Caution: Long Load

FAll! I love fall!

I had a bunch of stuff that friends had left at our house over the past few weeks and I decided that this afternoon it was time to return it. It was me and the little man hanging out all day, so I figured out how to hook the Burley trailer up to the Dummy and we headed out.
It was a beautiful afternoon. Lots of sunshine, and lots of color on the trees. Little dude slept hard in the trailer as we ran around.
Allman caught up with us in the middle of our ride, he was out on his Pugsley pulling a trailer with his recycling on board. At one point the tape measure came out and it turned out that his rig outstretched the Dummy/Burley set up by 9 or 10 inches.Mrs Bike wrider caught up with us just before we got home, so we turned around and rode for a while longer. We finished up by riding a few mellow trails on the way back to the house.

$0.02 on a Cross Check

A buddy in the southern hemisphere sent me a message the other night (morning for him I guess) and said he was looking at getting a new cross bike and wondered how I liked my Surly CrossCheck. I realized my response might be worth sharing here, so here it is:

I love my cross check! I could go on and on about it, but I'll boil it down to I love it. If you want me to rave on and on let me know, I'm more than happy to do so.

Previous set up: Single speed studded.

I've run it singlespeed, fixed and currently I've set it up nice and tall with flared drop bars (On One Midge) and STI brake lever/shifters. It is super comfortable and can rally off road.

My only caveat is with the fork. If it weren't such a great fork I'd swap it for something else. It has a nice smooth ride, and handles superbly, but for some reason it is prone to excessive squealing/shrieking. Some kind of tuning fork, vibration issue when you apply the brakes. EXtreme toe in can quiet it for a while, but only temporarily. I've tried a few things, but I'm thinking of getting a brake bridge for it and see if that helps.
The new forks have rack eyelets on them, so you could just slap front rack on there and hopefully that would kill any noise.

My ideal Cross bike would be a CrossCheck with disc brakes, and I'm hoping that since the UCI or whoever legalized discs for cross racing it won't be too far off.

THe closest thing I've found so far is the Singular Peregrine.

http://www.singularcycles.com/peregrine.html

At this point if my crosscheck kicked the bucket I would have to seriously consider replacing it with the Peregrine.

Hope this helps fuel the thought process a bit. I can say more if you're interested, and you can check out my blog @ www.bikewrider.blogspot.com for more of my semi random musings on things bike related.

Happy Springtime to ya'

Locked Out

Got home from running errands around town on my bike this evening to find I was locked out of the house.

No worries, I'd half expected it would happen. We have a housemate for the time being and I'd given my house key to her until we can get some new ones made. My wife was out running errands, so I knew she would be home before too long.

Dropped my panniers on the back deck and took off for the trails. I had just explored a new to me trailhead to the local trail network and was pretty stoked about it. I'll put it this way, our new house is about 2 min from dirt and less than 3:30min from singletrack. I timed it, and I timed it on the up hillish ride home.

Point is I had about an hour of fall cross bike rallying around in the woods after a couple of hours commuting around town. The leafs are bright yellow right now, about half on the trails and half still on the trees. It was that golden hour of evening where the sun is getting low on the horizon and everything just lights up beautifully and a chill was just beginning to creep into the air.

Got home just as my wife was unloading from her errands. Now the pizza is out of the oven and I 'm going to go chow down.