Americana day - 3

My failing on this day was to go very light on photos, and pound away the video (which I can't really see as functional on your blog).  Video is the machine gun of light capture; you dont think too much about what you capture, you just suck it all in.  As a consequence, I have a video (very poor quality) of a black bear - but no photos :-(

Sunrise from Big Meadows Lodge - seriously beautiful morning - looking down into the valley.

Packed and ready to go - legs recovered pretty well it seemed, sore but working.

Taking a coffee break in the town of Dyke.  There were rocking chairs to sit in out front, very nice coffee experience.

Final destination, The Residence Inn in Millmont Street, Charlottesville.

Americana - day 2

 

Early morning, at the entrance to Shenandoah National Park.  There are lots of ways to describe this - the gateway to pre-lapsarian paradise (descriptively accurate) or the jaws of the green hell (by the end of the day, emotionally accurate).  It was very very beautiful, and very very hard.  10 degrees for 10 hours.

This one for Grandpa George - 10,000 miles away, another Hogsback.  The altitude is in feet not meters, but dont be fooled (as indeed I was when setting out) all in all this day I climbed 9,000 feet, with a 50kg bike, and the physics of that is inescapable.  For camparison, the peak of Champaigne Castle in the Drakensburg is 11,000 feet.  It was an especially NASTY day in the saddle.

This accurately sums up the day, emptying waterbottles and streaks of sunblock mixed with sweat.

Lunch, close to the highest point of the day, having come from the light coloured valley in the distance.

The Big Meadows Lodge, Room 9.  Never been so pleased to see a bed - fan too for drying washed clothes.  Big Meadows also turned out to be the end of the road for my favourite green flame go-faster cycling clothes - just too old and nasty to bother trying to preserve any longer.  

Americana - day 1

Setting out on the Washington Old Dominion Railroad trail - scenerey is gobsmacking - ferocious beauty.  Here on a bridge crossing a river, name unknown.

       

Didn't see a Joshua or Evan, but did find an Adie - I think this town is called Leesburg

In Purcelville in a diner for a late breakfast - fantastic - exactly what my whole soul was craving.

Meeting and talking to serious cycling people - a divine part of the journey - this is a carbon fibre Quest recumbent trailing wheel tricycle, built by a Dutch company called Velomobile.  This is serious hardware - much more efficient than a bicycle.  Yours for 6600 Euros.

Among my dearest friends at school were Jon Stewart and Graeme Wilson, and some of the things we had in common and lived around were bicycles and Americana, particularly music.  The cult status E-W road, Route 66 featured in many places, so it was cool to see it in the flesh, crossing over it on the A50, with a bicycle.

The area is rich with civil war history - and it's pretty dramatic stuff.  On these fields in front, also in July, but of 1863, 6000 cavalry supported by artillary clashed.  Like so much of the rest of it, it must have been carnage.

Rolling along the Shenandoah river, communities of people living with and around the river.  This photo out back of a river-side diner, ubiquitous bakkie, "tradie" box, flag.

The other side of the diner - insanely fantastic green, grass, trees, water.

The end of the day's ride, the Twi-Lite Motel in the town of Front Royal - itself a fantastic piece of Americana in every sense - visually, functionally, and as it happens run by an Indian family from Gujarat.  Perfect.

The BIG O.K.

 At various points this whole ride in America thing has seemed one of my less good ideas.  But here we are, two days to go and the blue beast is ready to fly.

Evan, when asked to take a pic of me and the box on my phone, couldn't help a little selfie first :-)
Aiden indifferent in the background - head candy, teenager.

Here's the minimal dismantling - the plan is a ten minute rebuild in the airport.

Snugly it fits.  I've had some shabby moments with lazy measuring in my life,
but this one was spot on.

Ready to roll (in cut off jammies) - 21.6kg, and under the 200cm limit.  I need to add that in my hyperperforming public holiday mode, I also stripped and cleaned a dehumidifier - just saying.

The 2018 Summer - so far cruel and clear

It has been a summer with a capital S so far - record heat in May, a regular wet June, and now the booming skies of Philippines air coming into Hong Kong from the south.  I went for a long ride yesterday morning - 72km - came back feeling wasted.  It was 31 degrees with 90 percent humidity at 4.50am.  I think Washington is going to be the same - so good practice.

Looking North-East out over Sheung Sze Wan bay.

Looking back over the bay towards Lobster Bay village and a super-low tide.  

Clearwater Bay Beach 1 on Saturday morning.  Aiden and I went for a swim, and it was fantastic; the water was gin-clear (you can see the reef in the bottom right of the photo), schools of fish, and 29 degrees.  I loved the dude fishing just inside the shark-nets; old-timer in his paddy-field hat.  By the time we'd walked home we both looked like we'd been swimming in our clothes - especially thanks to a dad's short cut (not) which turned out to be a coastal rock scramble and then a massive climb up a hill.  

Aiden and Evan - finished year 9 and 7 - Summer Holidays are here

Yep, another year of education has passed and school is out.  Summer in HK equals a winter trip to SA.  Ev is all steel smiled; everyone is raring to go.  I had to take new pics for next year's bus ID cards for them - so here they are.

Hopefully good to go

It was super-nice to chat last night - thanks - and of course I am thinking of you and your extended family in particular today.

Here's the completed bike, it's pretty cool and sensibly customized, by which I mean that I've ridden it lots and changed little bits here and there without changing the overall philosophy of it (it's alsways seemed really daft to buy a bike and then change it so much that it's a different one).

I get why bar end shifters are good for touring, because you never stand up and pedal a loaded touring bike (they would normally stick out of the bottom of the handle bar).  I also use this one for the beach and for getting fit for touring however, and I've banged my knees on them once too often (also brings about an immediate gear change - not ideal if you are grinding up a hill).  So I bought a pair of these brake-mounted cyclocross friction shifters (which use the same brake levers as the bike originally came with as their base - important if you want to change as little as possible).  Delightfully they are made by a company called The Goats of Gevenalle (yep).  

I opted for these front pannier racks which mount independently on either side of the front fork.  The key is to have a fork which has tapped mounts on both sides of each fork blade.    The next challenge was that there wasn't an available eye for the mud-guards.  I'm way too old for days-on-end of grit-in-crack if the roads are wet, so I was determined to re-attach the mudguards.  I did that by cutting and reshaping the mounts so that they could attach to the pannier rack when it was on, and directly to the fork eye if the racks were off.  

You can see it here, the rack bolts sandwich-like with the fork blade in the middle.  To fit the bottom spacer required to get round the disk brakes on the one side and the fork base, also required a spacer for the top mount.

The racks themselves are pretty cool, made out of  4130 hollow Chromoly - which means lightish, fiendishly strong, easy to weld if broken.  Seemed like a good fit for the rest of the bike which is essentially of the same stuff.

The spacers I needed (you will be amazed at how impossible it is to buy a 12mm steel spacer with a +5mm core) I ended up making out of the end of brass gas nozzles - cheap, rust-proof, easy to cut and trim... seemed perfect).

This is what the front panniers look like when mounted.  Damn cool, low centre of gravity, easy on and off.  I also used strips of hose-pipe between the pannier mounts to stop them moving around unduly under braking :-).  Hopefully I can get all my gear, tools, work-clothes, laptop etc etc in.  Time will tell.