Injured Vanity and Chapped Lips.

I have been in San Francisco this week.

Using Bikes and the City as an informal guide I have found my way to several coffee venues and a group ride, The Butter Lap.

college roommate

 

The group was small enough and reasonably friendly; reassuring me that the ride would be "relaxed" and "casual." After a twenty minute wait we were off.

We began to fall back very early on.

the last we saw of the group

This is what happens, you come out West trying to help your friend mend a broken heart and end up getting dropped like an old lady a mile in on the first hill at Fort Mason. 

My friend was struggling more, but he's no cyclist. My second excuse would be to try and blame the hybrid bikes we had rented  (hybrids are the bane of my aesthetic existence within bicycling). Maybe my eyes were so sore from looking at the ugly things that I just couldn't pedal fast enough. It was simply a pathetic display on our part. We embarrassed ourselves and our community and in the end all I could do was take these (tourist-y) dusk photos: 

and roll over to Safeway for some Chapstick to balm my heart now broken by these latest failures...or at least my lips anyway.

Unseasonably Cool New Bike Parts.

After recovering from resent illness and waiting for some latent winter weather to subside I finally got to work putting new parts on my new old stock Raleigh.

Before.

After. 

I ordered the braided steel brake cables/housing at Scooter's Bike Shop on Shreveport-Barksdale Highway. The Freewheel mentioned in an earlier post I bought at Bikes Etc. in Bossier City.  The housing clips and grey cloth bartape I had to order online; I bought both of them from Velo-Orange:

Before.

After. 

I am very pleased with the results. I am tempted to try shellac-ing this cloth tape in the future to water-proof it. However, I am reluctant to do it so far as the tape overlaps the porous wound steel gear cable housing that the shellac might gum up.

I still need to buy a new saddle for it. Currently I am debating between my beloved Selle San Marco Concor Super Corsa in white suede or a Kashimax Five Gold 4p in patent gold. I will also be buying it some new tires colored either brown or blue and some new pedals (most likely MKS Sylvan Touring pedals).