Thursday, June 18, 2009

Ride a bike to work

It was the perfect day to ride a bike to work. It rained last night and today it was clear and cool. Nobody was on the bike path. My favorite time to ride a bike is after a rain shower. The air felt cool on my body so I didn't break a sweat. It wasn't even 60 degrees and no wind. I saw various birds, and one squirrel. I felt sorry for all of the people driving to work in cars. It's nice to be able to ride a bike instead.

Last night I repaired the front brake on my single speed. If I pulled the lever the caliper would go in but then wouldn't return to fully open. And it felt terrible like metal grinding on metal. It started to do that on the SpokeFest ride at the end of last summer. Instead of fixing it, I just quit riding it and switched to my regular road bike, but now I've been wanting to ride it again. I hardly ever have to do anything to my bikes, but now and then you have to fix something. Usually a tire.

So I bought a new housing and cable thinking that would be the easiest fix. I had ruled out the caliper and the lever. It ended up being the cable housing. It's working fine now and I rode the single speed to work.

2 comments:

Diane Lowe said...

That trail looks really nice! I don't think there are any nice green bike trails like that in L.A.!

Good luck repairing your brake!

don said...

The bike paths are nice here. Everything is green now. That section of trail is getting over grown with knapweed right now though, but they usually come along and spray or cut it. One nice thing about this area is that there aren't any thorns that will flat a tire, so that's never an issue here.

That trail is one that connects where I work with the main bike path that goes along the river for miles. About half of my commute to work is on that bike path.

The brake is fixed and I'm going to ride that single speed for a while.