Shoulda done this a while back...

... why haven't I posted this before? I don't know. 

My friend Katie, who has contributed stuff to this blog in the past (and who is the only other woman I know whose bike has a boy's name: her bike's name is Stephen), is going to be riding from Toronto to Montreal this summer in support of the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation. Toronto to Montreal. That's one seriously long ride for an urban cyclist. I may be posting a link over on the sidebar to her sponsorship page: for now, click here to donate. Any amount helps, and it goes to a truly good cause.

Dutchmen in Istanbul

This morning I stumbled across this article from a Turkish online newspaper: about a stalwart group of Dutch ex-pats who, against all odds and in defiance of self-preservation and rationality, are cycling around in Istanbul. They go on cycling tours to the Black Sea and organize early morning city trips so they can avoid the worst of the traffic. It makes me smile. 

"Except for de Carrasco, the members of the group are Dutch and they are determined to lead lives loyal to their own culture. How? by riding bikes, of course.

They challenge the chaos of the metropolis and its intensive traffic. Obstacles created by the municipality, aggressive taxi drivers, crowds in the streets, people screaming, “What the hell are you doing?” and people looking at them in weird ways don’t bother them a bit."

Something about the mental image of a bunch of Dutch guys, placidly cycling along in the face of honking horns and people yelling, "you're too fat, you should drive," just makes me happy. I like to think of them as unflappable. Maybe with little Mona Lisa smiles on their faces as they pedal along. It's such a comforting image somehow. These guys are my new heroes.

I want this on a T-shirt...

... for those days when "Share the Road" just doesn't quite cut it.

 

Like it? I threw it together today after being buzzed by a few too many trucks. 

Abandoned (in Toronto)

I just got a nice comment from the author of ThumbShift, a new cycling blog out of Toronto, on my piece in Spacing Ottawa about abandoned bikes. She (I will assume she) also details what happens to these bikes in Toronto on her own blog, at least as far as "held 30 days and then disposed of." What "disposed of" means she doesn't know, and I'm not going to guess. Although it's possible that Crown Assets Distribution gets them there too, or something similar. I doubt they're just piled up into containers and shipped off to China to end their existences in recycling mountains. At least, I certainly hope not.

And I'll take the smidgin of Ottawa envy, too. With the faintest of smiles.

Greased up

This is a visual approximation of Mike, yesterday afternoon, after I took him out into the hallway with a rag and a bucket, washed him off, scraped gunk out of all his gears, and applied liberal amounts of oil. (The part of Mike, obviously, is played by C3P0: but I insist that I am NOT Luke.)

("Thank the Maker!")

Did it ever make a difference. I had no idea how much crap had built up - grit, grime, general gunk. Not only does Mike just look better now that you can actually see the colour of the tubes, I headed downtown this evening for my dance class and was blown away. So much less work, so much smoother. Smooth enough that I noticed the funny little bump my back tire has picked up (and the slight wobble in the pedals, which will need to be fixed come spring, or I'll have a crank arm pop off in the middle of the street the way I did a couple of years ago when I got one of those wobbles.) But wow. Let this be a lesson to me: it's winter. Buy bucketloads of lubricant, and use 'em. 

It's also only about -1 tonight. I'm slowly starting to believe in that whole 'summer' thing again.

Outside the MEC

 

Spotted this bike a couple of weeks ago locked to the racks outside the MEC in Westboro. The note reads: "Please remove this bike if yours. We will have to remove the lock and recycle if not moved. Thanks."

Again: this is a not-half-bad bike. It's clearly been left locked there for long enough that the MEC staff have noticed and put this note (laminated, and written on both sides, so it will survive the weather and be noticed from any angle... all very helpful of them.) What happened to the owner? It's not a junker, and it's not like it was joyridden there by a bike thief - because it's locked up. So... what happened to the owner? Who forgets a bike? The seat's gone... stolen, or removed? Did the seat get stolen and the owner decided to write off the whole bike? Doesn't seem so likely though, does it?

Luckily, the folks at MEC can probably find a use for it, so it won't just rot away like most abandoned bikes.

Okay, what's up, Bank Street?

I went through downtown this afternoon on my way home from work - had some errands to run. And I don't know why I hadn't noticed it before, in the summer, say, when the pavement was still bare. But it suddenly occurred to me. The recently reconstructed part of Bank Street (which was blocked off for what felt like years) is still fairly devoid of traffic - it's my theory that people learned alternate routes while the construction was going on and haven't trickled back yet. So, it's refreshingly easy to bike along even at rush hour, except for one strange thing. All along the edge of the new pavement, through the entire rebuilt section, there's an extra layer of asphalt a bit over a foot wide, lumpy and a bit irregular, next to the curb. It looks like the layer of ice and slush that hardens at the edge of the road where the plow's blade doesn't reach, but it's permanent - there all year around.

And it forces a bike further out into the road. Not that I mind much: I should probably be further from the curb than I usually am anyway, just to ensure I have room to dodge debris and manholes. But it's strange that it's there, and it's right where you have to keep paying attention to it so as not to catch your wheel on it (and it must be mildly annoying for people trying to parallel park, too.) It's laid right down, the whole way along the street, and I have to wonder. What's it doing there? Does it have some intended purpose, or was it a mistake when they were laying the road? Seems unlikely that it was a mistake, since there's a good mile of it. It's a small, confusing little thing that didn't really occur to me until I was navigating around it tonight on my way home.