Virtual weather

There was severe weather in the area today but I did not experience it. It was much darker than normal when I got up this morning but it stayed dry and I went to work. I will admit that there was the start of a sprinkle as I walked from my car in the parking lot to the building but it would have been barely enough to get me to give up on a ride, not really rain yet.

I work on the fourth floor of a completely sealed building so I could just as well be watching the weather on TV. After I got to my desk it looked like it was storming outside, but as I say, I did not experience it. It looked stormy for quite a spell and when the storming stopped it looked pretty wet.

By the time I left work I noticed that the parking lot was dry. On the way home the streets looked dry. I can only conclude that the bad weather was virtual weather, not at all real.

It is the last day of the month and I got enough miles to be satisfied with the month. I got more than the absolute required minimum, I got a few ticks more than the hoped for goal. I came up considerably short of the record for the month but as noted elsewhere, the record for July is skewed by the TRAM years. I came up over 200 miles short of July 2005, the last TRAM. But I got enough and I feel good.

My Roseville loop today took me through Falcon Heights and across Larpenteur to the farm campus. The sign above this display provided by the department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics says "Common Crops and Weeds in Minnesota". Here is my plant of the day.That healthy looking fella foreground left is leafy spurge.

Here's what Wikipedia says: "Leafy Spurge was transported to the United States possibly as a seed impurity in the early 1800s. First recorded from Massachusetts in 1827, Leafy Spurge spread quickly and reached North Dakota within about 80 years. It now occurs across much of the northern U.S., with the most extensive infestations reported for Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. It has been identified as a serious weed on a number of national parks and on reserves of The Nature Conservancy in eleven northern states. It is now classified as an invasive species by the United States Department of Agriculture."

I am guessing leafy spurge is not welcome amongst the prairie orchids in Glyndon.

I read Drunk Cyclist as much for his "link dumps" as anything. I really like this one: The website is down.

Hot again, but not humid

It was hot again today but today the air was dry. Still, riding in this kind of heat is hard, very hard. Today was another episode of just pedalling along.

But I went farther, resuming the more or less regular ride to the north, out Hamline, around Owasso, back past County Cycles to Hamline again, looping through Roseville to home.

Just past County Cycles I also pass Roseville VFW Post 7555. There was a large crowd in the parking lot and the sign may show why. They have "HOLDM" on Wednesday and Saturday. Hold 'em is big on ESPN, it figures that it is also a draw on the local bar scene.This VFW post has a charitable gambling operation (see PULL TAB) but I will have to go inside sometime when HOLDM is underway to figure out if they somehow actually allow gambling on cards. I don't think so.

The most interesting bit of obscure Americana is the Saturday "Meat Raffel". I have attended this event and have also been to another meat raffle in Wisconsin. It doesn't sound like much but both of the times I attended it was obvious that those in attendance were having a good time. Who doesn't like gambling, especially when the prize for winning is a big piece of meat?

The gambling is charitable gambling, meaning that there has to be an official charity as beneficiary. This Post, as do many VFW Posts, sponsors youth athletics. The Roseville VFW was extremely generous in sponsoring our softball team for three years. Here is the last team:Front row, left to right: Tricia Hartman, Amy Knutson, Emily Miller, Leah Sventek, Carla Zbacnik, Mary Stepnick, Carole Bergstedt. Back row: Gene Miller, Chris McCann, Stacy Maher, Stephanie Bloxham, Erin Netzloff, Monica Stefanson, Ron Knutson. Photo by TT.

Any unbiased assessment would have to reach the conclusion that we were a handsome group. We were also a pretty good softball team.

Hottest day of the year

As I said to Dave this afternoon at work, it was a great day for global warming. It was the hottest day of the year.

At about 11 am I checked the weather bug found on the sidebar to the left. It asserted an actual temperature of 91F (at 11am!) with a dew point of 73 and a heat index of 99. A dew point of above 73 is described at Wikipedia as "quite uncomfortable". A heat index of 99 calls for "extreme caution". On top of that, the Pollution Control Agency was reporting an Air Quality Alert, with air quality being described as being of only "Moderate" quality.

The Weather Channel said 94 at the time I got home. But it didn't actually ever rain and days that it doesn't rain I like to ride.

I took it really, really easy. I rode in the small ring most of the time. I tried to stay in the flatter areas of Roseville. Mostly I rode along in a 39x17, 18 or 19, pretty easy gears. I did have to climb one hill in Shoreview and I got down to the 39x21 for that one climb. It did feel hard. For comparison, 39x21 is the gear used by most of the professionals to climb mountains in le Tour de France. And they were climbing those mountains at 15 mph or more. I was doing about 8 mph (and I do have 2 lower gears). I was taking it easy.

Staying in the flat areas brought me past a place which is inside the loop I usually ride but which is still a place I have not been to previously this year. Here is the beach at Lake Josephine.That is what reasonable people do on the hottest day of the year, immerse themselves in water.

But actually, by the time I stopped for the picture it wasn't really too bad. The atmosphere was in the process of turning over and both the temperature and humidity had backed off from the morning crisis levels. Mind you, it was still hot, but at least at the pace I was riding it never felt stressful or dangerous.

It was the hottest day of the year.

Sunset practice

It was pretty clouded up when I got home from work. I set out on a ride anyway. It was hot, not so much in temperature but the dew point and the heat index were both pretty high. I found myself thankful for the miracle of evaporative cooling.

But I also pretty much tuckered out. The last couple of miles were just pedalling along.

I decided that I would try to get a picture of the sunset as the cloud cover looked like it would provide decent structure. Also, if I am going to spend several days on the shore of Lake Michigan I need to get my sunset skills back up to snuff.

As I compose this entry sunset is still at least a half hour away. I just went out and checked and most of the structure has departed. It looks pretty clear out towards the west and the sun may be departing from today without putting on much of an end of day display.

*sigh* The best laid plans . . .

But I tried, and here is one taken from inside the house.It's not so bad, the screen gives kind of a nice effect. I think I can do better, though. I just need a deck overlooking a Great Lake.

Our version of catch and release.

We rode a little different route today. We rode first to Turtle Lake in Shoreview. Once last year when we were at Vadnais the incorrigibly gregarious person who once per week rides with me (IGPWOPWRWM?) lapsed into a conversation with the perhaps inebriated fisherman at the Vadnais parking lot. He recommended (who asked?) the fishing at Turtle Lake.According to Drunk Fisherman the lake has an active population of bass. He said the fishing is good just down the shore from the park, I am guessing more or less in the background of the photo. The lake is catch and release so you can't keep any of the bass but catch and release is the proper approach for any species as fun to catch as bass.

Detouring to Turtle Lake should have added about 3 miles to the usual ride but as we found our way back onto the regular route the wind shifted slightly and the atmosphere changed to feel ominously like rain. I remarked to the IGPWOPWRWM that there would be no further stops because any mile we rode before it started to rain would be a mile we didn't have to ride IN the rain. We rode hard and we rode the most direct route until we were within a mile of home, close enough that we could get home dry in any but the most sudden and intense cloud burst. As a result of taking the most direct route we ended up with a ride distance about the same as usual. So much for trying to stretch BB out to a Kirk Park ride training distance.

This is a different perspective on the corn, again showing that it is a good year here for corn.Where's BB? We made it home without getting rained on and, in fact, the threat of rain seems now to have passed.

The Tour ended today and serious football in France begins on Saturday. Le Trophée des Champions is the official kick-off, a match between the winners of Ligue 1 and Le Coupe de France. Lyon won both of those titles last year so the opposition will be provided by Ligue 1 runners-up, Bordeaux.

Nantes opens league play the following Saturday, August 9, at Auxerre. The cycling is over, let the football begin.

LOOK 2,000

With today's ride I climbed the LOOK over the 2,000 miles this bike this year barrier. The mileage ridden on this bicycle is ever so gradually creeping up to the total mileage combined on the second and third most ridden bicycles in my stable. I may not every reach THAT threshold. I don't think I will actually make it this year and it is my current intention to bring the Crown Jewel back out to play as soon as the LOOK reaches 14,000.

I rode in mid-afternoon today. The sun almost directly overhead seemed to keep racer boy inside so it was mostly a pretty nice ride. Except for the 40ish helmetless guy on a comfort bike who latched onto my rear wheel near Summit and Fairview and seemed determined to hang there as I rode leisurely up Summit towards the Cathedral. I could hear him back there clicking through his gears on every slight uphill.

Finally at the corner of Dale he decided that he had won the race and he cast a triumphant sideways glance at me as he rolled by on the right while I waited for the light to change.

Those of you who watched the end of Stage 19 can visualize what happened next. I assumed the role of Chavanel of Cofidis, he was Roy of Francaise de Jeux. It is downhill away from Dale and I rolled up onto his rear wheel, finding as I did the gear that I wanted for what was coming next. The street turns back uphill and racerman started clicking his gears again. As soon as he was in a gear in which he could not accelerate I took advantage of being in a gear in which I could accelerate, and did so.

These little victories are so puny, I feel ashamed and diminished to have taken such glee in blowing his fenders off.

A bit further along I detoured into the parking lot at the big church to get both of our city's big stone buildings into a single photograph.We watched the time trial this morning. I love le Tour, it is such great scenery. And it is a great athletic show. But it isn't clean yet, not by a whole bunch. That Schumacher guy, he just doesn't look right to me. The Gerolsteiner team in general, Schumacher, Lang, Kohl, they just don't look right to me. The Schleck frères don't look right to me. Sastre? Another Spanish climber having the time trial of his life just in time to win le Tour? It just doesn't look right to me.

Le Tour did not invite Team Astana this year as a way of making a statement against doping. Astana insisted that they are clean, that only the sponsor is the same, that team management and all of the riders are changed from old Astana, and that leaving them out deprived the race of its defending champion. I think that I have already expressed my personal belief that the defending champion has some explaining to do before we accept that he rides without the aid of pharmaceuticals. Race organizers apparently feel the same and they held firm, deciding that they have already had enough Astana drug scandals, thank you.

Today, just in time for the final stage of the Tour, Astana announced that they have fired a team member. The announcement seems to be some sort of bid to be seen as a team that is clean, a team that is ridding themselves of dopers from within. But what strikes me as high irony is that if Astana had been invited to the race, the announcement today would be that they were throwing an Astana rider out of the Tour and the Tour would have had an Astana doping incident for its third year in a row.

I do not believe the Tour is clean.

I love le Tour de France

But . . . When something looks too good to be true it is usually too good to be true.

Andy Schleck first aroused suspicion when he arrived at last year's Giro d'Italia with nothing more than a junior resume, an older brother in the sport and a father who was a professional cyclist. Cycling is an endurance sport, endurance sports should reward maturity and strength. With a tiny amount of professional experience young Andy Schleck was immediately able to compete with the best riders in the sport and captured second place in the Giro. It seemed too good to be true.

Andy disappeared from prominent view for the rest of 2007 but has reemerged this year. For the past two and a half weeks we have seen him ride comfortably at the front of the most elite group in cycling at the head of the race in the Tour de France. He makes it look easy. Perhaps a bit too easy.

If I am suspicious, there are probably others who are suspicious. It seems French customs officials are also suspicious. Today a car driven in the race caravan by Schleck's father was detained by French customs and searched. If it looks too good to be true it is probably because it is too good to be true.

Team CSC has adopted the attitude that they do not do drugs. The team manager is Bjarne Riis, who has admitted that he was doping when he won the 1996 Tour.

The riding of the Tour draws near to its Sunday in Paris conclusion. We all might have to stay tuned for quite a bit longer before we have a decision on the identity of the one who most deserves to be named the winner.

Football starts soon.

L'Alpe d'Huez

Today for the second time this Tour de France I took a day of vacation from work and stayed home to watch. Today was what the commentators labelled as the Queen of Stages, 3 out of categorie mountain climbs culminating in a mountain top finish at one of cycling's most famous venues, l'Alpe d'Huez.

As usual, France was spectacular. Highlights for me included the helicopter shot of the 21 switchbacks of l'Alpe d'Huez, the moonscape above the treeline at Col de la Croix de Fer and the spectacular mountain cataracts in the streams crossing the route of the tour.

The bicycle racing was also pretty compelling. Today's results set up the Saturday time trial as the decider of this year's Tour. It seems likely that the race will be close, very close, with perhaps as little as a few seconds separating first from second after over 2,200 miles of racing over 21 stages.

It all left me feeling pretty Euro and with plenty of time for an afternoon bicycle ride of my own. I came upon this scene in Saint Paul.The intersection of Iglehart and Wilder illustrates both the lush greenery of mid-summer and a most un-American solution to a traffic problem: the roundabout.

Crashes are always popular and I have added these two to my sidebar video link list. First is yesterday's diversion down the mountainside by John-Lee Augustyn. VeloNews reports that the bicycle HAS been recovered.

It is pretty scary looking but I personally find this excursion off the road by Frank Schleck at this year's Tour de Suisse to be even more unsettling.

Grain identification update

As the member of the family with actual work experience in agriculture I have high expectations for myself in identifying various crops to the city born and raised females who have inhabited my house for the past quarter century. Obviously it has been a while, but when I worked on the farm I could identify all of the various grains out the window of the car while driving past at highway speed.

I did work on Gullekson's farm. It has always seemed to me to be a reasonable expectation that I would have retained this grain identification ability in my knowledge base. As a result, I was quite dismayed to discover in recent years that what I was identifying as barley was, in fact, wheat. This clearly would not do and I have set about trying to rebuild the knowledge base.

Today as I was riding past these I again began considering to myself what a bozo I am for not being able to tell wheat from barley when I had a eureka moment. Those are oats, I said to myself.I stopped, leapt off my bicycle and made an up close inspection. Yup, oats. And while not identified at highway speed, they were successfully identified at bicycle speed. Now if I can only find some barley.

I read in the newspaper today that TRAM has begun. Allez Betsy, have a good ride.

Starting to think Michigan

Here is a guy who has gone all out on a yard theme.I will check with the geology guy but I am quite sure that the only bedrock exposures in the Twin Cities area are in the river gorge. So that rock in front of the lighthouse had to be selected and hauled to this location and then arranged. It is pretty authentic looking iron rich granite as is found along the north shore of Lake Superior.

It set me to thinking about Big Red and Lake Michigan.

While standing in the exact spot from which the above photo was taken I turned towards what is referred to as Shoreview Lake and got this shot through the tiger lilies down towards the lake.It was a nice day for a ride. Lots of days in July are nice days for a ride.

You can hear the corn grow.

Something occurred yesterday which I do not believe has occurred since I bowed to the logic of Wireless's observation that this bicycling thing is totally bloggable. I rode but I didn't blog. It was a late morning ride that ended prematurely with the onset of sprinkles. I was always riding hard, always aware of the approaching storm and never got stopped anywhere for a photo. Further it wasn't a very interesting ride as mostly it was riding hard with an eye on the sky. A ride but no entry.

It eventually rained heavily but only quite a bit later. We are getting enough moisture of late to make for another impressive week for the corn.The weekly BB ride got underway a bit earlier than usual. It is warm enough to ride in the early morning and there was enough uncertainty about what the afternoon weather was going to be to make going early the prudent course.

We were out at Vadnais and I was saying something possibly vaguely rude to BB to which she responded with a wave or some other hand gesture. This picture catches the hand gesture before it is completely formed.I think it was a wave.

On the ride home we meandered a bit. It was such a nice morning that meandering was called for. BB said she approved of meandering but not after the horse caught a whiff of the hay in the barn.Here are the steeds at the watering hole.

Heat wave recedes

Yesterday the weather gods provided a rest day by sending early morning storms and just enough evening rain to discourage even the most hardcore of daily cyclists. It was a much needed day off.

Today the weather pattern had altered and for the first time in many days the wind was predominantly from the north. I visited the northern route but for some reason ended up with a loop from what is the usual southern route.

The motorhome convention is officially over and the Fairgrounds are once again open. But there are still a large number of the large vehicles lurking in the peripheral parking lots.I suspect they are waiting for the price of gas to go down.

But I was on the Fairgrounds and got a picture of one of my personal favorite out of the way spots. This is in an alley just adjacent to the DNR building. Even in the height of the Fair this alley is generally deserted and I suspect most Fairgoers are not even aware of the existence of this little grocery.As you can see from the signs, enough Fairgoers have found this location since 1933 to enable this store to be celebrating its 75th year at the Fair.

I think it is day users that are unaware of this store. I suspect that the young people staying in the dormitories above the cattle barns and the people camping on Machinery Hill are way aware of this place at its product line as advertised on the various signs is clearly aimed at that sort of consumer.

In Tour de France doping news, the positive drug test of Saunier Duval's young Italian climber Riccardo Riccò is yesterday's headline. Today the scandal spread back towards a probable source as the team also dismissed stage 10 winner Leonardo Piepoli. The dismissal was for violating the team’s code of ethics.

Piepoli has not yet been announced as testing positive but his team manager said that he had carried out his own inquires and concluded that both riders had violated the team's anti-doping code.

Those who watched stage 10 may recall that Piepoli all too easily climbed away from the elite group of the best cyclists in the world to lead a teammate to a 1-2 finish. Once again, a performance that looked too good to be true apparently was exactly that, too good to be true.

In tomorrow's stage the race route turns away from the Mediterranean and begins to approach the Alps. The stage crosses the flat Rhône delta before reaching Provence, where the race traverses some low hills before eventually finishing in the early foothills of the Alps.

Mid-season

Today is the middle day of the middle month of the reasonable temperature Minnesota bicycling season. It is an appropriate time to assess goals for the season and accomplishments to date.

In fact, here is aLOOK at Midway.

(pause for laughter)

I have a number in mind and to do so I need a certain number of rides at a certain average number of miles for each of those rides. As of today I am in good shape in all categories, total miles, total rides and average miles per ride. If the weather holds I should have no huge difficulty achieving my objectives.

Today was a bit cooler than yesterday. I set out to soft pedal, to very definitely make the ride a recovery ride. I felt good, I felt slow.

A ride in the heat

I think I just rode 26 miles in 92 degree heat.

I was never overheated due to the miracle of evaporative cooling but I almost always felt a little bit uncomfortable. The last 3 miles I was out of water.

As I finished I was saying to myself that I was completely, totally used up.

Well, I have had dinner and an hour and a half to recover.

I feel okay, I think I could recycle.

And that's another of the reasons why I ride.

Bastille Day

Vive la France!Our home improvement project today included a second coat of paint on the front door. The door had to be left in an open position to allow the paint to set up. One or the other of us had to stay home and watch the paint dry. I drew the right straw today so I watched today's extended coverage of the first mountaintop finish stage of le Tour live. It was extremely exciting.

France tonight will be celebrating a Tour de France triumph by Frenchman Rémy Di Gregorio of the Française des Jeux team. Di Gregorio rode away from an early break to lead the race over the penultimate climb, the legendary ascent of the Col du Tourmalet. The Frenchman was not able to hold the lead. Italian climbing specialist Leonardo Piepoli claimed first place on the stage but a Frenchman as the first rider over the Tourmalet on Bastille Day is going to be a good enough reason for many toasts this evening in France.

Today's TdF doping news: "Riccò rides right into questions." VeloNews Tour correspondent Neal Rogers opines that in this environment, unbelievable rides are treated as if they really are unbelievable. Young Signore Riccò has raised many more questions than he has so far answered with his dominating performances. He was clearly much the best in Sunday's first true mountain stage and today in the first mountaintop finish he easily hung with the race leaders before eventually nipping past them at the line to claim first place in the King of the Mountains competition. Many are finding his results to be just a little bit suspicious. Riccò has declared quite publicly that his personal hero is the legendary Italian climber, Marco Pantani. Pantani, of course, was found dead in an Italian hotel victim of a drug overdose. One hopes that young Signore Riccò intends to emulate only the bicycling exploits of Il Pirata, not the other bits.

My personal prime dope suspect, Schumacher, flirted with the head of the peloton on Sunday and even attempted at one point to break away. In a failure of his doping program, however, he faded and only ended up first in the second group on the road, losing 40 seconds to Tour leader Kirchen and the other GC contenders. Today he never threatened the front. He did ride well enough to lose only about 40 seconds to the new leader, Cadel Evans.

After I spent the morning watching le Tour, TOPWLH returned to take over the paint drying watching in plenty of time for me to get in a nice ride. The weekend wind has much diminished while the sunny skies and the warmish temperatures hung around for another day. It was a fabulous July day.

Happy Bastille Day to all. Vive la France.

New tire report

The only things that changed from yesterday's ride were the tires and ride quality. Perhaps not too surprisingly there is a radical difference in feel between a ride on old, well worn tires and a ride on brand new, stiff tires. The new tires transmitted much more vibration and road chatter than what I felt yesterday with the old tires. The new tires also did not go flat.

It was too windy to ride but we persevered. Probably we shouldn't have. The wind was a cross wind as we departed from Lake Vadnais and it blew the diminutive BB off her bike. She got a foot down to avoid an actual fall. She has promised to post a complete account over on her Xanga.

The geology guy lives on a farm south of the city. His neighbors are real farmers who actually grow corn as opposed to corn being grown by students and staff of an agricultural experiment station. One of his neighbors has a field which depends upon drainage tile to keep the field a corn field instead of a wetland of some sort. That neighbor says that at this time of year even an inch of rain produces no outrun from the drain tile. The corn absorbs all of the moisture and turns it into corn vegetable matter.As I noted last week, you can hear the corn grow.

The photo also illustrates, perhaps, just how windy it was today in Roseville. It was too windy to ride but we did anyway.

2,948

It is quite a bit less than 6,000 but it is the best I can do.

Yesterday's wind continued overnight and on into today. Just after dark we had a large branch blow down off our cottonwood tree. According to descriptions given by TOPWLH it was about 5 inches in diameter at the large end where it disconnected from the tree. It hit with a very audible thud on the roof over our kitchen. The rain was only beginning and not yet very intense so we went out to look. The branch seemed to be hanging on the edge of the roof. I figured that uncertainty about its final resting place was inferior to having it down on the ground so I got a hold on one of the larger of the small branches and pulled it down off the roof onto our deck. TOPWLH then began asserting that it covered the entire deck.

Never ruin a good story just for the sake of the truth. Ask her.

The old car show that was in town a few weeks ago never presented an appropriate photo opportunity. The old cars were out and about and never seemed concentrated enough for a good picture. This weekend another motorized group has taken up positions at the state fair grounds. It is some sort of motor home association. With the price of gas being what it is most of the extremely large vehicles remained parked most of the time. I was able to enter their lair and capture this image down one of the many rows of parked vehicles.The wind was blowing extremely hard, 20 mph and up from the southwest so I headed off in that direction. This led me towards the University. The last time there, last week, I explored some new areas. I headed back towards those places hoping by a repeat visit to fix the various locations firmly in my mind. I got across the Washington Avenue bridge and over to the end of the bike lane. I wanted to orient myself to where that intersection was in relationship to the extremely well known landmarks in the area so I proceeded up 21st. In a couple of blocks the street crosses Riverside and I found myself on the Augsburg campus. It occurred to me that my trip to Freewheel had involved riding on the extremely car-centric Cedar Avenue so I set about trying to find the back way to that shop. I turned towards the right and left the campus and plunged into hard core West Bank.

I quickly located Freewheel but I had gone a block too far. I pulled into a parking lot hoping for an alley to lead me over to the now visible Freewheel parking lot without having to venture out onto Cedar. Bingo, flat tire.

Three flats in four rides is a tad discouraging. But there I was within yards of a bike shop. I always carry a little cash with me, I knew I had enough to pay for a new tube and to pay someone else to make the repair. I walked my bike over to Freewheel and went inside.

The bike mechanic put the LOOK up on the repair stand and removed the flat tire. I explained what I wanted, we quickly settled on a price that was agreeable and then I monkey wrenched the deal. I prefer smooth valves on my tubes. No, I don't prefer smooth valves, I require smooth valves. The threaded valves are a hassle with the brand of pump I have and furthermore the threads rip up the pump head gasket. I wanted a smooth valve. The Freewheel guy and I searched their inventory and they didn't have what I wanted. I asked then what the price of repair would be using my tube, knowing that I had one in my seat bag. He interpreted the question as inquiring what they would charge if I fixed the existing tube, inquiring back if I had a patch kit. Obviously I do.

Thus informed I inquired the cost of air if I went outside and did the repair myself and brought the repaired tire back inside. The correct answer is, "No charge for that", and that is what he said, and then compounded the correct answer with, "In fact, why go outside, you can use that bench over there." So I did.

I have been to Freewheel quite a few times and I like the place, it has a very, very bikey feel. But I have never been more than a customer in that place. I had never been inside with my bike, I had never been there in any other mode than having arrived by car.

As regular readers know, I have one of the nicest bikes in the history of bikes. When I brought that bike inside, and then further demonstrated that I was no novice by sitting down at their work bench and launching into a patch of a tube, well, the whole Freewheel experience took new directions.

The male manager, a person I had never previously identified, came over and wanted to chat. His opening line was, "Is that your LOOK?" Indeed it is.

My other appearances at Freewheel had involved clothing purchases, this guy wears a bicycling cap and specializes in the repair end of the shop. When I was interested in clothes he wasn't interested in me. But with a bike like that? Well, hello, how can we help you? First we had a discussion of tires. I explained that I was trying to stretch a set of tires to 3,000 miles and was in the midst of failing in that effort. He recommended the tires he uses, Vittoria, and a new product which he intends to try, Continental 4000S. We had a good bicycle chat and he passed along some information about tires which I did not previously have.

I finished up the tube repair, got the tire remounted and asked the bike mechanic to remount the wheel. Having done the repair in front of him I had gained a little mechanic cred. He not only remounted the wheel, he performed a mini-adjustment of the rear derailer just so I would appreciate, which I do, that he very clearly knows what he is doing.

So I rode home and immediately gave up the quest for 3,000 miles. Enough is enough. I had the new set of tires and I have already mounted them. It isn't 6,000, but 2,948 appears to be the best I can do.

Too hot, too windy, but no flat tire.

Yesterday I utilized the best possible method for derailing a string of two straight days with a flat tire. I didn't ride.

It rained during the day and it was still pretty wet when I got home. I took the day off. I should have also taken today off.

It was 91, humid, heat index 94, south wind 20-25 mph, all in all just darn hot and windy. I got a few miles in but it was hard.

We have been watching the Tour every day. If the guys that we have heard of before, Evans, Valverde, Menchov, if those guys are riding clean then there is absolutely no way that the previously unknown Schumacher is clean. He is too strong. He covers every move effortlessly. Dope. Just my opinion, I could be wrong.

But there is this: "French police took Spaniard Manuel Beltrán into custody for questioning on Friday night following news that he had tested positive for the performance enhancing drug EPO. The 37-year-old Beltrán was taken away from the Hotel des Voyageurs, where he and the Liquigas team were staying. Police also searched Beltrán's hotel room."

Beltrán is best known to most of us as a former USPS and Discovery Channel teammate of the never tested positive 7 time Tour champion.

Operational report, lessons learned, parte deux

Today the flat came at about 9 miles. The good news is that with yesterday's practice today's repair went really rapidly. I almost immediately found the sharp piece of rock imbedded in the tire, fourth spoke over from the valve. Got the tube out, placed the patch, remounted the tire, blah, blah, blah.

Nine miles is too far from home to try to limp back to my garage. However, I was only about 2.5 miles from County Cycles, the best bike shop in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. I got enough air into the tire with my mini-pump to limp to County Cycles where they were glad to assist. The bike kid even did the pumping for me, putting me back on the road.

The standard answer to the question of when you should replace your tires is that you should be fine until you start having flat tires. The truth is that I have been on borrowed time on this set of tires for a while. I hope to get 2,000 miles on a set of tires but usually don't. I have replaced a set with as few as 1,500 miles and have fallen into the habit of close examination of the tires at 1,600 miles with an eye to replacement at about that time. As of today, this set has 2,898 miles. I am so close, I was hoping for 3,000 miles.

Obviously there is more to flat tires two days in a row than worn out tires. There is also really bad luck. If I can ride through the weekend I still have a shot at 3,000 miles on these tires.

Everyone wish me luck.

Everyone notice that the lesson parte deux is that I haven't learned my lesson.

Operational report, lessons learned

Today was an unusual ride in a couple of ways.

First, I rode out about 2.5 miles and had to stop to change a flat.

The repair was out of the ordinary. Usually I use my hand pump to locate the hole in the tube and then line the tube up with the tire to locate the cause of the flat. Today was a little windy and I couldn't hear the air hissing out of the tube. Eventually I decided to try something else and instead started to search the tire. I ran my finger around the inside of the tire and found nothing. I then began a meticulous examination of the exterior of the tire and on the first time around the wheel found a piece of embedded glass. I lined up the tube and the tire and, voila, hole in tube.

I fixed it.

I was only 2 miles from home so I tried an experiment. I used the hand pump to pump up the tire. It wasn't easy and I couldn't get much air into the tire. But I got it firm, if not hard, and decided to try to ride it. And I made it home. So that gives me another option in a tire emergency, I can get enough air with the hand pump to ride. Not ride fast, mind you, the tire was pretty soft. But I was not riding on the rim, I was riding on the tire and I made it home just fine.

Where I used my floor pump to run that baby back up to 120 psi and went ahead and went out for a ride.

It was a nice evening and I had a nice ride.

Referee's decision

Two items of note occurred during today's 3rd stage of le Tour de France. One was quite unexpected while the other was absolutely normal. The unexpected was, of course, a successful breakaway. Four riders got a large lead and the team of the yellow jersey showed no inclination to chase, in fact seeming at times to be deliberately impeding the chase. Eventually the teams of the sprinters took up the cause but their efforts could not reel in the group of four. As a result some completely unknown French guy leads le Tour.

The totally expected event was that il pleut sur Nantes.

Most of the day it appeared that it was also going to pleut sur Roseville. I rode out into some pretty threatening skies which led to the necessity of a referee's decision. This picture was taken midway through the ride but illustrates the state of the sky for most of the time I was out.Is this enough blue to make a Dutchman a pair of pants?

But eventually the big storm split in two with a large cell passing by to our north and another large cell slipping off to the south. The skies have cleared and it is pretty nice out right now, if a bit humid.

Voeckler remains in spotty

My intention is that this is a bicycling blog. Almost instantaneously upon beginning to make entries, however, I realized that serial repetition of distance, average speed, and weather conditions wasn't going to be very interesting, either for me or for potential readers.

So I take photos of interesting things that I see while riding and post the photos along with a description. And the truth is that some days I ride along and not a single thing that I pass seems like a good photo opportunity. Today was not such a day.

I started out towards the south intending to ride to the river. I quickly became aware that there was also a pretty strong west component to the wind. I headed southwest towards the University. I don't ride over there very often and this was my second day in a row heading down the tramway towards the new football stadium.

I decided that I didn't want to cross the Stone Arch Bridge again. I was out about an hour and a half earlier than yesterday and today WAS Sunday so the probability was that many fewer people would be out and about. The Stone Arch was likely to be fairly deserted. But I decided to see if I could ride across the 10th Street Bridge. The 10th Street Bridge is a little too busy during regular hours but Sunday morning is not regular hours. It turned out just fine, there was only a handful of pedestrians and a few other cyclists on the bridge.

The view from the 10th Street Bridge is of the 35W Bridge. The morning newspaper reported that the last precast concrete section had been placed and that only a 7 foot gap remained to be filled before the span was complete from shore to shore. Here is what that 7 foot gap in the new 35W bridge looks like from the 10th Street Bridge, 100 feet or so away.Having crossed to the West Bank I found myself in territory where I almost never ride. I have visited Freewheel Cycle on several occasions over the last couple of years, notably when female visitors are in town. Freewheel seems to have the best selection of women's clothing of any of the shops in town.

I have visited Freewheel several times but always before arrived in my car. No bike shops feels completely right to me until I have been there on my bicycle. It feels more like someplace where you stop while in your car until you have stopped there while on your bicycle. I was a bit disappointed to find that the shop was not yet open when I arrived so I could not introduce my bicycle to the shop. I did introduce my bike to the sign in the parking lot.I then set out to find the way across the Washington Avenue Bridge. I knew that there was a pedestrian deck above the automobile deck and I had heard word of bicycle lanes. I rode down past the law school and found only a stairway leading up to the deck. I carried my bike up.

I located the bike lanes and backtracked on two of them to find a street level entry to the level I was on. Back past the law school is another stairway but at 21st and 4th, in front of the Rarig Center, there is a cutout in the curb that gets you up onto the plaza.

I was riding across the bridge towards the main campus when I noticed that the old bridge wreckage is laid out on the riverbank below the bridge.I call the first picture "BridgeNew" while this one is "BridgeOld".

I rode out onto the main campus, also a place I have not previously ridden and commemorated the occasion with a picture of one of the main campus signature buildings, Northrup Auditorium.As I circled towards home I came upon an opportunity to illustrate transportation again.

This is not Union Junction, it is the beginning of the area that is known as Union Junction. I spent a majority of the time that I spent working as a switchman when I was a young man working in the Union Yards, I KNOW where the Union Junction is.

So that pitiful switch and siding visible in the photo is not THE Union Junction.

The photo illustrates again where trains are likely to be found in the context of where the rails are.Also visible on the last car is the ETD. They don't have cabooses anymore, they have an End of Train Device.

And in the bicycle race in France, Thomas Voeckler's Bouygues Telecom team drove out from the peloton to reel in an early break and allow Voeckler to join the breakaway riders free at the head of the race. He used that position to score more mountain points and is now firmly in the lead of the mountain points competition. He will wear the spotty jersey at least until Thursday. The next three stages have no mountain points available. However, Thursday has 2 second category climbs including an 11 kilometer drag up to the finish at a ski resort. Second category climbs offer more points than Thomas has won to this point meaning that it will be difficult for him to remain in the jersey once the real strong men of the mountains come out to play.

It is after 9pm in London and that tennis thing isn't over yet.

Throw Your Hat in the Air Cup

We got off to kind of a late start today due to the fact that I was engrossed in the bicycle race. This resulted in our being out there when it was too hot and also in our being out there in an unfamiliar time slot.

The time slot may have had some effect on Plan A or it may have been yesterday's nutritional plan (Dog me, dog me again, dog me again etc.) In any case BB had to resort to Plan B.Her facial expression indicates to me that it was something less than a completely pleasant experience.

We found very many members of that often encountered family to be out and about. The Stone Arch Bridge looked like it was going to be unsatisfactory for a return route from the north river road. The route we eventually ended up riding detoured through downtown. This resulted in BB becoming the new holder of the highly prestigious Throw Your Hat in the Air Cup.

For those of you not familiar with this traveling trophy, the holder of the Throw Your Hat in the Air Cup is that person to be most recently photographed by me while standing next to Mary Tyler Moore while dressed in bicycle clothing and also standing next to a Bianchi Veloce.

The Cup Holder is eligible for the International Bicycling With Gino Hall of Fame.

We proceeded along towards home. It was hot and we were both definitely feeling residual effects of yesterday's nutrition (see above . . . Dog me . . . etc.) You are what you eat and 3.5 dogs (or was it 4.5, do I hear 5.5?) is not what you want to have eaten before heading out on a long bike ride. For example, I was knackered and I noticed that the Babe was not attacking the uphills with her usual gusto.

We thought about skipping the corn but BB pointed out that today is July 5 and it was as close as we were going to come to the knee high by the 4th of July pose.At night you can hear the corn grow.

But the real excitement of the day was the bicycle race.Thomas Voeckler, a bicyclist of relatively modest abilities, has managed to insert himself into an extremely elite group. Thomas is of course best known for having held the leader's Yellow Jersey at the Tour de France for 10 days in 2004. He earned a permanent place in French cycling history by gallantly defending the jersey with all of his ability even though the stages were fairly obviously too hard for him.

Today he got into the first stage breakaway and captured enough mountain points to earn for himself the Spotty Jersey of the mountains classification leader. Most professional cyclists, even cyclists of great talent, never hold for even a single day one of the leader's jerseys at le Tour. Voeckler joins a heady elite by becoming a holder of two different jerseys. Allez Thomas!

Sunset on the deck

August 18, 2003

Grass

Here's another one of the crops growing at the University experiment station. The wheat is rapidly nearing maturity.It is pretty clearly a grass but this grass is also pretty clearly planted in a row.

The third stage of the Tour de France finishes in Nantes. I signed up for something at MapMyRoute at some point and they now SPAM me. The most recent e-mail offered a link to a place where the individual stages of le Tour are mapped out in excruciating detail, road by road, street by street. I examined the Nantes finish and this photo is taken from directly in front of the finish:That's the new Palais de Justice in the background (that's French for Courthouse). Standing on the bridge are TOPWLH and our beloved guide. The beloved guide is currently on the road. If anyone spots her please let us know.

Tour de France starts Saturday.

This is Saint Mathew's Episcopal Church in Saint Anthony Park. It has architectual significance for some reason or another which I would report if I could find my book. I do remember that part of the significance is that it faces three different streets. It also has significance for certain former residents of the Twin Cities as the site of a baptism or two.EDIT: My wife found my book for me. It was almost certainly where I left it but she found it.

The book says that this is the only block in the Twin Cities where there are back to back churches by the same architect, Clarence H. Johnston. The other is the Saint Anthony Park United Church of Christ from 1915. Saint Mathew's is from 1914. Both are more or less Gothic Revival in style and both had restorations and/or additions in the 1990s. Saint Mathew's on this side is across the street from College Park.

Today is July 1 and today I do have a milestone to report. I used to be better at taking these pictures as I remember at least one of them was actually in focus. But in any case, tonight I passed this mileage total on my primary bicycle.It threatened 90 today although I believe the official high is going to be recorded as 89. It was an extremely pleasant summer day.