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..