that which rolls

Yesterday’s commute home was worth noting.

I took off from work and I felt like I was making good time. There wasn’t as much traffic as I usually encounter at the 490/31 on & off ramps of doom. My technique there is to make eye contact with all 15 cars I’m surrounded by simultaneously and yell “don’t kill me. don’t kill me. don’t kill me.” over and over as fast as I can. I don’t think riding through there will ever be ‘old hat’ unless they put in a sidewalk or a bike path or a stop sign instead of a yield. (Cars don’t seem to like yielding to bikes. It’s emasculating to them.)

Anyway, I got through there and started creeping slowly up the hill between there & Perinton. I noticed that traffic was backing up and I was kind of gloating that I was cruising by them all even though I was going up hill. This sense of triumph was not to last. I crested the hill and started down toward the accident that was backing everything up.

All the cars were being routed through the Wegmans parking lot around the left side of accident. I opted to take the sidewalk (very slowly) around the right side of the accident. After passing the chaos I decided (for some stupid reason) to ride down over the curb & get back into the road. The curb was a bit higher than I expected and it slammed down hard onto the road. 50 feet later my tire was flat.

My initial plan was to ride another 11 miles to the far distant bus stop but given the flat, I walked my bike to the nearest park & ride 1/4 mile away and decided to try to fix the flat while I waited. The pressure of changing my tire with onlookers and helpful bystanders caused me to omit that very important step of carefully checking the tire for debris. Also for some reason I believed that I had gotten the flat from riding off the curb and that no debris was involved. Beware of certainty.

I got the tire changed but I have not mastered my craptastic hand pump & could not get the tire over 20psi. I will have to add tire inflation devices to my list of perfect-gear holy grails to search for. But at least the tire was on with a new tube free of gaping holes.

I caught the bus and got off at the first gas station in Newark. I attempted to fill my tire with the air pump but it appeared not to be working. I went in the store and demanded to know what was wrong… “I put a quarter in & it’s not working!?” “Oh,” the lady said. “It’s 75 cents.” Three minutes of air for 75 cents. So I felt like an idiot for not reading and I felt ripped off that the price of air has skyrocketed. What’s everyone so worried about the gas prices for when the price of a barrel of air has tripled in the past few years.

I got on my bike and it was rolling along so happily. Compared to the horror of walking it was like flying. I cruised through Perkins Park. I caught a green light by the liquor store. I stopped at a stop sign and suddenly my tire was flat again. This time I just called for a ride and started walking the bike toward home. I was only about 3 miles away at this point.

After supper I worked at changing the second flat. We discovered a huge piece of glass embedded in the tire. I’m wondering now if the glass in the tire came from the accident. Brian had bought me one of those slime tubes so I put that in. Then we noticed a problem with my brake cable, and than my new fenders were practically touching the tire (where it’s bolted to the frame), and that my rear wheel isn’t quite round anymore. Maybe I did that going off the curb… maybe it’s been like that for a while from a million potholes and moments of bad judgement.

I’m hoping today will go more smoothly.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 8:50 am and is filed under biking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.