For the academic year 1995-96, I lived in Goettingen, a medium sized college town in central Germany. I somehow just found myself remembering a bike ride I took with my dad to a tiny residential village about 10km south of the city, primarily on bike paths. I also remember the crappy bike that I had there, which took me all over the city for the entire year. I rode in the rain/snow, in the day/night, and I never worried about the bike. It was 50DM (maybe $30) and with an untrued rear wheel, what could really get worse?
I think about the serious attention I give to bikes these days, and yet I certainly don’t ride as much as I did back in college. But as I was looking at the map of Goettingen I saw an entire forested area that i had never known was there (Naturpark Hann Muenden). If I were doing the same thing now, I can guarantee you that my bike would be nicer, but also that I would have explored that area by now. I would have ridden all over that crazy country. A host family that I visited once a month lived a mere 14km away and yet i never rode that. That seems so odd to me now. I also think about all the wonderful hills around the East Bay in California (where i went to college) and how I never took rides around there. Just hiking trips.
I guess the point of this post is to recognize that I have changed and while I gladly go on a 50 mile bike around the Boston area, I also realized the missed opportunity of exploring these areas. Luckily, it’s not like I was sitting on my ass: instead of riding in a saddle, I was dancing through the night, acting in theater, meeting tons of people, hiking in Big Sur, exploring life in a different way. no regrets!
Sometime last fall, right before the Labor Day bike-camping-appendectomy fiasco, I saw a posting on craigslist for a nice tall old Fuji for $75. I drove the few miles from work, which is far enough away from Boston that the guy probably wasn’t going to get the most bites. He went out to the backyard and pulled this gorgeous bike out from under a tarp — he said it had been in the garage until recently when he started renovating his place. This was the bike he had bought when he decided to ride across the US! Everything was original, even the tires, both of which were flat and worn. Before I had it, this link was all I knew…
The bike sat in my basement as winter arrived and I tried to decide what to do with it. I had originally wanted a beater bike, but this baby was clearly too nice for that, so I opted to clean it and build it back up as another road bike. I added indestructible Schwalbe Marathon tires (27″), one of my Brooks saddles and then wrapped up the moustache bars I had lying around to make this a pretty stylin’ ride. Adding the fenders was the most difficult, as the tires are very big. They don’t rub, but it’s fairly tight in there, and if it became a problem, i would need to either get narrower tires (which subsequently means less overall diameter), 700c wheels or skip the fenders.
I realized that this could be a new longer distance road bike and was curious how it handled with weight in the front — something my other bikes haven’t handled that well. I took the front low riders off of Karen’s bike, grabbed some panniers and set them up. I needed some weight, so I grabbed two half-full paint cans and threw them in. The Fuji handled fantastically and I didn’t even notice the extra weight! I even did some light off roading as I cut through a golf course, and the steering and comfort was great!
I’ll probabaly upgrade to a better front rack, but I needed the proof of concept first. I was hoping to use Jan Heine’s BQ method of measuring trail and angle and getting all the protractors out and stuff, but this ended up being easier and more empirical.
The only thing I’m not sure I like is the cockpit:
I love the bar end shifters, and have them on my xtracycle, but i find i keep my hands on the ends where there are no brakes. With the brakes located in a more forward position, I find myself not really ready to brake quickly if I needed to. I think I’ll keep it like this for a while (partly because i shellacked the hell out of the bar tape, and it’d be a pain in the ass to redo that), but also because I might just replace it with a Nitto Noodle someday.
The other thing to note is that this is the bike that I’ll be using for the trail bike, so I am sort of required to have a wider grip. Once spring hits, we’ll see how it works with the kids…