Thumb levers

Travel is hard.  Travel yesterday gave me a rest day from my bicycles but travel is hard and it turns out that a day of travel wasn't quite restful enough.  I rode today and my legs were still totally dead.  Hard work.

But I was back on one of my Minnesota bikes, all of which are equipped with Campagnolo.  That means thumb levers.  I love my thumb levers.

After a bunch of days riding Shimano in Michigan here is a point of comparison.  That Shimano single click on the small lever on the left brifter which moves the front from the big ring down to the small ring is the best thing about Shimano.  Overall, the Shimano front shifting has a lot of positives, when moving from Campy to Shimano or back the front shifting is always the thing I dwell upon.  The Shimano system performs really well.

The rear shifter goes overwhelmingly to Campagnolo, the whole throwing the entire brifter (including the brake lever) to the inside of the bike to shift to a smaller gear required by Shimano introduces to the shift the possibility of inadvertent braking.  Campy works better.

And as demonstrated recently by another of the bicycles residing on the dune next to Lake Michigan, if something goes awry with your Shimano shifter, your only alternative is new components, Shimano is NOT repairable.  On the other hand, Campagnolo is completely rebuildable.

I vote Campy.

So I didn't know my legs were dead until several miles into my attempt to ride today.  Just having breakfast inside my house my legs seemed fine.  Why wouldn't I go ahead and ride?  Despite a WNW wind I wanted to start off with a loop to the south.  I was hoping to find the Minnesota cardinal flowers to compare with the Michigan blossoms I saw just a couple of days ago and I was hoping for one last chance to see what was up on the Fairgrounds before the grounds are closed down for the big event.

One out of two.

I checked three different rain gardens in the Como area, the best display was at the location where actually I most expected to find the flowers.

The Como rain gardens do not feature Queen Anne's Lace or those nice Michigan ferns, the purple things are a little past peak, but overall still a pretty nice display.

I didn't do as well at the Fair.  It turns out I am not just too late, I am too late by a lot.  I saw a sign indicating that the grounds were closed beginning LAST Monday, August 4.

Showing up there today a full eight days after the grounds closed ends up having been a very puny plan.

Blue flags demonstrating wind direction and velocity.  My next move after taking this photo was to start riding into that wind.  It was a hard ride but every ride is a good ride.  I made it all the way home.

Here is the thing we discovered today that surprised me (and TOPWLH) the most.  Look what our apple tree has gone and done while we were in Michigan.

Most of those apples have been lying on the ground for a while, many of them have been gnawed upon by one creature or another (I suspect mostly squirrels).  TOPWLH diligently examined the fruit and eventually she found one that was pretty much OK.  She cut it up and we each had some apple slices.

The tree is a Beacon and I must say, the Beacon is a most excellent Minnesota apple.  The slices were really sweet and tart and very, very tasty.

She raked up all of the apples she could find underneath the tree.  Our plan now is to check in the morning, every morning, and see if we can actually end up with an apple harvest.  The apples are really quite good.

I planted that tree.  I bought it at Bachman's and hauled it home in the back seat of my Toyota.