Stopping is good, too...

The weather hasn't been too cycle-friendly in this week of so-called midsummer. So when the sun came out of hiding yesterday afternoon, I hopped on a bike and headed west. After a few miles into a gusty and quite strong headwind, I stopped for a breather at a country road junction. I propped the bike against a fence and then lay down on the grass verge. With the sun on my face, the breeze held at bay by a hedge and with the scent of summer flowers all around, I stayed a while. And then another while. All in all I must have lain in the grass for about half an hour, watching the occasional bird and nodding to the few motorists who stopped at the junction.

Of course I could just as easily have taken my ease in my back garden, but in addition to the pleasant sunbathe I had a change of scene and an hour or so of healthy exercise riding to and from the selected spot. As we sometimes say in these parts, "Ye canna whack it"!

Three cheers for gears!

Cycled out from Perth to Murthly this afternoon. It's a pretty steadily uphill trip. It's not all that steep, but today it was into a constant headwind, so pedalling was hard going, or at least it would have been on the type of single-speed bike I had as a teenager. Thankfully, my bikes of today have gearing systems which provide me with the opportunity to maintain a more or less constant pedalling rhythm.

With three chainrings on the front and 8 or 9 sprockets at the rear, my bikes have a wide range of gears that I would have killed for twenty years ago when struggling uphill on my 5-speed "racer" (crawler, more like!). And of course we now have the ability to alter the range of gears on our bikes with little more than ten minutes work in the shed. Just replacing a close-ratio sprocket with one with wider spacing gives me the range to tackle even some of the hairiest hills in this lovely part of the world.

So let's have three cheers for gears and ignore the luddites who moan about "all those unnecessary speeds" on modern bikes. The more the merrier say I!

... and the curtain track?

So, I'm in the fabric shop to collect the new curtains they've made up for us and the ladies seem very unsettled by my proposal to take them home on my bike trailer, especially when they discover it already holds a new kitchen bin of a fair size, plus a load of groceries. There follows the usual conversation in which I try briefly to explain that I don't use a bike for shopping either because I've lost my driving licence or am too poor to afford a car. Carbon emissions, climate change, yadda, yadda...

After carefully explaining to me that cramming the curtains into a trailer might irretrievably crush the fabric and after a sort of dubious acceptance of my clearly crackpot intention to proceed, the ladies hand over the bag of curtain things and then one of them says "And the curtain track?"

Bummer. I find I'm rather less jaunty about riding home with a loaded trailer and about eight linear feet of plastic curtain track. I can only hope I look suitably nonchalant as I carry the thing out to the bike and try to work out a method of transporting it, involving one large rubber band which is the only form of attachment I have with me.

I did make it home, with the curtain track lashed to the top tube and sticking out ahead of me like a lance at a tournament. Interesting journey though..

Time well spent

The weather this Easter weekend is just appalling here, with very strong winds and quite heavy snow showers. It's also very cold. So the bikes are staying in the shed and I've been spending this downtime getting ready for the annual service on the bikes. Doing my own own servicing is one of the most enjoyable things about cycling. So many of the other things we own and use nowadays either aren't user serviceable or need such special tools and so on, so it's a real pleasure to work on bikes which can be stripped down and rebuilt with cleaned, regreased or replacement parts, with just a few tools and ideally a workstand. Of course, the more often you do these jobs, the more confident and skilful you become.

Perhaps the greatest benefit from home servicing is the confidence you gain in the bicycle you're riding. When I apply the brakes, I know exactly the condition of the brake levers, the cables, the brake shoes and so on. And when I turn the pedals I know that the wheel bearings are in good condition, well greased and properly seated.

So this weekend I've been checking my supplies of cables, grease, brake shoes, chain oil and all the other bits and pieces I'm going to need. As soon as the weather warms up I'll get started in the shed and then I can look forward to the road tests ...

A kindly wind!

Generally, the cyclist finds the wind to be againsterly. Even a trip which follows a 360 degree circular route will frequently involve a wind that constantly frustrates progress. However, this afternoon's ride was the exception that proves the rule. Cycling west from Perth was like riding with my braces nailed to a tree; it seemed to take constant effort to make any distance at all. I rode out about 12 miles or so before turning off the main road and heading down towards the "back" road. And when I eventually reached that road and turned east for home - wow! All I did was sit up as big as I could and the wind took me more or less all the way back to Perth. I think I only pedalled for about a few hundred yards up one or two little slopes.

For "fitness" purposes I shall claim today's ride as 25 miles. The log won't show that I only pedalled half it. A kindly wind at last!

Group Cycling

Most of my cycling is done on my own. Partly this is from choice, because I enjoy being able to take all the decisions about how I'll spend my time on the bike, my speed, my route, the stops I take and so on. But partly it's because cycling clubs tend to be based on sports cycling, whether road racing, time trialling and so on. These clubs have training runs which are much too fast and furious for me nowadays.

Social cycling groups are rather harder to find, at least in these parts. I have occasionally ridden with CTC groups, but even they tend to be a bit pacy. I ride about once a month with a group from ByCycle, the Perth-based cycle campaign group. We usually cover about 30 miles or so at a very sedate pace, stopping for all sorts of reasons and none.

Sunday past we had just such a ride in Glenalmond, on a day that felt very much like spring had sprung. We stopped to watch a group of enthusiasts flying model planes and later in the day stopped to chat with a different group whose thing is model railways. The 30 miles or so took us well over four hours to complete, which I regard as a very satisfactory pace for a retired gent on a Sunday morning!

Where's the camera...

...when you want it? I went for one of my favourite rides today, from Perth via Caputh to Coupar Angus and then back to Perth via various back roads. It was a fine day, so I took my time. I saw, at reasonable camera distance (reasonable with a 300mm lens on) roe deer, wild swans, a grey heron, buzzards, a kestrel and to top it all a beautiful red squirrel which sat obligingly on a roadside verge watching me for all of half a minute. And where was the camera? In the back bedroom, of course.

I keep telling myself never to leave home without the camera kit. I keep it in a "slingshot" camera bag, which gives me pretty quick access to the camera even when standing over the bike. Ok, I'm not going to get quality photos without a tripod and so on, but at least I'd have been able to have a go at capturing some really nice moments.