A perfect day

It's sunny. You get on your bike, pedal 40 KM in leisurely fashion and end up back where you started.

Life gets no better than this.

(Unfortunately that was a few days ago, and now I'm at work, it's about to start raining - heavily by the look of it - and so I'm going to get really wet cycling home. Ho hum - but the memory's good.)

The work is (nearly) complete

I bought the donkey just about two years ago now, spending as much as I was prepared to lay out at the time and with the intention of transforming it by degrees into a machine on which I could both commute and undertake longer journeys with the reasonable expectation of actually being able to get there. Much longer journeys, in fact, is the plan when I finally get the time to do such things.

Well, now I’m awaiting delivery of the very last item on the development list, a long anticipated new, stronger wheelset, able – when I’ve got round to installing it – to carry substantial loads over dubious surfaces without collapsing into a quivering heap of spokes, aluminium and rubber. So the work is almost over and soon it will simply be a case of routine maintenance and replacing bits as they wear out.

Oh yes, and riding it of course, which has always been and still is the whole point.

One man's pig is another man's Mexican

I noticed in my local paper this morning - and not for the first time - that hereabouts in NL they seem to be taking incredible care not to call swine flu swine flu. Instead it's inevitably referred to as Mexican flu.

Now, I wonder, could this possibly have anything to do with the fact that within a 15Km radius of the city in which I live more than 5 million pigs are being reared at any one time - and that we wouldn't want the citizens to get scared by the idea that these cuddly (and not very tasty, actually) creatures may in reality not be the very healthiest and nicest of neighbours to have around? That they might, in fact, end up giving us nasty diseases like ***** flu?

Nooooo! Of course not!

Things you see from a bike 2

BORDER POST

Not, perhaps, the grand kind of border post you'd expect to be marking the transition from one country to the next - but these are, after all, the days of open borders and no barriers between countries (well, some countries anyway).

This one marks part of the border between the Netherlands and Germany. The photographer is in NL, the bikes are in Germany.

Incidentally, it's fascinating (to me) how often the border between the two countries is marked not simply by border posts like the one above, but by the transition between totally flat land - in NL - and hills that rise right from the border, and I do mean from the very first metre you enter Germany. It's as though the old Germans arrived at the end of the hilly land, looked out over the flat land and said, "Yeuch, no thanks, someone else can have that bit". As below:

Left, NL; right (where the hills start), Germany.

A new bike for my beloved

V is not renowned as the world’s fastest cyclist; in fact sometimes she can be downright slow. Until recently I had simply accepted this as a fact of life (she’s after all not exactly a giant of a woman) and tailored our weekend cycling routes accordingly.

But then, three or four weeks ago, while we were out on one of these weekend rides, her bike started making scraping and clonking noises. The plastic chainguard, it seemed, had gone out of alignment and was rubbing somewhere. So I pushed, prodded and bent it – my time-tested method for fixing almost anything – then got on the bike to test the effectiveness of what I’d done. And it was then that I realised for the first time what a complete pile of utter crap the poor woman had been riding for the past two years.

Now this isn’t some cheap piece of supermarket trash we’re talking about here; it’s a mid-to-high range model from an extremely well known Dutch manufacturer who’s been making bikes for about 100 years. But still it’s rubbish. The effort required to pedal it was enormous and – although I’d realigned the chainguard so that it didn’t rub on anything when I spun the pedals before getting on the bike – pedalling it made the frame flex enough for the rubbing to start again. Admittedly I’m a few kilos heavier than V, but surely this simply should not happen. What’s more, the disc brakes – that’s DISC brakes, supposedly the latest and best in bike technology – were, to put it mildly, ineffective; I had to apply great pressure on the brake levers to produce any noticeable braking effect whatsoever (and they weren’t worn out or misaligned; I checked – it was just lousy design and materials).

No wonder the poor woman has been a trifle on the slow and hesitant side! And more than a trifle tired after a 40Km ride! Actually, I think she’s been a bloody heroine for persevering with it at all. And she deserves better!

So better she now has, in the form of a new bike from Koga Miyata – sometimes referred to as the Rolls Royce of Dutch bike makers, and rightly so in my opinion. It’s very significantly lighter than the old model, and designed and built to a standard that shows the old bike up for the rubbish it truly was. Best of all, it’s as smooth as silk on both tarmac and rough track – an absolute joy to ride.

So now V’s covering the kilometres at twice the speed she did before – and with a big smile on her face as she does so. Fantastic!

Cheap it certainly wasn’t! But worth it? Oh yes!

Things you see from a bike 1

Garden ornaments in a private garden, Ven-Zelderheide.

Bike ferry

Living as I do in a country crossed by big rivers, it's not unusual that I put my bike on a ferry at some point during a ride, but normally the ferries concerned are car ferries that - for a small fee - squeeze on a few bikes whenever necessary.

Last weekend, however, we came across something slightly different on a ride along (and across) the river Waal (the Dutch part of the Rhine) near the German border east of Nijmegen. Twice we crossed the river, and both times we used bike ferries - small ferries dedicated exclusively to ferrying bikes and their riders. And very busy they were too; obviously a profitable enterprise - at least when the weather's good.

Some pictures of one of them, based at the town of Millingen:

The donkey bites back

As you can see, the bike’s been acting a bit contrary recently – and I can’t say I blame it; I have, after all been failing to perform as I should in the care and attention department.

I tend to ask quite a lot of the beast. Not only does it have to cope with me commuting to and from work on it every day (unless it’s absolutely pissing down at 8 a.m. of course; there are limits), it also has to handle doing quite a few dozen kilometres of a weekend. And usually, in return for minimal care, it provides faultlessly reliable performance.

But over the past couple of weeks it’s been the ‘minimal care’ bit that’s been the problem – or rather the lack of it. I’ve failed to reach the required standard and the picture above shows the result; a chain that decided it didn’t want to stay where it should be.

It’s not surprising, really. After all, quite a few of the kilometres I do over a weekend tend to be on unpaved roads and tracks, and in NL that inevitably means riding on sand. And good though the donkey’s XT derailleur is, it’s still a derailleur and thus prone to reacting badly when it gets clogged up with dirt – or in the case of the donkey, with a glutinous mixture of sand, water and lubricant. In particular, the front change mechanism seems prone to stick in these circumstances, and it’s this that has thrown the chain off the front rings a few times recently. And, of course, left me covered with black gunge after replacing it.

Serves me right! So guess what I’ll be doing before the next weekend ride.

Sorry, donkey.

So CattleAir really doesn't give a flying f**k any more!

OK, that's it, the end!

In the past I've been a regular Ryanair customer, since - conveniently - they fly from my local airport back to the UK. But I've never really been a fan, since I've always got the impression that they really don't give a monkey's about their passengers in any sense other than the obvious one - that we're the source of income for the airline (airline, huh, what a sick joke!). But they do tend to get you there on time, as well as at a lowish price (even though it's never been as low as they try to claim), so I've always given them the benefit of the doubt until now.

But this is it; I've had enough.

Why? Because now they're going to charge me a not insubstantial sum of money for the privilege of printing out a computerized check-in form/boarding pass ON MY OWN COMPUTER AT HOME. Otherwise I'll have to pay an even larger sum of money as a penalty for daring to arrive at the airport to check in without this particular piece of (expensive) paper.

And all, I presume, so that they can continue to claim that their fares (which don't include items like this that you have to take as part of the deal and can't avoid paying for) are low.

Oh come on CattleAir! What a bunch of complete fraudsters! Sorry, but I know when I'm being conned. And I know when someone thinks I'm so bloody dim that I'll keep falling for whatever trick they choose to come up with - time after time.

And I know one more thing. Convenient or not, there's no way I'm giving CattleAir a single piece of my business from now on.

Frankly I'd rather sodding swim that piece of water that separates me from my home country!

End. Of. Story.

Hello, am I just possibly being ripped off here?

Some time ago, being on occasion a sucker for appealing consumer technology, I bought a Garmin bike computer - you know, the kind that uses a satellite to tell you your speed, distance, position, sex (if any), and probable date of death under the wheels of a giant truck. And it's been fine so far.

But the mount (surprise, surprise) is the same kind of cheap, flimsy plastic thing you'd find on the cheapest of cheap bike computers (which the Garmin definitely wasn't). And - guess what - it's broken in under a year.

So I've been investigating how to replace it - and I'm not happy. Definitely NOT HAPPY!

Why?

Well, the computer cost something just less than 200 Euros, which was OK (it's worked well so far). But the cost of a replacement mount for it - a cheap, flimsy plastic thing that probably, like the original, won't last even a year - is 25 Euros.

For God's sake, that's more than a quarter of the price of the computer itself.

Sorry, but that's f**king outrageous. They're taking the piss!!

So if ever you're tempted by Garmin's futuristic technology, beware! The electronics are OK, but the cheap (huh!) plastic mounting stuff, without which the technology's not - in practical terms - functional, is complete, very expensive, CRAP!

So caveat emptor. For the sake of your blood pressure as well as your wallet, don't go there.

You have been warned.