 rides, with an average distance of 14.23 miles.

That may seem pretty elementary, and in some ways it is. But rides and distance both take up time, and it can be challenging to squeeze additional riding into my schedule. But I did make a conscious effort to increase the length of my Sunday rides, which seems to have had an effect. I’ve also tried to do a better job of taking riding opportunities where they present - for example, riding to my mailbox on days when I am working from home (it’s a 16-mile round trip to a PO Box - I’m not just riding to the end of the driveway).

It also helps sometimes when you have a new toy, which brings us to...

Machines

I know that a lot of cyclists are N+1 types (as in the right number of bikes to own is the number I have now - _N_ - plus one more). I am not. I think new bikes are cool and all - they sure do look pretty sitting there on the showroom floor. But I’m really much more the sort of person who establishes a long-term relationship with a machine. I rode my 1987 Cannondale for at least a decade before getting the Catrike Pocket, and I was set to ride off into the sunset with the little blue machine.

But I didn’t.

At the end of July I took possession of an Atomic Orange Catrike Expedition.

To be clear, was absolutely nothing wrong with the Pocket, and I’d been happy riding it for the past two years or so. But I’d purchased the Pocket as my entry into the world of recumbent trikes, a chance to see whether or not I liked it. My selection of it as a particular model was one of convenience - it came up as available on eBay, was in my price range, and was only an hour away.

It’s worked out well for all of that, but when I felt like I was finally in a position to consider getting something different, I decided to take a more considered look at what I thought would work for me and my cycling goals, and the Expedition seemed to fill the bill. I’m liking it a lot, as anyone looking back across the posts this year can see. And I suspect this will be a long-term fling.

And this doesn’t hang the Pocket out to dry. I resized it for MLW so she can have her own triking adventures.

Trips

This year, as usual, most of my rides started and ended at my driveway. But between opportunities offered by work travel, and some additional general adventurousness, I did get out to a few new trails, as well as revisited some more. Those included:

• The month of May offered an opportunity to drive down to the pointy end of the state, so I took a ride on the Tunnel Hill Trail, riding from Vienna to Karnak.
• In June I made the trip over to Sterling to tackle the Hennepin Feeder Canal trail. I managed to get very wet. Incidentally, the feeder canal provides the water supply for the Hennepin Canal. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s Illinois gateway trail for the Rails to Trails coast to coast path project.
• In July I returned to the I&M Canal trail and learned a thing or two about what the rainy season can do to a trike. And then I returned again to go hunting for my lost flag (ugh).
• In August the opportunity to ride the Des Plaines River Trail presented itself.
• I rode in the Farmondo again in September.
• On Black Friday this year I decided to give the Expedition a shot at the Military Ridge Trail in southwestern Wisconsin. I did not distinguish myself in terms of either speed or distance, but I did learn a thing or two about the rolling resistance provided by wet sand, and got quite a workout in the process.

There were a couple of others that I returned to or tried but didn’t find the muse to put them down here, including two return trips to Rend Lake (one on the Pocket, one on the Expedition), and a late day adventure riding north to the titular Tunnel on the Tunnel Hill Trail (that one may still get its own post). One of my goals for last year was to explore more trails and, all in all I think I managed to get there.

Miscellaneous

I had a couple of other areas of more technical exploration in 2019:

• When I ordered the Expedition I also ordered up a pair of Shimano Spd sandals and decided to give being clipped in a try. That experiment was not successful, but I did learn some things along the way; and
• My desire (okay - need) to sometimes have coffee along for the ride led me to add a Terracycle Adjustomatic Bottle Mount to my Expedition. Besides having a product name that is just delightful, it also works very well; and
• The addition of a second trike required me to rethink the storage setup in our comparatively tiny garage. And finally
• Serendipity brought along the opportunity to get a new mobile trike garage in the form of a Subaru Outback. That experiment is more successful than the spd shoes thus far...

Next Year?

The end of the year is also the time to set goals for the new one coming.

In terms of mileage, last year I set my goal at 1500 miles. In retrospect, that seems like it may have been too safe a number, but I also find myself mentally wanting to make excuses about how I’m not sure where or how I would fit much more riding into my schedule. I’m sure I’m not the only person that struggles with that issue - as I said before, distance equals time. Still, I think I need to at least shoot for a 2000 mile goal.

There - I said it. Now we’ll see if I can actually _do_ it...

Last year I said I wanted to explore more trails. I’d like to do a little more of that for 2020 - I think there are a handful of routes in areas I visit that I haven’t yet taken advantage of. But I’d really like to manage a couple of options that I didn’t achieve from last year:

• I would really like to finally make it from LaSalle to Ottawa along the I&M Canal Trail. I tried this year, but was stymied by mud and... well... just so much mud. And I didn’t make it back later in the season, when the rain finally had tapered off.
• Similarly, I didn’t make that trip further down the Hennepin Canal Trail. I did, as noted above, take a ride along the feeder canal, but I didn’t make it back down for the main event. Portions of the Hennepin Canal trail were closed during the rainiest parts of this spring (this is something that, hopefully, Rails to Trails has a plan for sorting out), but again, didn’t take the opportunity to return to it later in the season.

And along these lines, I’d like to see if I can’t find a way to fit the occasional stop in at restaurants or taverns along those routes. This is a thing that I’ve often considered, but with one exception - the Lodi Tap in Utica, following my struggles with the mud along the I&M canal trail (did I mention the mud?) - I usually just keep going (I’m a fairly solitary soul by nature). But I think that would add to the variety along the way.

And finally, I need to finish my trailer project. I’ll be honest here and admit that part of the issue is that working on the trailer directly competes with riding - both are spare time activities, and faced with doing one or the other, I’ve generally chosen to ride. I may need to bring it inside and do some work when the winter snowstorms rise up.

So: that’s it for 2019. Come on 2020 and show us what you’ve got!

Grocery Getter

A couple of weeks ago MLW announced that it was time to make a chuck roast. This is always a moment of celebration in the house - My Lovely Wife is a magnificent cook, and when she applies her skills to a large item like a roast it means that the goodness lasts across several meals. I am a particular beneficiary of this, as I love leftovers, and I seem to be of a singular preference for that in our household.

My role in these things is often to fetch items, and this meal was no exception. I was beginning to gear up for my Sunday ride when she asked if I could run to the store and pick a few things up. It was a short list, and so my first thought was that I could quickly run into town, grab the items on the list, and then go for a ride upon my return. And then it occurred to me: maybe I could kill two birds with one trike...

Ok - so the metaphor there needs a little bit of work, but you can probably see where I am going with this. I asked her if she needed the things on her list right away, or if it would be okay if it took an hour or so. She agreed, and didn’t even roll her eyes at me (or if she did, she was kind enough to do it when I wasn’t looking - either way, I’m a very lucky man).

So I decided it was time to set my Catrike Expedition to work as a grocery getter.

Now I realize that people in urban areas have been using their bikes to run to the store for several years now, and that those numbers are increasing as the amount of urban cycling increases overall. In that respect, this idea is not a new one, and in fact, when I lived in an urban-ish area in the 2000’s I used my Cannondale and a repurposed child trailer to do periodic grocery hauling myself.

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Enjoying this post? Check out our Cycling page for links to other cycling articles on Applied Life

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But we don’t live in an urban area now. We live about six miles out of town on the open prairie, and getting to the grocery store is a 12-mile round trip. Comparatively speaking, my trip to the store back in our urban-ish days was less than three miles all told. This is not a complaint - we actively chose to live out here, and this is not a decision I regret - but it does mean that a ride to the store is a greater time commitment, and that it requires planning - there’s no running back again for "one more thing".

In this case, it also meant that I needed to do some planning in terms of carrying capacity. I reviewed the list that MLW provided:

And determined that I should be able to carry all of that in my pannier bags if I emptied a few things out of them first. Mostly this meant that I wouldn't be carrying additional insulating gear (which I’ve been keeping in there as the weather gets colder), and that I would have only one spare tube for the front and rear tires. So, you know, if I got two front flats I’d have to call for help. None of that would have been necessary if I had a trailer to pull behind my trike, but some jackass has been dragging his feet at getting that project finished...

That all set up, I double-checked to make sure I had my wallet along with me - there are few things more frustrating than riding 6-8 miles to do an errand just to find that you have not brought along a vital component to completing said errand; or, you know, so I hear... - and started riding my way into town.

This adventure occurred on the 15th of December. The temperature was right around 20°F, but it was sunny and the wind was blessedly, atypically still. In short, it was a perfect December riding day.

The ride in was uneventful, and the shopping itself was, you know, shopping. I’m sure I attracted a bit of attention with my riding gear. I’m not a MAMIL - I’m middle aged, but I don’t go in for specialized riding clothes. However, I was wearing Columbia noisy pants (nylon hiking pants) and a bright orange insulated jersey (Lycra I don’t need, but visibility I do). But as is true of midwestern small town life, if people took notice they whispered about it amongst themselves.

The challenge came in when it was time to pack my produce on to the trike:

Fortunately I had calculated correctly, and everything fit. But once it was in there, I could certainly feel it.

While celery and herbs don’t add much by way of weight, the wine and the beef broth - two containers of each - certainly did. I packed the broth on one side and the wine on the other in order to balance things out. This wasn’t exactly perfect - the broth was about 4lbs (2lbs per container), and a 750ml bottle of wine is about 3lbs, for a total of 6, but I put the broth on the side with my spare tubes and tools, so it was probably pretty close. Once I was all loaded up I zipped the bags shut and hit the road.

When I say that I could feel it, I mean that I could definitely tell that there was more weight on board for the return trip. It wasn’t unreasonable, and I’ve carried far more weight on the back of the trike without significant issue. But you definitely knew it was there. And it shows on the stats for the ride as well. My ride speed from Cyclemeter is in the graph below:

The ride in is 6.36 miles, and that sharp drop-off in speed around mile 6 is almost certainly my arrival in the parking lot. To even things out, I compared the first five miles to the last five, leaving out miles six and seven. My average speed for the first five miles on the way in was 15.4mph, while on the way out it dropped to 12.3mph. So the extra 10-11lbs of groceries dropped my average speed by about 3mph.

This was, all in all, just about a perfect day for this comparison. Usually wind is a significant factor in riding on the prairie. The fact that the day was essentially still means that the difference in speed can largely be attributed to the difference in weight. One could argue, I suppose, that I might also have been more fatigued on the way back, but this grocery run was shorter than my average ride for the year thus far (14.27), and I often find that my speeds either maintain or go up as I get warmed up, so I don’t think fatigue was a significant factor.

To me, that 3mph drop seems a reasonable trade-off for the utility use of the trike. When I put together my argument for recumbent trikes being the ideal rural bike, this was exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind. The Expedition handled the weight well, and I was able to manage the load at a reasonable return speed. 12.3mph isn’t going to set any speed records, mind you, but it’s pretty good for managing an additional 10-11 lbs over and above what I carried in.

And, as always, I just love it when I get the opportunity to use my trike as transportation. I don’t have the illusion or expectation that I will ever be in a position to cycle for most of my transportation, but on this occasion, at least, I used no fossil fuels, put no wear and tear on my car, and managed to get some exercise. In my book, all of that comes together for a win.

And incidentally: the roast was excellent!

Trike Transporting - The High Seat - Getting on Top of Things Revisited

One of the things that goes with getting a new mobile trike garage is learning how to work out the different aspects of carrying the trike. Most of the time, of course, I plan on just carrying it inside. This is really the safest option in multiple ways - keeps my Expedition out of the elements and keeps it away from prying eyes and touching hands.

And while I chose the outback because it would carry the trike and a couple of people, sometimes we have to carry multiple people and their stuff.

A notable example of this occurred over thanksgiving. Apparently my wife and child want not only to be transported over the river and through the woods, but they also want to bring along other ridiculous items like, say, pajamas, toothbrushes, and changes of clothing - so demanding.

I’d dealt with this before, setting up the rack for the Pocket for the same trip last Thanksgiving, but that was on my Honda Fit. For that car I’ve used an entire separate Yakima rack that mounts to the roof (no particular allegiance to Yakima here - it’s just what I already own). The Outback comes with its own roof rails - specifically swiveling roof rails (it took me a little while to figure out what that meant) - so I’d need a bit of different equipment.

As you might expect, Yakima makes mounts for factory roof racks as well. I spent a little time on their website, and it appeared that all I would need was the Mighty Mount 23H to hook the wheel trays to the Outback’s factory rails. I ordered them up. They come in packs of four, and I needed six (two mounting points for three wheel trays), so I ordered two packs.

I was a little puzzled by the warning on the box - where exactly did they think I was going to put these?!? But then again, those silica packs look pretty tasty too...

Once they came in, installation was pretty straightforward. Of course, on the Outback the first thing you have to do is swivel your roof rails. I said before that I had read this phrase several times when I was researching the Outback, but didn’t know what it meant. When you look at the car, the roof rails run parallel to the sides:

On most vehicles this means that the rails essentially serve as a mounting point for crossbars, which you will have to purchase separately - e.g. from the manufacturer or from an aftermarket company like Yakima or Thule. That’s initially what I expected to have to use as well, but I already have two separate sets of crossbars (I’ve had to mount bikes and skis to a lot of different roofs over the years. Anyone need crossbar mounts for a 1994 Nissan Pathfinder...?).

What I learned is that when they say "swivel" what they mean is that the bars unhook from their parallel mounting and swing around (swivel) across the roof to a perpendicular position.

Why I am spending so much time writing about this aspect? Honestly, it just tickles me. I’ve spent years putting racks on cars, some of which had no factory rack, some with just side rails, and some with full racks that I just wouldn't trust. In every case part of the problem is putting on and taking off the rack, storing it, etc. You can’t just leave it on because it plays havoc with mileage and presents a noisy intrusion. Subaru has solved at least part of that problem by keeping the rack (or at least the crossbars) always on top, but out of the wind until you actually need it. It’s just elegant. Maybe other car companies have similar systems, but none of them have ever been on a car I’ve owned, and I’ve had a few. So I’m a fan of this solution. But now I’ll stop gushing and move on.

Everything else is pretty much what you’d think - line up the mounting points so they are straight, put the wheel trays on to them, and tighten everything down.

One’s (my) natural tendency might be to try and center the rails on the roof, but you want to keep in mind that you have to lift an entire Catrike Expedition up there. I try to mount it as close to the driver’s side as I can get it, since that’s where I’ll be lifting up from.

The wheel trays I’m using are Yakima Copperheads. What you see are the wheel tray part of those with the fork mount head removed. For the trike what I needed was the ratchet straps that would go around the rear wheel of an upright. This is all the same system and equipment that I used with the Pocket last year.

The trike is awkward to get up there, but it gets easier with practice.

I supplement the ratchet straps with bungees (the heavy duty black rubber ones)...

...And I always put my cable lock around the seat frame and crossbars. I think of this last part as a bit of double security. Hopefully it will keep people with wandering hands from contemplating taking my trike, and also will act as a final safety catch if other parts let go.

How did it all work? I love my Honda Fit for a lot of reasons, but you can tell that the Outback is designed with the idea that people will carry things on top. It’s relatively quiet even with the trike on the roof (the Fit was not), and where the Fit struggled to maintain speed in a headwind the Subaru (with its much larger engine) managed just fine.

I’ll still carry the trike inside most of the time. The following morning in Wisconsin illustrated the reason why quite nicely:

I love a fresh dusting of snow, but I don’t love it being on my trike... You know, unless I put in there myself.

Ok - time to ride...

New Mobile Trike Garage...

For much of the past two years or so, my car has largely functioned as a mobile trike garage. While I went through a fair amount of thought and effort to figure out how to store my trike by hanging it from the ceiling in the garage, the reality is that it spent relatively little time on it’s perch. The Pocket, being a relatively small machine, fit nicely behind the rear seats in my Honda Fit, and since I most frequently drive alone or, on rare occasion, with a single passenger, it was simpler to leave it in the car much of the time. Besides, you never know when an opportunity to ride might present itself, and you can only capitalize on that if the trike is present, so...

When I got the Catrike Expedition this summer I knew that it’s increased size was going to complicate things a bit. I love Honda Fits - they are extremely flexible, efficient and, with a stick shift at least, fun to drive. But the Expedition is both wider and, notably, longer than the Pocket. I expected it would strain the Fit’s capabilities as a trike transport.

Strain was correct. While the Pocket fit behind the front seats with the rear seats folded, I was not able to find any way to carry the Expedition without encroaching into the front passenger area. Ultimately, the best arrangement turned out to be sliding the passenger seat all the way forward and then leaning the seat back forward. With this done and the Expedition put in the back at an angle I could just barely get the rear hatch closed. (I also quickly discovered that I had to remove the passenger headrest because it now sat directly in my line of sight of the right-side rear view mirror).

As I mentioned, most of the time I’m in the car by myself, so this wasn’t necessarily the end of the world. However, it does decrease flexibility. Say your child needs you to swing by and pick them up on the way home, for example. Unless they are going to ride in the seat of the trike, there’s nowhere for them to sit. Oddly enough, passengers tend to object to this option.

Yes, it is possible to carry the trike on the roof - I’ve done this before - but that puts it out in the elements and in view of prying eyes and wandering hands, so I prefer to have it inside whenever possible. And besides, the roof rack has a negative impact on noise level and gas mileage, so I don’t put it on unless I’m planning to carry the trike up top in advance. It’s not there on the car to be used if I encounter an unexpected passenger need.

All that aside, it’s been workable, if occasionally inconvenient, for the past several months, and I’d been prepared to work with it for the longer term. However, events transpired such that the family was going to need to get a different vehicle. Given that, it made sense to pass down my trusty, but well used, Honda Fit to the aforementioned offspring and look for a vehicle more suitable to trike transport.

Of course, the ability to transport the trike was not the only criteria I needed to meet (believe it or not). We live in the hinterlands in northern Illinois, and I travel by car a fair amount for work. A vehicle for me needed to meet the following criteria:

• Have real all-wheel drive - we contend with a lot of snow
• Be comfortable for distance driving
• Sporty and relatively fun to drive
• Get relatively decent gas mileage
• Have room for the trike and at least one other passenger to ride in comfort; and
• NOT be a truck or SUV

It’s the last one, of course, that really narrows things down, given the rest of the list. While we’ve had a truck or three in the household over the years, I prefer the handling characteristics of a car. Plus, since I drive a lot, the greener side of my nature struggles with the mileage hit of, say, a Suburban or Tahoe (which would otherwise easily meet the other criteria). To boil it down: I can’t help myself - I’m a car guy.

This list frankly left me with, as best I could determine, two potential choices: Subaru Crosstrek or Subaru Outback.

I like them both, and I loved the fact that the Crosstrek could be had with a manual transmission (car guy, remember?). However, I’ve parked next to many a Crosstrek with my Fit over the past few years (well - mostly the same one many times- a friend in my martial arts class drove one, also in orange), and the Crosstrek appeared to be bigger than the Fit, but not by a lot. So I posted a question for the folks in the Catrike Owners Group on Facebook to see if anyone else had experience with Expeditions and Crosstreks and, well, they had (groups are really the best part of Facebook. Maybe even the only good part...). The upshot: it’s about the same situation as with the Honda Fit.

So that left me with the Outback.

I spent a few evenings searching online for something in our desired price range, and then MLW and I set a day aside to go have a look. Besides identifying a dealership and mapping a route, my primary act of preparation was shoehorning the Expedition into the back of our 2011 Honda CR-V. My logic here was that, given my primary criteria was being able to carry the trike and people, the best way to test that would be just to bring along the trike and try it out.

Brilliant, right?

What followed was a phenomenal testament of just how good My Lovely Wife is to me. When I say "shoehorned", what I mean is that it does not fit comfortably in the CRV, which is taller, but not really that much longer than the Fit. So, in order to fit it inside, I had to slide the passenger seat forward, set the seat back bolt upright (but not forward - yay!) and push down on the trike against the tire pressure in order to slide it back because the rear cargo rack was pressing against the ceiling.

After I had accomplished all this MLW looked at it and said: "so - that’s right against the back of my seat."

"Yeah" I said. "Is that ok?"

"So" she says "I can’t lean back or, you know, move or anything?"

"Umm... I could take it out. I could just bring along a tape measure and do measurements..." I said.

"How far is it?" She asked.

"About an hour and a half".

And then she sighed and said "it’ll be fine. Let’s go."

I’m quite certain I don’t deserve her.

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I’m pleased to say that the salesman at the dealership appeared completely unphased by my request to cram my trike into the back of a car I did not yet own. I’m sure that part of it is just due to wanting to make a sale, but I suspect that it was also helpful that the car, though used, happened to be for sale at a Subaru dealership. Given the target market for these cars I suspect I’m not the first person they’ve encountered bringing along equipment of one sort or another to see how it fits.

And: it does. I’m pleased to say that, with the back seats down and the front seat moved slightly forward the Expedition fits and allows for two passengers in addition to the driver - one in the front passenger seat and one in the rear driver’s side seat (in the "40" side of the 60/40 rear seat split). I did have to loosen the neck rest on the trike and tilt it forward to fit it in, but that’s a pretty easy adjustment to work with.

That sorted, it was just a test drive and some negotiation time before we settled things up and I took it home:

I’ve had it out and about a few times now with the Expedition in the back, and it all works out well. I did briefly try running the rear wheel in-between the front seats, but that blocked the central rear view mirror more than I cared for, so I switched to setting it in at an angle. That adjustment made, everything seems to work quite nicely. We’ll see how it works out over the longer term, but at the moment I’m pretty optimistic.

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I have no doubt there will be readers who will quibble with my conclusion here on various fronts. If that’s not you, feel free to stop here. But if you are thinking something like:

"You know, this [type or brand of minivan/crossover/panel van/Conestoga wagon] does most of what you want and you can haul two trikes in it at once."

Or

"There’s nothing like a Suburban [Excursion/Escalade/full-size pickup/etc] for cargo capacity and four wheel drive. You live in the country - it’s time to step up to a truck."

Or

"They make rear hitch racks/you could use a trailer/did you consider [type/brand] of carrying system?"

Please know that I think these (and related ideas) are reasonable ones to present. But I think there are a few things that are important to consider when looking at vehicle solutions surrounding carrying a trike. Probably first and foremost is considering whether your transport vehicle is going to be your primary vehicle or whether you will use a secondary vehicle for that purpose. If you are in a position to have a vehicle oriented just towards your recreational activities I am happy for you. I have periodically considered that - getting an older truck of some sort just for hauling the trike. But I’ve done that in the past and it really didn’t work out for me. While I do have just recreational riding times - my regular Sunday rides, for example - in order to increase my riding opportunities I try to integrate riding into the rest of my regular schedule. If I’m traveling somewhere for work and it offers trails, paths, etc, I’ll bring the trike along and ride over lunch and/or after the work day.

This approach has worked well in terms of enhancing my riding time, but when I say "traveling", it’s often distances of two to six hours in the car - this really isn’t the ideal sort of situation for a utility vehicle. Hence the focus on comfort and gas mileage in the criteria.

It’s also the case that this decision point was triggered by having a family vehicle taken out of service. We weren’t in a position to get a secondary vehicle - anything added would have to serve full-time duty.

Finally, while I don’t care for SUV’s or crossovers as a general rule, I don’t have anything against minivans - I think a good minivan is a beautiful thing from a utility perspective (though they are not sporty or fun to drive, as a rule), and I’ve eyed the little Ford Transit vans closely in the past for similar reasons. But nothing in the class does what I’d call real all-wheel drive. Most of these vehicles, when they have all-wheel drive, have systems designed to aid in stability and traction under slippery conditions, and this is what is needed for most people in most situations. As far as that goes, that same type of benefit can also be conferred on virtually any two-wheel drive vehicle by adding a set of snow tires. What neither solution does well, however, is crawl their way through, or out of, a snow drift. We are rural enough that this is a periodic need - and I can tell you that my knowledge in this area is more than academic...

While it doesn’t quite have the capabilities of a four-wheel-drive truck, Subarus occupy that middle ground between being much more capable than the typical slippery-road friendly vehicle and a truck, while still operating like a car the rest of the time. They are, in a way, kind of an odd compromise machine that other manufacturers just don’t make, but which happens to fall right into my current sweet spot.

Soft is Slow

We gather every year with family in Southwestern Wisconsin for Thanksgiving festivities. It’s always a good time, and this year, in addition to a delightful meal, LB led a game of Dungeons and Dragons which added to the fun. The following day - Black Friday - MLW and her sister go off to Madison to battle the shopping crowds, and the rest of us seek our own fun in the Driftless Area. For me, for the past few years, that’s meant tackling the Military Ridge trail.

I’ve written about the trail itself before. You can look there for detail, but it’s a rail trail with a nominally crushed stone (but mostly packed sand and grass) surface. I was pleased when I looked out in the morning and could see that the Wisconsin weather gods had chosen to bless me with a bit of snow.

The dusting of snow really is a blessing - I enjoy riding in the white stuff, and it often has the additional effect of putting a hush over the world and of keeping most other people off of the trail.

When I woke the thermometer sat at 30°F, working its way up to a high of 35°. The main artifact of this is that, while there is a chill in the air, the ground isn’t really frozen. And that means that the snow and the sand conspire to provide a soft, resistant surface. This isn’t a problem, per se - I’m riding for exercise and to enjoy the countryside, after all. But it does have an effect on the speed and distance traveled.

In sum: soft is slow

When I loaded up the Expedition for the ride - its first adventure on this particular trail - I also included a growler in the saddle bags in anticipation of riding from Ridgeview to Mt. Horeb for a stop at The Grumpy Troll.

I knew I was probably being optimistic with that decision. Mt. Horeb is a solid 13 miles along the trail, presenting with a 26-mile round trip. The distance doesn’t scare me, mind, but I was looking for some exercise, not to spend the day on the trail.

As it all laid out the trail was reliable and consistent with past experience in terms of the ride through the countryside, albeit softer.

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What became clear, as I rode along the trail, enjoying the scenery, was that it was not going to be a speedy trip. I do most of my riding on the big ring when I’m on pavement, especially on the relatively level roadways of northern Illinois, but it quickly became clear that I was going to need to drop down to number two.

And then, as the ambient temperature rose, down to the little ring.

Ultimately, as I entered Barneveld - the first town East from Ridegeway along the trail - and I was already an hour in, drenched with sweat, I knew I was nearing my endpoint. I rode to the far end of town and turned around.

I came out of ride at 12.27 miles and an average speed of 6.75 mph (but with a blistering top speed of 12.18, so there’s that...). But the landscape and snow more than made up for the lack of distance. I’d also been looking forward to seeing how the Expedition managed one particularly soft uphill portion of the trail - one which has required me to get off and walk both with the Pocket, and with MLW’s Schwinn years ago. In other, similar things the Expedition’s larger footprint has seemed to provide an advantage, so I was curious.

Here, too, it shined. That section appears on the return trip and, despite the softness of the trail, the Expedition crawled its way up the sand on its decidedly road-oriented Schwalbe Marathon Plus’s with little slippage. Riding that ride this time actually made me wonder what had made it so difficult in the past...

And I was once again very pleased with the presence of the fenders on my Expedition. I’ll probably get tired of bringing them up at some point, but it really is amazing what a difference such a seemingly simple technology can make. Without them the climactic conditions and season would have conspired with my wheels to throw untold amounts of a conglomeration of sand, snow, ad leaves into my lap. Instead they were arrested at the wheel level.

Soft or not, because of the snow I was able to see, and thus follow, my original track on the return trip. Although the effect was likely small, there did see to be some benefit to remaining in the wheel path, perhaps from a bit of compression gained on the way in. And besides, it’s neat to see that evidence of where you’ve been (and the trike makes a pretty unmistakable footprint).

Of course, some cleanup was needed upon arrival back, but this is not an uncommon component of winter riding. And given that the trail isn’t cleared, there’s little by way of road salt to be concerned about.

Probably the only other downside is that Cyclemeter, which I generally like, seems to track calorie expenditure based upon speed and distance if you don’t have supplemental sensors attached. The assumption, then, seems to be that my slow pace means I only worked through 584 calories. My dripping sweat begged to differ with that assessment. But I’m far too cheap to pony up for the additional equipment to rectify that situation, tho, so here we are, and here we remain.

Winter Cycling Unpreparedness

The introduction of November has been pretty chilly for us here in Northern Illinois. Over the first weekend of the month I was riding with snow accompanying me along the sides of the road:

The irony is that, looking at the weather conditions that accompany that ride on Cyclemeter, it was about 51° while I was out and about. The snow, in the relative protection of the ditch, hadn’t quite gotten the message.

But the reality is that most of our days over the first third of the 11th month have been in the unusually cold category. This doesn’t stop the cycling, of course, but it does mean some changes have to be made in terms of gearing up for the rides.

And there lies the struggle.

Now begins the time when I realize that I may not be fully aware as to the location in which I stored all of my cold weather riding gear. I mean, I’m certain that at the end of the last use I put them in a perfectly logical location to make them easy to find the following season. Unfortunately, November Erin is not in the same mindset as April Erin, and I think that guy might have been a bit squirrelly anyway...

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So then comes the internal discussion: did you put your balaclava and gloves in with the rest of the family gloves and hats? That would make sense, right?

But one pile of hats and gloves on the floor later, and they are nowhere to be found.

"Perhaps" you say, "perhaps you left them in a pocket or a sleeve of your winter coats or vests". And then you nod knowingly: "perhaps April Erin didn’t put them away at all". Because that guy can sometimes be a bit of a slacker.

And this can be kind of interesting because you then realize that you have cool and cold weather items that you had forgotten about in the intervening months:

"Yup - gotta break out that light leather jacket while it’s still in the reasonable temperature range".;

And:

"Oh - I forgot about that down vest." And then gaze admiringly at the color.

(Yes, it’s orange - specifically burnt orange. No points for guessing that one).

All of this to finally think "is it possible I just put them on the closet shelf with my other cycling gear? Could it be that simple?"

Yes, dumbass, it’s that simple. Heaven only knows why that wouldn't have been the first place you’d look, but now at least you have a mental inventory of all of the rest of the winter gear for the house. Because you needed one of those. For some reason...

The struggle continues, a bit, with what to wear when. It’s a tenet of cold weather riding that you want to be layered and, if possible, vented, so that you can open things up and/or remove them as you get warmer. But there are areas where that’s harder - particularly your feet. And so I’ve had one outing over the past few days where I decided to go with wool socks and sandals - committing a fashion crime to split the difference on foot warmth. As to my level of success, well, I’ll report back when I can feel my feet again.

All kidding aside, once it’s all out and I start using it regularly, there really won’t be any difficult with it. But fall in the midwestern US is an ongoing struggle where what was appropriate clothing this morning is too much by afternoon and simply inadequate by night. That effect is amplified when riding.

But, regardless, now that I’ve finally found my stuff (dumbass), it’s time to ride...

The Nemesis

I love riding through the countryside - the majority of my time cycling is done on rural thoroughfares, viewing the grass (yes - and corn and hay and soybeans) of the open prairie. But there is one part of rural riding that I simply cannot bring myself to love:

Gravel.

When I was young many of the roads out here in northern Illinois were gravel, including the one upon which our homestead currently sits. As time has gone on, however, gravel has progressively moved aside in favor of tar and chip, resulting in fewer rocks thrown, fewer dusty cars, and fewer bikes disappearing out from under you due to an errant stone.

It’s that last part that has always been the primary problem with riding on gravel for me. As a kid I had a friend who lived about three miles away by gravel, and the challenge was always getting myself to mentally work past the fear of struggling with the treacherous rock surface in order to get there. Most of the parcels are about a mile square, so after a while I solved this by riding the other way around the block to his house (hey, I was a kid - give me a break!). It was technically further by about a quarter mile or so each way, paved, and so far more comfortable, and likely faster, because picking your way around the rocks is usually very slow going.

As an adult I’m riding longer distances and can, with some recon and the help of mapping software, lay out routes that avoid the gnarly substrate. And typically this is exactly what I do. About the only time of year that I routinely embrace the gravel roads is in the winter, when their evil has been rendered impotent by dint of a layer of fine white powder. But there are times, on a few routes, when brief bits of gravel figure in and I have to weather my way through the stone. I typically avoid those routes, but it’s nice to add in the variety from time to time.

The challenge of gravel was somewhat tamed with my transition to primarily riding recumbent trikes. One of the primary difficulties - the sudden vanishing of the machine - is eliminated with this change. And that does make it more pleasant. While the ride is still rough, and the going is slower, a route with a mile or two of gravel connecting one point to another is often workable.

But there is one exception. Not far from my home is a mile or so of gravel that is, quite possibly, the most hateful bit of pathway in the tri-county area. This mile of jagged rock and stone is the Sauron to the simple orcs of the other chipped stone byways.

Yup - that’s an actual picture of the road right there.

Ok - so no, not really. This is an actual pic of it:

There are two factors that make this road stand out. The first is that the surface seems to be made up of unusually large and rough stone. I don’t know if this is just the first surface they treat and so it gets the extra-large substrate off the top, or whether this is just so lightly traveled they don’t think anyone will notice.

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The second factor is the hill. There are a couple of them on the road, but the one at the East end, just before it rejoins the pavement and the twentieth century, is relatively steep. Now it’s not that I mind climbing a hill or two when I’m riding - this generally just adds to the challenge, as any cyclist knows. But the combination of the angle and the very loose gravel means that it’s extremely challenging to maintain purchase with the rear wheel. This would be a problem on an upright bike, where your back end would be slipping sideways out from under you, risking a topple. It’s a slightly different issue on the trike. The couple of times I’ve ridden this road on the Pocket what I’ve found on this hill is that I end up sitting there in first gear, functionally immobile while my rear wheel spins free in the rock. Sometimes the rear wheel throws away enough stone that it gains purchase for a move forward of, say, six inches, before then repeating the sequence over again. Each time I’ve tackled this on the Pocket I’ve ended up getting off and taking the ignominious step of walking the trike up the hill.

So, you might ask, if you hate it so much why would you ride on it again? And I would say that’s an excellent question, and one that could probably be answered by the simple admission that I’m a bit of an idiot. However, not wanting to make that admission, let me now try, perhaps a little to hard, to suggest that there are reasons:

• First, taking this road alters two of my favorite routes by cutting the longer one shorter, and adding distance to the shorter - it makes for a 25-mile ride while going longer would be 29, and shorter would be 20; and sometimes 25 miles is the distance you want.

• Second, the quality of gravel roads changes with time and wear, and I was wondering if this road had perhaps now been used enough to make it less hateful.

• Third, while this mile or so of stone demon had been a severe struggle on the Pocket, I’m now riding my Expedition, which has a longer wheelbase, wider track, and bigger wheels. I wanted to see how the new trike tackled it.

Ok, if I’m being honest, it’s 98% the third option there, and 2% of just throwing in the other two so that I could make a list and seem a little less dumb. The Expedition is a different machine. I’ve ridden it on less severe gravel roads and gotten through just fine - I wanted to see how it managed this... thing.

This section of the highway to hell essentially constitutes mile 23 of the 25-mile ride I have laid out. That means I’ve already expended a fair amount of energy once I get to it. I could reverse the route and tackle this very early into the ride, but that erases the challenge of the hill at the east end, and that was part of what I wanted to learn about for the new trike, so there we were.

The first thing that I realized when I pulled on to it is that it hasn’t worn down since the last time I saw it.

It’s still full of large, blocky stone, with very little by way of tire ruts to offer softer purchase. There are only two houses on this stretch of road, and one of them is just off the pavement, so I suspect there’s just very little traffic here to make for that wear and tear. Good for the road crews, but no so much for me. I did briefly wonder, just as when I was a kid, how bad, really, I wanted to do this, and considered whether just going another four miles or so around it wouldn't be better. But no, dammit, this is what I’d come to do.

The fIrst clear impression I got from it was that it was just going to be painfully slow going. The resistance from the rock and tire slippage, along with the jarring nature of the ride, meant that I was going to need to pick my along in low gear even on flatter portion of the road. And that lack of wear and tear meant that, although you could see evidence of automotive travel within the stone, tire ruts were very shallow, and still mostly covered in rock. They helped where they were present but not, you know, a lot.

And slow it was. On Cyclemeter’s speed graph you can see the portion where I seem to have slipped into a pool of molasses:

The slow pace really does a fine job of prolonging the agony and allowing a person to reconsider their choices in life. Not just the choice to take this section of road, mind you, but all of their choices. Because it took me three and a half weeks to traverse this mile of roadway. Three and a half weeks! Or about 15 minutes, but I swear it sure felt like a lot longer than that.

I’d like to tell the hero’s tale of how I persevered through grit and determination here, but mostly I just felt sorry for myself as I pressed on, working my way up to that stupid hill so I could see if the difference in layout would make a difference in climbing up it. And more than once it occurred to me that I could have approached from the other side, just ridden down the hill, and then ridden back up it to answer the question. I didn’t have to ride the whole distance.

Of course, it occurred to me in the middle of the ride down that road. Because I’m an intrepid explorer. Or an idiot.

But here’s the deal: when I got to that hill, I was all prepared to find myself needing to dismount and shamefully walk my trike up over the rise.

But I didn’t.

The Expedition, in its lowest gear, crawled its way up that slippery hill and crested the summit. (Yes, it’s still northern Illinois and no, there aren’t really any summits, but come on - it was a lot of work - allow me some creative license here).

I was pretty pleased and duly impressed. The difference in geometry, and maybe the fact that the pannier bags are directly over the rear wheel as opposed to in the frame like they are on the Pocket, seems to have made the difference.

So what this means in practice, I guess, is that I don’t have to have quite so much trepidation about approaching the average gravel road. If the Expedition can pick it’s way successfully along this detestable behemoth of a “road”, it should be able to handle the other, far less problematic sections that I encounter on my other routes. I’d already seen a bit of that, of course, but until this I couldn’t be sure about the more problematic surfaces in the area.

Gravel riding is a thing, now, and some people just love it. Gravel bikes are out there, and there are various ways to fit out machines to make them more suitable for tackling the rocks. For myself, having mostly moved on to machines of the three-wheeled persuasion, there are fat trikes out there and many brands of trike can have their wheelsets converted to allow for this. For my part, I encounter gravel infrequently, and so I’d rather not deal with the trade offs - heavier wheels, slower machines - that come with specializing in gravel. Instead, I prefer - and am pleased to find - that my primary machine be suited to the road, but be able to manage the rocks on rare occasion. Fortunately, as this otherwise painful ride has shown, it seems to be up to it.

Okay - Time to ride...

Rural Bike Part 1

The ideal urban bicycle is a recurring theme in the overall cycling world. Comb through bike magazines and websites and you will see it come up periodically. Generally the discussion and debate centers around the features that a bike needs for the urban cyclist who will be using it as their primary means of transportation. There has even been a contest or two towards designing such a machine. I put forward my vote on that front as well.

You can understand why this comes up with respect to urban settings. Traffic congestion paired with a growing interest in alternative transportation makes the question a poignant one, and the needs of the urban lifestyle offer an interesting puzzle to solve in this respect. For example, because the inner-city cyclist may have to carry their machine up multiple flights of steps you want the machine to be relatively lightweight, but it still must be durable enough to manage the reality of city streets, and ideally not be constructed of a material that will make it costly to build or repair. And, of course, that’s just one bullet point; there are multiple other factors to consider.

Back when I became aware of the contest and this theme in general I began to wonder about the other side of this: what makes for an ideal rural bike?

It’s not a question that comes up in magazines or on websites often, and I suspect that’s for a number of reasons. Rural areas don’t have the traffic congestion issues that urban travelers contend with, of course, nor the population strain that suggests impending limits on the use of motor vehicles. Travel down any city highway during rush hour and you can see that we really are approaching our limits - if we haven’t already reached or exceeded them in practical terms - for the ongoing use of independently owned and operated automotive travel in those areas.

But out in the country? There’s no rush hour. I mean, sometimes you have a stack-up of traffic while you wait for a train or get behind a tractor, and sometimes you end up with two or more people at the four-way stop at the same time (gasp! - who goes first? Think, think, mentally pull up the rules of the road book...), but otherwise it just isn’t a thing.

There’s also the realistic question that I suspect many people would ask: is it even practical to consider cycling as transportation in rural areas? The distances are longer, of course, and the travel is often for different purposes. The urban cyclist may ride to the store or market to get groceries, but the store is probably only a few blocks away, and the proximity means they can shop frequently for a smaller volume of product, making cycling a practical alternative. The rural counterpart is going to want to purchase things in larger amounts due to distance (I can tell you for a fact that no one out in the hinterlands ever allows the toilet paper to get down to a single roll in reserve...). And given all that, isn’t everyone living out in the boondocks just going to get a truck?

Well... no and yes.

Unlike city living it’s really not the case out in the country that you can go without owning some type of automobile. In urban and suburban areas there are multiple alternatives to draw on, from traditional taxis and buses to Uber and Lyft and car sharing services like Zipcar, when a self-propelled, weather protected option is needed. Versions of those services might eventually find their way to the remote climes, but they generally aren’t there yet (tho I did see a ZipCar in Dixon, Illinois this past summer, so maybe...). There are just times when the weather, or the mission, will make for the need to have a motor vehicle.

Still, that need for an automobile doesn’t mean that it wouldn't be possible for a substantial portion of routine travel in rural areas to be made via an HPV (Human Powered Vehicle). In fact, I can verify that when I was a kid my friends and myself did it all the time. Up until a certain age it was the only way to get around if your parents weren’t able or willing to take you. And they often were not:

Me: Mom, can you give me a ride to Matt’s house?

Mom: You’ve got a bike don’t you? Get on it. And anyway, why are you inside? Go outside, and don’t come back in until the sun goes down.

(I love ya, Mom!)

For you younger folks this may seem perplexing, so let me help you sort it out. Have you seen Stranger Things)? Of course you have. You know the part where the girl moves things with her mind and where monsters come out from the upside-down? - that’s fiction. The part where the kids ride absolutely everywhere on their bikes? that’s real. I know it doesn’t seem that way because your parents drove you all over the place, including to the school that was four blocks away, but I assure you it was absolutely true. I know - I essentially grew up a few miles outside of Hawkins Indiana except, you know, in Illinois.

And that was how it worked: Want to see a friend? Ride two or three miles down the road. The two of you want to get a coke from the elevator? Grab a couple of quarters (yes - 25¢) and ride another mile or so over to get one for each of you. Finished with the coke (or Fanta - they always had orange Fanta...)? Let’s go play in the creek (that’s pronounced "crick", incidentally) a couple of miles away.

And of course, eventually you had to ride home, ideally getting there before dark. All in all it was quite possible for us to ride 10-15 miles in a day from spot to spot, and most of that riding time it was on single speed bikes with coaster brakes and banana seats. We really didn’t think much about the distances, just the destinations. The bikes were freedom.

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Eventually I had a five speed Schwinn road bike with a light and dynamo on it, so then darkness wasn’t even a limitation. At that point I was a little older, and was allowed to ride into town, which opened the world up even further - I could go shopping for comic books and stop at The Kitch-Inn for a grilled cheese and a chocolate malt. I can verify that it is possible - though extremely inadvisable - to read a comic book while riding your bike back home. Hell - it was my primary motivation to learn to ride hands free...

Before I get too far down the nostalgia rabbit hole (I know - too late...), my point to all of this is that there was a time where neither we kids, nor the adults overseeing us, found the idea of purposeful travel across the rural countryside via HPV either impractical or unusual. That perspective, pervasive though it is, is an artifact of a much more recent sensibility.

It is true that distances to reach anything are further than they are in urban settings, but further doesn’t necessarily equal far. In the upper Midwest of the US, at least, the word "rural" doesn’t just describe houses sitting out in fields, alone. Rather, rural areas are a combination of country houses and fields and pastures and small towns, most of which offer some level of provisions - gas and food at least, and often an array of other services. Based upon life experience and a quick eyeball of the map I’d say most towns in northern Illinois are within 10-15 miles of another town, which leaves country residents always within +/-10 miles or so of supplies and, if they are lucky, within similar distance of their work (tho I suspect this may be getting less common).

So - while I’m not about to argue that people in these rural environs should move to a cycling only life for transportation, I would argue that self-powered transport is an option some of the time. I might also argue that, with the right type of machine, cycling could likely be an option for more of the trips than one might initially expect.

All of which leads us up to the question: What would the right type of machine be? What are the features that make for the ideal rural cycling machine?

Setting Criteria

As discussed initially, the urban bike contest identified a number of factors to be considered by contestants when developing human powered transportation for city settings. Some of the criteria for a rural bike may overlap, but there are definitely differences in the needs for a rural cycling machine. I would posit the following criteria:

• The machine must be capable of routinely covering longer distances - 10-20 mile round trips - comfortably on open secondary roads.

• It must be a human powered vehicle. It’s fine if it’s amenable to electric assist, but it cannot rely upon battery power.

• It must be able to contend with varied weather and road conditions. Generally this is going to mean:

  • Some type of effective fender system.

  • Being stable and functional with a load under high wind situations.

• Be capable of carrying cargo - the Bike Design Project specified their urban guidelines around a gym bag or a single bag of groceries, which makes sense for their purposes. For a rural lifestyle, a larger carrying capacity would be needed - I’d say the ability to manage 3-4 full paper grocery bags (or equivalent volume), with those groceries including at least one full gallon of milk. The machine should be able to manage that load on all rural road surfaces, including gravel, dirt, and hills.

• Be capable of remaining stable and upright under load. This criteria is borrowed from the Bike Design Project, but it makes intuitive sense to me. Your machine has to be able to stand safely on its own if you have to get off of it when it’s fully loaded. Otherwise you’ll break your eggs, have to chase your oranges down the road, and cry over your spilled milk...

• Must be capable of a reasonable average speed over flat(ish) terrain when operated by a rider who rides regularly. Here let’s say reasonable is an average of at least 10-12mph. I think any slower and it risks even dedicated riders avoiding use in favor of a car.

• Be a durable machine capable of many years of use with basic maintenance.

• Be capable of using aftermarket lighting and visibility systems for effective forward and rearward visibility.

• We are looking for a type of machine here, not a specific brand or new design. What sort(s) of HPV meets these criteria?

I’m excluding a few of the other criteria from the Bike Design Criteria. For example, they wanted their designs to incorporate anti-theft systems and built-in lighting systems. From my perspective there are multiple versions of both items readily available on the aftermarket, so it seems superfluous to require them here. I’d also worry about any such system that was incorporated into the machine in a specialized or bespoke fashion. One of the contestants for that competition had USB ports for charging lights, etc. To me, that’s a high tech solution that is really just built in obsolescence - cycling machines last for years, and USB-A is already on its way towards being replaced...

I’ve also not included the idea of being amenable to being carried up stairs. One of the things that rural settings generally have in abundance is storage space. Folks out in the country are likely to store their machines inside, but certainly not in the house. We can expect a garage or shed to be available.

Finally, you’ve seen me use the word “bike” here interchangeably with HPV and “cycle”. That’s intentional. I see no reason to artificially limit the number of wheels to two if there is a better option. Two-wheeled bicycles might be the best option for urban settings because of flexibility of movement and storage, but most of that advantage is irrelevant in rural settings.

So that’s it. Obviously I’ve got ideas of what might be the best candidate to fill this bill, and I’ll plan to let you know my thoughts about what and why in this space next time.

In the meantime, tho, let me know what HPV’s you think best meet the mark through the comments either on Facebook or thru Twitter. If you’ve got pictures of a specific machine I’d love to see those, or if you just want to describe it that’s great too. Maybe you’ll change my mind and, if there are enough of them I may take those suggestions and put them together in another post for everyone to learn from and enjoy.

Ok - time to ride...

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I write about cycling a lot here on Applied Life, but it’s not the only topic here. I also consider broader issues on the topic of transportation, discuss the effect of science and technology on daily life, and periodically review or discuss books and music. Very occasionally I just write about Things That Actually Kinda Suck. I also live in a 150-year old farmhouse that my Great Great Great Grandfather built, and periodically I and My Lovely Wife write about updating the house and about country living in general over at Prairie Homestead.

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Trike Storage Revisited

Back when I first got the Catrike Pocket I fairly quickly realized that I would have to re-think storage. As I mentioned then, for my uprights I’ve long relied upon the basic and traditional hang from the wheels method. That approach has a lot to say for it. It’s extremely cheap and easy to set up. A couple of lag hooks from the local hardware store, 30 seconds with a drill for a pilot hold, and a minute or so with a hammer using the handle to screw the hooks in. Bam! Bike storage.

I adapted this approach for the Pocket and it worked well for me. Yes, it did involve doing a clean and jerk with the trike to flip it over and lift it up, but it’s only 33lbs and, to be honest, it spent the overwhelming majority of its time in the back of the car. I didn’t have to hang it up much.

Part of the rationale behind getting the new trike was because MLW was interested in riding. At about 5’1" tall she’s the perfect size for the Pocket, and so it made sense to pass that on to her and order the Expedition for myself. But while her height fits the Pocket well, it also means that she can’t even reach it when it’s hanging up on its hooks, much less get it down. If she was going to be able to use it whenever she wanted it needed to be stored in a fashion that wasn’t oriented explicitly towards an almost-average height American male.

For a large chunk of this past summer that just meant that the trike sat down on the garage floor to keep it accessible. That’s fine, as far as it goes - for much of the summer if the choice is between protecting the trikes or protecting the car, well, the trikes are going to win. But as the weather turns more crisp I begin picturing the act of scraping windshields, and while I love being out in the winter weather, that particular activity is not one I treasure. I needed to be able to get the car into the garage. It’s not a large space, so that meant the trikes had to be able to be stored _up_, above the cars. But it had to be stored in a way that allowed MLW to get her Pocket up and down without gaining 7 inches in height or developing a talent for Olympic weightlifting.

The old setup just added the Pocket to the existing bike storage in the garage:

This approach reflected the idea that I was adding the Pocket to our existing stable. I imagined, at the time, that I would be alternating use of the trike with my Cannondale, and perhaps occasionally using MLW’s mountain bike when the situation called for it, as I’ve done in the past. The reality turned out quite different, and I pretty much rode the Pocket all the time. In addition to that, some time ago MLW had indicated that she no longer found her upright bike comfortable, and the little Specialized hanging there belongs to my child, who has since outgrown it. It seemed that some rejiggering was called for.

We have a large machine shed on one corner of the property, and I relocated all of the uprights, except for the Cannondale, out there. I suspect I’m mostly being sentimental about the old girl, but I’m telling myself that I’d like to keep it at hand because it is the machine I ride when my trike is out of commission.

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Once the old guard was retired the next step was to sort out how to hang up the Pocket in a way that MLW would be able to get up and down. At the risk of being somewhat unoriginal, I decided to look into bike hoists. I have seen other people hang up their trikes using these, so it seemed likely it would work for us. The trick was getting one mounted high enough so that the trike wouldn’t be a noggin knocker for people when doing other work in the garage.

Now, I’ve referred to the hook system that I’ve typically used as being cheap - inexpensive - and it is. Lag hooks usually run less than $1-$2 or so at your local hardware store here in the Midwest. But it’s been a long time since I’d priced bike hoists, so I was surprised that our local-ish big-box store had them for less than $10.

To accomplish the height I built a mounting frame out of 2x4’s and attached it to the top of the garage ceiling joists. This raised the height of the hoist by about 3 1/2", and of course would raise the rest of the trike that same amount relative to just attaching it to the joist. While assembling and mounting the hoist itself is somewhat more complicated than putting in a couple of hooks, it’s still pretty straightforward: measure the distance between mounting points and set your pulleys at that distance apart (and make sure you have leave enough space between the pulley and the wall for the wheels and/or boom).

Determining mounting point was a bit of a question. On an upright bike the mounting points are generally going to be the handlebars and the back of the saddle. The hooks that the kit comes with are sized for that approach, and so equivalent positions on the trike have to be identified, and they have to be far enough apart for the trike to hang stable. I used the horizontal crossbar on back of the seat and the center of the front crossbar as the mounting points. I had considered the possibility that I’d have to do something to widen the front mounting point - e.g. set up a rope or similar across the handlebars but decided I’d try its without first. I could always add it later.

(I used the Expedition in these shots to make the hooks easier to see - the orange provides better contrast than the blue on the Pocket)

Mounting the hoist and getting it ready to lift was a matter of setting the two brackets at the measurement between the two mounting points, and then threading the rope through the pulleys. When I started screwing the brackets in to the 2x4’s I think I discovered why the kit was only $10 - the mounting screws it comes with looked substantial, looked like they were made from hardened steel, but might as well have been constructed of cheesecloth and spit. After I snapped the heads off of two of them I switched over to my own supply of screws.

Once it was all put together and mounted overhead I gave it a test run with the mounting points I selected. As might be expected, it does sway just a bit from side to side when being hoisted up and down, but the movement was easily manageable, so I left it as is, mounting to the front crossmember.

The additional height of the frame I built proved to be enough to get it over my head. Substandard screws aside, the hoist works exactly as advertised, including the vitally important catch and lock system that means when you stop pulling on the rope, the trike stops moving up - it just locks in place. The pulley system makes it little physical work to raise and lower - it’s not just doable by Olympic hopefuls. Probably the only caveat is that, I think because the pulleys are attached to the trike at different vertical locations, it doesn’t want to come down level, and so you have to periodically correct it so it doesn’t come down boom first. It’s a little fiddly in that respect.

I originally figured I would use the hoist for the Pocket and perhaps move the Pocket’s old hooks around a bit for the Expedition. However, with this working so well for the Pocket, and with the kit coming in at less than $10, the prospect of doing a clean and jerk with the slightly heavier and more considerably more awkward Expedition suddenly seemed considerably less attractive. I went back and bought a second kit and repeated the process (though I just went ahead and used my own hardware this time). So now what we have is this:

(If you peek in the back, you can see that the Cannondale was narrow enough to hang in a space against the garage wall. That narrow profile is a true advantage of upright bikes when it comes to storage. Which is good, because it’s likely to sit, stored there, for quite some time).

I’m expecting the Expedition, like the Pocket before it, will ultimately just spend most of its time in the car. But now both of the trikes can be stored up out of the way when needed, and the car can be put back inside ahead of scraping season.

Ok - it’s time to ride... (my trike).