Tour de Palm Springs

The 25th Tour de Palm Springs will be held on Feb 11th 2023. I decided to ride the route on my Brompton yesterday. I rode the first and second years a century option was offered, which I think was 1999 and 2000. In 2000 I decided to ride as far as I could without refueling. I got about 50 miles before I completely ran out of gas. I didn't really recover full strength until almost the end of the ride. That was very unpleasant but very educational.

The route is a little contrived in places to get the full 100 miles. I straightened out some of the sillier bits and took a detour at the south end to visit a date farm. I got a total of 98.6 miles and ended up riding 90% of the route.

To avoid paying for parking, I started at the Palm Springs Amtrak station instead of downtown. For a town of 45,000 people the train station is remarkably bleak. The only facility is a trash bin. The rest room is locked, the phone is destroyed, and there are no staff or even ticket machines. There are two trains a day arriving from Los Angeles, one at 10am and the other at midnight. This might be the least used station I have ever seen. Fortunately that meant there was plenty of parking available. It has nice views of San Jacinto mountain.

View from Palm Springs Amtrak station

The route can be split in two halves. The first half is through desert, hilly, with narrow or no shoulders, light traffic, poor road surfaces and few stop lights. The second half is more urban, with wider shoulders, heavy traffic, good road surfaces, and lots of stop lights - some of them two to three minutes long. I preferred the second half. The first half was exhausting on a folding bike and even though I had 35mm tires and some suspension, the quality of the road had turned my backside into hamburger. A smooth pavement and frequent rests at the stop lights was welcome.

I cannot imagine paying $100 to ride this with thousands of other cyclists.

Edgar got his new bike

Amber, Edgar, and I rode 40 miles on Christmas day. Edgar finally received his new Lynskey gravel bike and it was worth the three month wait. Apparently Lynskey builds their bikes in batches so they will produce 1000 road bikes, then 1000 gravel bikes etc. If you place your order at the wrong time you may have quite a wait.

I saw the bike has through axle fittings instead of quick releases. I'm not sure I like them. I don't know what problem they are supposed to be fixing, but wasn't the whole point of quick releases to be able to remove the wheel without tools?

A proud new bicycle owner

Amber is finding her Brompton M bars are good at keeping the pregnancy back pains at bay. That's good news. I don't know how much longer she can keep riding but she's getting good use out of her Brompton and her smart trainer.

We rode from Anaheim to the Bolsa Chica Café on two Bromptons and a Lynskey. It's cool that we can do an all Brompton or an all Titanium ride. The café was closed, of course, because it was Christmas day. We had brought sandwiches so we ate them at the café - hope they don't mind. I'm looking forward to them being open again on Jan 6th - I miss their cheese quesadillas.

A quick metric century on the Brompton after work

I decided to ride a cheeky 100k on my Brompton after work yesterday. There is a storm coming in and it looked like the weekend was going to be a washout. I hadn't originally planned to ride 100k but I got a few miles into the ride and realized my jacket was in the saddlebag of my other bike and my vest was in the car. I was expecting a low of 50F during the ride so I decided to turn back to the car and get my vest. That turned out to be a good decision.

I started at Yorba Linda park, in the pay section, because I don't think anyone is going to pay $3 for the privilege of vandalizing my car.

I've must have ridden this section of the Santa Ana bike trail 1000 times (I'm not exaggerating) and seen the gravel path that runs alongside it. I was saying to someone just the other day that there's no good gravel riding in Southern California so I thought I'd ride on the gravel for once. It's only two miles long but it was a lot of fun. I'm playing one of Mozart's Bassoon concertos on my mp3 player.

I'm riding my Brompton one handed and recording video with my cell phone. So it's a bit slow.

That was way more fun that I thought it would be. It has a totally different vibe from riding the bike path but it's only 10 yards away. 

I got to the Bolsa Chica café and had my usual Monster drink with a cheese quesadilla. It's mid December, about 4pm, and it is beautiful. There's no sign of the storm yet. Surely this is why I live here. 

Because I was stopped, I put the vest on to avoid getting chilled. Although the temperature at the start was 60F, it had dropped to 55 at the beach. I had had a mild headwind all the way here and I was looking forward to a tailwind on the way back. But I've ridden here enough times to know the tailwind would disappear when the sun went down in about an hour.

So I set off and instead of warming up slightly as I headed inland, it continued to cool until it was 49F. That jacket would have been nice. Not fast, but nevertheless another wonderful ride. I'm so lucky I enjoy cycling and I truly feel sorry for people who have the mindset that exercise is a chore.

First double-metric in 18 months

After my enjoyable century a couple of weeks ago, I decided it was time to ride a double-metric  for the first time in about 18 months. I decided to ride the Serotta, because this is such an efficient and comfortable bike.

The route is very easy, though not very scenic. I started at Yorba Linda park and rode the Santa Ana bike trail to the beach. It was overcast and cold (about 50F) when I started at 7:35am. I had a light jacket, arm warmers, and tights on. There was very little wind and I couldn't have asked for better conditions. My target average moving speed on a ride like this is 14mph but I was holding 16mph so I tried to see how long I could keep it for.

Once I reached the Pacific ocean I took my jacket off and headed north to Seal Beach, eating at The Crema. I had a ham and brie baguette and a Thai iced tea. I sat on a bench outside to eat it. Total down time was 23 minutes. I could have been faster.

Then I headed inland on the San Gabriel bike path. This has seen a significant increase in homeless encampments since I last rode on it. It was quite disgusting in places. I rode up towards the Santa Fe dam until I had a total of 100km. Fortunately I reached that distance before I had to climb over the dam. Then I turned around to the Shell gas station at Peck Rd. It was crazy busy and it would probably have been faster to go to the Mobil next door, but I stuck it out. A bottle of water and an egg salad sandwich kept me off the bike for 13 minutes. That's not too bad.

The weather forecast had been for a 12% chance of rain. I got several bouts of light rain during the ride, but nothing that even made me stop and put my jacket on.

I continued back on the San Gabriel even though this route normally follows the Los Angeles river trail. Last time I rode that trail, though, the homeless problem was appalling. So I decided to do a simple out and back. 

My last food stop was at another of my favorite places to eat - the Bolsa Chica café. They were crazy busy too so it took me 25 minutes to get and eat my cheese quesadillas. I don't think they have ever tasted so good. There was a new band playing that I hadn't heard before - very good.

I always wondered what the band would do in the rain

While I was there the cashier mentioned that next Sunday would be their last day until the next year. I guess I'll have to find somewhere else to eat for the last three weeks in December. It's not like there's a lack of places to eat along the beach :-)

So my total time off the bike was 1:01 but RideWithGPS says I was off for 1:08. I assume the seven minutes was stop lights. I finished with an average of 16.2 mph and a total elapsed time of 8:50. I'm over the moon about that time. It would have been good when I was regularly riding 200k rides. I'm pretty wrecked today, but I don't care.

Triple the fun

Brompton just dropped their prices by 20% but the offer ends tomorrow. REI has dropped their Brompton prices too. So my son-in-law, Edgar, bought one. He got an S6L with front and rear lights and a Brooks Cambium saddle for about $1500. That's a great deal. He wants a rack so I pointed him towards some of the third party titanium racks that are available.

Amber's pregnancy is giving her back pain while riding her Lynskey. We tried raising the stem an inch but it only helped a bit. She found she can ride her M6R Brompton with less pain due to the more upright riding position. So we rode three Bromptons this weekend. This is Edgar's first ride on his Brompton so we shortened the ride to 40 miles.

I gave Amber and Edgar some custom 3D printed Wahoo mounts but I need to reprint them because they got crushed by the stem bolt. I'll try a solid fill next time.

Three little Bromptons - mine, Amber's, Edgar's

We rode from Anaheim to the Bolsa Chica Cafe. 

It's late November. This is why we live in Southern California.

Champing and other stuff

I came across a YouTube video from Terry's All Bikes. This guy's in his early 60's and likes to wild camp on his Brompton. His video skills are terrible, half the videos have his finger in the frame, but they are entertaining anyway. This particular video is about Champing. Not camping or glamping, but champing. 

It seems some churches in the UK are raising money by allowing hikers and cyclists to camp in the church. You get a sleeping pad, access to a kitchen and bathroom, and a dry, safe place to sleep. It looks really cool. You show up with your sleeping bag and food, and you have a nice place to eat and sleep. Hence the term - champing.

Probably not all churches provide a teddy bear.

On a sadder note, I read an article about a promising college football player killed recently on an e-scooter. He decided to ride across a pedestrian crossing against a red light and got hit by a bus. I see e-scooter riders constantly riding dangerously - one turned left in front of me just the other day and I only just missed hitting him. I bet a psychology PhD candidate has written a thesis on why e-scooter riders think they're immortal. I doubt I'd understand it, though.

My road bike has a Campy racing triple and it has become almost impossible to get replacement middle chain rings. The problem is the ramping on the middle chain ring is designed to help the chain get on the chain ring from both directions. If I replace it with an inner chain ring for a double I will have trouble shifting from the small chain ring to the middle. It's not something I do very often, but I'd like to still be able to do it. I asked my bike shop to give me an estimate on replacing the triple with a double chain ring. I have a feeling it will be too much.

First YouTube video

My wonderful helmet light that I bought on Amazon for $15 many years ago finally died. So I bought a new one. The new light has a GoPro compatible mount. It's one of the few lights I've bought where the mount is better than the light. 

The light itself doesn't have a very good beam pattern - it's a series of concentric circles of light and dark. It's fine for illuminating street signs or cue sheets. It can maybe catch the attention of a motorist. But it's not good enough to be a stand-alone front light.

I recently bought a GoPro Hero 9 so I thought it would be interesting to mount the GoPro on this mount and record video. I rode from Yorba Linda park to the Bolsa Chica café and back, videoing parts of the ride. The camera's image stabilization feature works really well, but the weigh causes to helmet to shift. I also had it pointing too far down. It's all a learning experience. I might need to increase the thickness of the padding inside my helmet.

I cleaned up the video with the free version of DaVinci Resolve. At first I was put off this software because the official documentation videos aren't suitable for a complete novice. Fortunately I found a lot of good YouTube videos about the software and realized it's very good.

Here's the finished product. It's my first attempt at a proper YouTube video. I need to work on my speech volume and enunciation. I think my trip to Vermont will be my next subject.