Jodi made it her mission to get our cruiser bikes fixed during this holiday break. To incentivize me to join her for a ride, she committed to doing the work herself. This did not go as planned.
The bikes have been unused for the better part of the pandemic, if not longer. That may come as a surprise, but taking a bike ride was not terribly high on our list of things to do while sheltering at home for the most of a year. This situation was made worse by the particularly bad winter weather last year, which led to a big reshuffle of the garage. That further buried the bikes, making larger the inertia of using them.
Jodi decided to turn that around. She went into the garage in the morning. She emerged defeated three hours later.
The rubbing sound that plagued her bike’s back wheel did not go away, even when she removed the shopping basket assembly from the rear. Both of the tubes in my bike’s tires were popped. The wheel rubber was also in very bad shape. My bike fell over after she replaced both tubes, popping one of the brand new tubes (which had clearly been pinched when it was installed). There were no replacements left, and she quit.
That’s when she discovered that there is a bike repair business in the area that goes door-to-door. We’d actually seen them at work once before, in a parking lot at SMU, but didn’t properly file away that info. Sure enough, the company came out to the house today and put the bikes in tip-top shape in about 2 more hours of professional work.
And so we went for a bike ride! I insisted on something shorter (Jodi has a habit of insisting on endless and long rides on the first try, leading me usually to have to quit 11 miles in because my legs cannot move any more and my ass feels like somebody has been hitting it with a hammer). We managed a 7.5 mile ride on trails in the area. It was a lovely day for it: a perfect September New England autumn day here in North Texas in late December.
