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If Only My Bike Had a Windshield

This isn’t directly bike related, but it is road spray related.

Back about 25 years ago, a reporter and I did a newspaper story on the train that ran from Miami to Chicago. (I think it was the Silver Meteor, but that’s not important.)

In those days, the toilets flushed directly out on the track. If you looked into the bowl, you could clearly see the ties rolling on by. I’ve walked many a mile of railroad track as a kid, but I had never seen any evidence of where the “debris” ended up.

On the second evening of the trip, I found out.

I wanted a nice scenic of the train going around a curve with the setting sun glinting off the shiny cars. I stepped into the vestibule between two cars at the rear of the train that was running at about 80 mph and opened a window.

Just as I had hoped, about that time, the train went around a gentle curve, the warm, evening light glinted off the side of the cars…. Then, a curious brown cloud blossomed about six cars ahead.

I pulled my head back in, but not before the cloud enveloped me.

When I took my glasses off and looked at myself in the mirror, I looked like a reverse raccoon. I was uniformly sepia-toned except for the white marks where my glasses were.

Mystery solved.

Semi-biking content: supposedly you don’t have to worry about that these days. Shortly after my experience, some fishermen under a bridge near Jacksonville, FL, got a similar shower. They made a stink about it, so to speak, and trains now have holding tanks, I believe.

Now, all we have to worry about is the infamous blue ice from airplanes.

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Florida DOT: Them Is Good Folks

I have been pleasantly surprised to see how responsive Florida’s Department of Transportation was when I pointed out two drawbridges that had “Walk Bike Across Span” signs on them when they weren’t justified.

When I explained that the signs sent the wrong message to motorists, they took one of them down. The other was changed to a slippery when wet sign, which is appropriate.

I got an almost immediate e-mail response to my message and results within several weeks. (The delay was for them to investigate if there was any real reason for the signage. After several email exchanges, they agreed that there was no need for a warning on a concrete deck bridge with wide shoulders. On the other, I agreed that the steel deck was dangerous to ride when it was wet, so they put up the slippery when wet sign.)

I went to the Florida DOT web site last week looking for traffic studies so I could see if there were any good roads to ride. Within 15 minutes, I got a message saying that the stats were available on CD at no cost and that they would be in the mail that afternoon. They thought it was a cool use for the work they had done.

It’s refreshing to find folks who are willing — actually eager — to listen and help.

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Employee of the Month: 50 Miles a Day Commuter

I was on a ride and stopped at a Palm Beach County park to cool down and check out the beach. A maintenance worker walked up and started to check me out. “Nice bike,” he said. Figuring he was just making conversation (after all, it was just a $300 Trek Navigator), I thanked him and didn’t really offer much more of a conversational opening.

Then he asked me about the Nightrider lights. “I’m trying to figure out what kinds of lights I want to buy now that the days are getting shorter,” he said.

We talked a little longer and it turns out that this fellow had been commuting 50 miles every day for the last six months — over 6,000 miles. He had ridden more miles in six months than I had in two years.

Every morning he gets up at 4 a.m. to be at work at 5:30. It’s true that he doesn’t face the kind of temperature extremes in Florida that you Yankees do, but we still have killer headwinds, heat and rain.

He was proud that he had just been named employee of the month because he hadn’t been late a single morning during the last six months that he had been bike commuting. He said that he used to be a maintenance worker for the city, but he got tired of cleaning the same 450 offices day after day. He like the idea of working in a park where he is “getting paid for what tourists pay for”.

His only complaint was that his long commute and two jobs cuts down on his jogging time.

I gave him a handful of blinkies from my bag for his pre-dawn commutes, wished him godspeed and rode off down the road with my tail between my lycra-covered legs.

That guy on his X-mart bike is a better man than me in a whole lot of ways.

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Leather Cycling Saddle: Brooks Champion Flyer

I recently bought a Brooks Champion Flyer, which is a B17 with springs. I coated it liberally with Profide and went riding. It felt fine out of the box.

I had some numbness issues (new bike), but they were solved not by the saddle, but by going with a shorter stem that kept me from having to pivot on the privates to reach the bars.

Either I got a great saddle or I’m one of the lucky ones whose bottom matches the saddle, because I’ve got about 550 miles on it now and the saddle is unremarkable, which is the way a saddle should be.