The Bailey Traverse (Olympic National Park)
Gear List
Summer 2010
Carrie’s Pack	Alex’s Pack	Jerry’s Pack
Sleeping bag	Tent	bivey sack
Sleeping Mat	Sleeping bag/blanket	sleeping bag
2 fuel canisters	Sleeping mat	foam pad
Rain jacket	Stove	back-up stove
Rain pants	2 Fuel canisters	4 Fuel canisters
2 Water bottles and/or 1 bottle/1 bladder	Water filter	steripen, extra batteries
Cup	Poles	light rainpants
Spoon	Rain jacket	shell
Bowl	Rain pants	cup
2 pans for boiling/cooking	2 Water bottles	bowl
Map	Cup	spoon
Head lamp	Spoon	route descriptions
Bug juice	Map	maps
Sunscreen	Head lamp	headlamp, extra batteries
Hat	Compass	compass
Thermal pants	bandana/hat	bandana
Thermal top	Thermal pants	hat
Pants	Pants	fleece pants
Tshirt	2 pairs socks	2 wool socks – 3 liner socks
Underwear	Tshirt	polypro long-sleeve top
Fleece	Thermal top	sunscreen
Jacket	Underwear	bug juice
2 pairs socks	Jacket	soft-shell jacket
Garbage bag	First Aid kit	garbage bags, cable ties
Ice ax	Garbage bag	matches, candle
Crampons	Ice ax	crampons
Hand warmers	Crampons	ice axe
Gloves	Batteries for headlamps and GPS	parachute cord, leatherman
Tea packets	Hand warmers	camera – spare batteries
Oatmeal packets	Gloves	gloves
4 freeze dried foods	4 freeze dried foods	8 single serving freeze dry
Cup of Soup packets	PB crackers	8 oatmeal
9 Cliff bars	Nut mix	8 mojo clif bars
3-5 Gummy snacks	Dried Fruit	8 fruit bars
Baseball cap	3-5 Gummy snacks	8 portions – cashews
Sunglasses	Snacks	8 snacks
Toothbrush	Glasses/sunglasses	balaclava
toothpaste	Toothbrush	toothbrush / toothpaste
eye drops	Sanitizer	3 pulleys
chapstick	Climbing harness w/locking carabiner	climbing harness w/ locking carabiner
Sanitizer	1 foot prusik	prusiks, chest harness, hero loop
Clean Wipes	1 chest harness	2 runners. 6 carabiners
Climbing harness w/locking carabiner	2 hero loops	pickets – fluke
1 foot prusik	Bear canister	bear canister
1 chest harness	Water proof matches	rope
2 hero loops	pocket knife
Bear canister	picket
Iodine tablets	helmet
Camera	Camera
Pocket knife
picket
helmet

 

 

 

 

BIKING ISN’T THE ONLY SPORT THAT REQUIRES A LOT OF GEAR

CERTAIN FRIENDS CALL ME A GEARHEAD

In the late fall of 2025 I picked up a Litespeed tandem and spent a good bit of time retrofitting it with a Di2 drivetrain. In the middle of that project I was interrupted by the failure of our Ibis tandem, naturally occurring just when the weather called for a bike with fenders.

The history of the Ibis goes back to 2014 when I had just quit working and was looking for a project bike. I retrofitted it with S&S couplers, a Rohloff hub, and a dynamo lighting system, eventually spending many times the original $200 purchase price. We took it on some epic rides including a couple of Gran Fondos east of the mountains. After my experience with the Franklin Rohloff conversion, I went with the Gebla shifting system – mainly because I didn’t like the look of flat bars on what was essentially going to be a road bike. For the Ibis I bought new Chorus 12-speed shifters and had R+E disable the downshift mechanism. The Gebla “Rohbox ” was never as satisfactory on the tandem as it was on the Franklin. It may be related to the length of the cable run, but in the six or seven years we rode it we had at least half a dozen episodes where the right shifter became really difficult to operate and eventually the end would break off of the cable. I became proficient in replacing Rohloff shift cables as a result (cable splitters make a huge difference) but we ended up hesitating to take the bike very far from home in case we had to ride it back as a single-speed.

In the summer of 2025 we had another broken cable and took the bike to The Polka Dot Jersey for service and repair. When I picked the bike up I had a long conversation with a mechanic there who had worked at Rohloff in Germany some time ago. He was impressed with the OEM cable holder and torque block, but was less impressed with the Gebla shifting, telling me that the system was only available for a little over a year and that the company was out of business now.

I rode the bike home and it worked well with clean shifting – a fun ride. Odette and I rode it once or twice on unpaved roads that fall, a total of maybe 50 miles, and found that while the bike worked properly, it didn’t shift as easily with a stoker on the back as it did when I was alone. Before Thanksgiving I installed fenders on it and rode it around the block to make sure it didn’t have any rubs – and the end broke off the cable. This time it seemed to be more than just a broken cable – the shifter didn’t have any resistance at all and there was no sense of a ratcheting process. I was pissed.

I fretted about shifting the Rohloff for a couple of weeks – the choice seemed to be spending whatever it took to make it work right vs. getting it rideable as cheaply as possible with an eye toward selling it. Eventually, after consulting with Alder at R+E, I ruled out rebuilding / replacing the Campy lever and decided that I would mount a regulation Rohloff twist-shifter and decide separately whether or not to sell. (Alder told me that while Gebla was still around and doing fine, they had only had a single American agent(Cycle Monkey?) who had gone out of business or at least weren’t importing Gebla any more.)

I had a few options for mounting the twist-shifter but I knew that I didn’t like the way any of the available bars had looked when I had them on the Fuji a decade earlier, and I figured that they would look even dorkier with one twist-shifter appended. After looking at the Velo Orange crazy bars in combination with a rando bag, I decided that it was something I could live with. In preparation for taking the bike in to R+E for a Gebla decommissioning I removed the drop bars with the broken shift lever and installed the crazy bars. I removed the bar tape, partly because it was an ugly hack and partly because I needed to get under it to remove the shifter cable housings. The shifters themselves, DuraAce bar-ends, came off really easily and I remembered that the ends of crazy bar extensions were too small for shifters and I had to ream them out to make the shifters fit. I thought that I could just take the faceplate off the stem and mount the new bars, but the crazy bars apparently had a clamp area that wasn’t 31mm (I had a stem with a 26 mm clamp that worked so I assume that they are 26mm bars.) The stem I found with a clamp that worked had a lot of offset – probably close to 100mm. I had to fiddle around with the rear brake to get it to pull properly but the whole process was pretty painless. I rode the crippled, tapeless, Ibis over to R+E (down the hill on 73rd!) and the brakes worked ok but I had to reach really far forward to pull those reverse brake levers. I had R+E order a Rohloff shifter and install it for me using their proprietary “doohickey” to mount it on the stem instead of on the bars. A couple of weeks later I found the extra parts – including a shifter – from when I originally had the Gebla system installed. At some point I realized that without shifters on the bars I could swap them for different bars really easily. I toyed with the idea of upgrading to Rivendale bars with a lot of raise, but decided to hold off on spending any money.

When I got the Ibis back with the twist-shifter mounted on the stem it seemed like a new bike. First, it shifted easily and cleanly. Second, I could see what gear I was in on the shifter and could tell Odette that I really was shifted down enough as we started up hills. The reach for the brakes was definitely too long and I kept moving my hands to where I expected the drops to be – especially on that first thrust when I got out of the saddle to climb. I gathered up all the spare stems I had and found a Cannondale stem with very little offset and a 26mm clamp. I swapped out the stem and tilted the crazy bar horns up by almost 45 degrees. I found the stem that had originally been on the drop bars and mounted it on those bars again. I took the 26mm stem that I’d replaced with the Cannondale stem and mounted it on a set of K2 flat bars taken off a mountain bike 25 years earlier because they seemed too wide. I ordered a shim so that I could use a 31mm stem with the Prima TTT bars I’d taken off the back of the Litespeed tandem. I still had a couple of stems to work with but no more bars that I wanted to try. (I did have a set of Nashbar butterfly bars but Alder had discouraged me from going that route and I wasn’t sure I really wanted to put any energy into them because I hadn’t cared for them when I had them mounted on the Fuji.)

The next ride we took on the Ibis was much better – the flats were closer to me and comfortable as a hand position and the levers were just about where you’d find them on a set of drop bars. I took the Pauls Component levers off of the butterfly bars and mounted them on the flat bars. I figured that hooking up the brakes to those levers wouldn’t require much – the straddle cable was already connected on the front cable so that wouldn’t need anything more than repositioning the knarp to adjust the length of the straddle. The cable on the rear brake lever had been sized for the Fuji – a single bike – and unless the cable splitter was pretty far forward I’d need a longer cable for the tandem. Of all the cables to replace, though, the rear brake cable is the easiest.

Before I took off the crazy bars to mount the flat ones, I figured I would take a look at what would be involved in installing a set of drop bars. I sorted through my collection of brake levers and found that I had the Dia Comp levers that were original to the Ibis as well as a set of drilled Dia Comp 202 knock-offs (Origin8?) that had originally come on the Centurion. I also had the levers from a Giant Rincon that were pretty rough looking but might work on flat or trekking bars, and several sets of brifters. I mounted the drilled levers on the Prima TTT bars and they fit just fine. Then those brifters got me thinking…

I took half the tape off of the drop bars that I’d removed from the Ibis. (FSA Wing Pro alloy bars – nice because they have really big flats and shallow drops.) I unmounted the right hand brake/shift lever and removed the downshift internals. I had to buy a torx screwdriver set (a whole $10) but one screw and the upshift internals came out too – and then I removed the other half of the bar tape and the shifting mechanisms on the left hand lever. The only broken part I could find was a spring on the the downshift internals – and I may have broken that figuring out how to get the mechanism out. I remounted the levers and rewrapped the bar tape I’d removed. The cannibalized brifters actually looked really good. Since those bars and levers had come off of the Ibis I figured that I wouldn’t have any adjusting to do to put them back on – and that proved to be the case. I rode the bike around the block and it felt good (better than with the crazy bars.) The bar tape needs to be redone (I bought new tape but didn’t want to use it until I was sure I was done moving the levers around.) When I hung the bike back up I remembered that Jan Heine’s blog had a recent post about the advantages of cantilever brakes where he described four of his bikes with cantis, two of which have campy levers with the internals removed :

The Weigle has Campagnolo 11-speed Ergopower levers with the shifting internals removed. They work the same as the older Campy levers on my Oregon Outback bike—superb.

Mine are 12-speed Chorus levers, but it’s the same concept and the ergo hood shape is definitely more comfortable than those Dia Comp levers, drilled-out or not.

Odette and I rode 30 miles on the Ibis with the drop bars and it felt pretty good. I came away wanting to make sure the bars were straight relative to the wheel and I wanted to adjust the left hand lever so that it didn’t toe-in as much. Our speed was slightly higher than the last time we’d ridden the Ibis but I’m not sure I can attribute that to the drop bars. When we got home I fiddled with the left hand lever and then removed the drop bars and mounted the flat bars. The straddle cable was too short for the brakes to work right and there wasn’t any extra tail, so I replaced the straddle. The housing seemed too long (the straddle was almost at the end of the cable and barely cleared the tire) so I cut about three inches off the housing. The rear cable was too short so I replaced it with a new cable and cut three inches off of that housing to match the one in front. I got the rear cable too short and had to break out a second cable, but in the end both brakes worked and it looked like a reasonable setup. I rode around the block and except that one grip needed to be tightened, it seemed great. I’m not certain that I have the levers mounted where they ought to be but with the shorter housings I probably can’t slide them much further out without new internal cables. It’s clearly not a touring configuration but I could see day trips with those bars. When I finally got the cables adjusted the brakes worked just fine with the MTB-style levers.

I put the crazy bars back on the bike and figured that I would ride it that way a few times before switching back to the drop bars. When I did this on the Fuji I quickly figured out that even though it was a ten-minute process to swap bars I wasn’t likely to want to keep doing that and settled into a favorite (the drops) pretty quickly. I expect that the process with the Ibis will be similar.

Before hanging up the Ibis I spent a little time with the butterfly bars. I removed the bar tape and held them up to the bike to look at how they would fit. The right hand bar end would make it hard to access the twist-shifter if they are installed in the conventional way. I could install them so that the ends go forward and up at an angle. but I wonder if they’d end up too far forward for a comfortable reach. I tried to slip the Giant levers on and couldn’t get them around the first bend. I’ve got a shim coming so that I can mount them with a 31mm stem, but I’m not inclined to take it much further.

Late in January I hesitated to head out on a frosty morning and decided to fiddle with the butterfly bars while I waited for it to warm up. I found several scraps of brake cable, including one that was long enough for a rear brake run. I found a Campagnolo straddle cable carrier! I found a Knarp and fabricated a straddle cable. By the time the white had melted out of the back yard, roughly two hours, I had a working bar option that just needed final adjustments and bar tape. The grips are small and the levers really ought to point in the other direction, but I think that this set up will work and it doesn’t get in the way of the shifter knob. I need a ride to assess the reach, but I think I’ll tape the bars first.

The next day was similarly frosty so I fiddled with the bike for an hour or so before riding. I taped the butterfly bars, which was interesting to do in the cold. I cut about a quarter inch off the rear brake cable and when I put the brakes back together again they seemed to be about right. I rode around the block and everything felt fine, although would take me a while to get used to that lever position. I removed the butterfly bars and mounted the drop bars and rode around the block again. Eventually I suppose I ought to re-tape those bars, but they don’t look too bad and they work just fine.

So now I have a Rohloff equipped tandem with four handlebar sets configured for quick changes. I really can’t justify three tandems and the Ibis is probably the first in line when I go to sell one of them. I’m not likely to do a lot of handlebar switching but to be honest I’m not likely to sell the bike soon, either. That’s probably a pretty good place for me to be and now I need to settle on the next project.

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

(or how I ended up with three tandems in my garage)

Di2 Back story

After we got back from the Danube I focused on riding and didn’t spend a bunch of time or money on bike projects.  When the chain gauge said it was time, I took the Fuji and the Centurion in for seasonal tune-ups, without addressing the seized seat post on the Fuji.  I bought a pair of Paul Component Engineering Touring Cantilever brakes for Odette’s Stellar, but I kept procrastinating on installing them.  I kind of had this idea of a blog post poking fun at the MAGA / America First guys by describing my American-made bicycles – but somehow when I thought about it some more I realized that it wasn’t actually funny.  Mainly I was just waiting – for the weather to change, for Amazon to deliver, for the bike shop to finish up, for Odette to agree to a ride, for every day to bring one more card.

The fall shaped up to be pretty uneventful, a trip to Long Beach (memorable mainly for squirrel bridges) being the only excitement.  I went out to the garage on a Monday after lunch to put fenders on the Ibis.  Odette likes to ride on Tuesdays and the forecast was wet.  The fenders went on easily but at some point the bike fell over and although I caught it and it didn’t hit the floor, it did make contact with the stand.  I finished the installation (stripping out the socket on the head of one screw on the front fork) and went for a ride around the block to prove that there were no rubs.  And… the bike wouldn’t shift up.  I kept trying and it “gave” – the shifter moved further than it should and then had no resistance at all.  I got back to the garage and removed the hood – the cable was broken and the lever was no longer ratcheting.

I was really upset about this failure.  For one thing, it was the fourth or fifth time the right-hand shift cable had broken on me and I don’t feel like I can ride very far from home for fear it’s going to break on the road.  For another thing, we’d only ridden the bike two or three times since taking it in after the last failure.  I don’t really blame the Polkadot guys but I don’t feel like they fixed what I asked them to work on.  Finally, I was pretty close to getting the Di2 tandem and if I were to sell one of the three it would be the Ibis – only I can’t really sell it if it’s broken and I’m upset about spending money that I won’t recover on a bike I want to sell.

I spent a bunch of time thinking about options and preferences and decided that I’d take one of the handlebar sets from my bar-swap project and mount  Rohloff twist-shifters on them.  I kind of remembered getting a pair of twist-shifters in the process of converting either the Franklin or Ibis, but I wasn’t certain.   If I already had the bars and the shifters I could probably hook them up  myself, and if I needed to go to R+E or Polkadot it wouldn’t be for a big deal project.  I was suspicious that the bars wouldn’t be the right diameter but I knew that I had mounted thumbies on them, and those ought to be the same size as a twist grip.  I scoured my parts boxes and found some Rohloff parts, but no shifters.  I figured that I could go to eBay or Amazon for shifters, but I’d need to know what else I needed to switch back to Rohloff.  I spent some time online reading Rohloff installation guides and realized that it was probably beyond my level of competence.  I also realized that the Rohloff twist-shifter moved the gears both up and down so that you only had one shifter, not a pair.  I dug out those handlebars – butterfly bars and Velo Orange crazy bars – and remembered that I didn’t really like the way either of them looked when I had them on the Fuji.  I remained upset and continued to try to figure out a plan.

On Tuesday (10/28) R+E was open and I needed to drop off the brakes for the Di2 tandem that had arrived while I was focused on the ibis.  I stuck the brakes in my handlebar bag when I went for my daily ride and stopped at the shop on my way home. The Di2 bike looks great – they were done installing the Di2 hardware and said that they just needed the fork to finish it up.  The battery mounts to bottle cage rivnuts on the stiffener tube.  The wires are taped to the down tube and are almost invisible.  The 40-T big cog in the cassette is huge.  The BCD on the FSA crankset was too big to mount 50/34 chainrings so they went with 52/38 – and I’m guessing that a 38-40 granny gear will be fine.  They had already taken off the chunks of housing hung on the brake cable to protect the top tube, replacing it with cable doughnuts. That’s probably a better approach than the housing liner I was proposing.  They were familiar with the ProblemSolvers downtube shifter boss covers and offered to order them for me but I took them up on the offer to remove the barrel adjuster from the outriggers – I think that will be lighter and look just as good.  I got to see the Zipp bars with no tape.  Alder said that there was no need to update the belt drive until it broke.  I asked Alder about timing and he said “a couple of days – maybe a week” which was pretty exciting news.

As I got ready to leave I told Alder about my Ibis dilemma.  He told me that he had a box full of Rohloff / Gebla parts because the Gebla-modified shifters broke a lot and a bunch of people ended up deciding to remove the Gebla and go back to straight Rohloff. He said to bring the bike in and he’d see what they could do.   I told him that I was pretty sure I wanted to go back to the Rohloff twist-shifter that the hub was made for.  He offered to order a shifter for me and said that they could fix me up with a doohickey.  I said that I’d gone with Gebla to be able to keep the drop bars because I didn’t like the way the doohickey thing looked (that plus bad memories of twist shifters on cheap mountain bikes.)  I said that I had a couple of sets of handlebars at home from a previous project and that I was thinking about mounting the shifter on one of them – and I mentioned the butterfly bars.  Alder said that he also had a bunch of butterfly bars because people migrated to them when Gebla was an issue and then decided that they didn’t like that style of bars.  He said that they often ran into issues of cable clearance between the bar end and the stem.   I mentioned my other option and he pulled me over to see an extreme travel bike he was finishing up – S&S, Rohloff, heavy duty tubes – and a Jones bar.  I don’t exactly like the dimensions of the Jones bar but it validated my thinking about moving away from drop bars.  I told Alder that I needed to think about it some more but in fact I pretty much knew where I was headed and just had to figure out some details.

While waiting to go on my ride on the red tandem on Wednesday I took the crazy bars and held them up against the rando bag I use on the Ibis.  They looked like they were made for each other and I knew I’d made my choice.  When i got back from the ride I removed the bar tape and bar-end shifters from the crazy bars.  (I dropped one of the bar-ends and didn’t get it back together right but it’s just going to sit in the parts bin for a while anyway.)   I had to change stems because the one on the bike wouldn’t clamp down tight enough for the crazy bars.  They are from the same manufacturer (Profile Design – the one from the crazy bars has a longer reach) and they’re supposed to have the same clamp dimensions, but only one of them works.  The straddle cable attached to the bars was for a narrow 700C wheel while the Ibis has a wide 26-inch wheel. I had to replace the straddle cable to hook up the front brake, otherwise that cable was ready to go.  The crazy bars were set up for a single bike and the cable for the rear brake wasn’t long enough.  I had trouble getting the stopper out of the reverse lever and had to remove the pivot screw and take the lever out to remove that cable.  The new one went in just fine and after some fiddling with the cable splitter I decided that it was good enough. I replaced the stripped fender screw and tried (without success) to manually shift the Rohloff into a higher gear.  In order to make sure the cables got split I wanted to attach both pieces of the cable splitter to both cables – but they split in different places so I had one long and one short cable under the keel tube.  I put a short cable end into the shorter splitter and then matched it with a very short cable end in the longer cable.  I wrapped a piece of velcro around the tube to hold both cables in place.)

My plan was to take the Ibis (now sporting crazy bars with no tape) with me when I went to pick up the Di2 tandem. Despite the fenders I figured I would put it on the car because without a shifter it isn’t rideable. (That’s actually not true, I’ve ridden it home with a broken shifter more than once – it would be rideable, just not shiftable.)   If Odette drove me over I could drop off the Ibis to get a doohickey and bar tape, have her take the parts that came off the Di2 bike and I could ride the new bike home.  If I rode the crippled Ibis to get there I would just need a knapsack to carry the redundant parts home on the Taliani.

I wanted a quick lesson on Di2 shifting (somehow I’ve got to learn about automatic progressions vs. the left-hand lever, etc)   and I needed to figure out charging and displays and probably ten other Di2 secrets, but I figured that  I could ride it home more easily than I could connect with Odette on Ravenna – and maybe I could  even sneak in a lap around Green Lake.

I ordered a Brooks Sprung Flyer for Odette and will hold off on a fitting.  Amazon shipped the wrong saddle – a sticker on the box said “flyer with suspension springs” but inside was something with a short nose and no springs –  so I filed for a return and waited for a replacement.  The replacement from Amazon was also the wrong saddle – the same error as the time before.  The leather on the side was stamped “B 68” so I assume that’s what got put in the flyer box.  I returned that one too, but this time I requested a refund not a replacement.

It cost almost $50 more, partly because of shipping, but I ordered a flyer with suspension springs from Rivendale.  After really unhelpful tracking information from USPS, the Rivendale saddle showed up two days earlier than expected – they got the right one and I’m confident that it will fit.  Odette thought that the saddle on the Tuscany (that she doesn’t like) was a Brooks and we had a conversation about that.  If she hates the Flyer there are several versions (carved, soft, etc.) that we can try which might make her happier. Meanwhile, it’s been over a week and Alder still hasn’t called to say the bike is ready.

I waited another week and then (11/11) called Alder to check in.  He reported that the bike was basically done and I said I’d be right over.  I grabbed a stuff sac / backpack and set off on the broken Ibis.   I walked up the hill at 73rd and rode down the other side and around Green Lake as if single speed was the new normal.   When I got to R+E I realized I still had the frame pump and the tool bag on the bike so I stowed them in the backpack and went on in.

The Ibis was dispensed with very quickly – “I want a doohickey and a Rohloff twist-shift and some kind of grips on the bar-ends.”  Alder noted that the bar-ends had been cut down.  I didn’t ask him to adjust the brakes, but they seemed to do just fine coming down the hill on 73rd.  (I had a bag of Rohloff parts from th original conversion in my pocket but I forgot to give them to Alder – I expect that he already has plenty of similar ones.) I also forgot to explain the cable splitter thing to Alder and I imagine he’ll think I clipped the two cables instead of opening the quick releases.  .Without shifters to worry about I’m thinking about experimenting with other bars:  (Rivendale Albatross or Choco or maybe Bullmoose would be interesting) or maybe going back to drops.

The Litespeed, however, was more complicated:

Taliani spec sheet: original vs. Di2

Here are some notes from after I picked up the Litespeed:

• Alder says not to worry about synchronized shifting – people always come back and have it removed because you have to shift all the time in very small increments.
• You need to charge about every 150 miles or once a month – there are lights on the battery to show that it’s charging and lights on the front stem that show how much battery you have left.  (Those are the only displays on the system.)
• The battery should have been about half way charged coming out of the shop.  I left it plugged in for three or four hours and the lights didn’t seem to change.
• I forgot where the charger port was (but figured it out the next  morning.)  I pushed the shift button to see the battery light, and learned that the shifters move even when the bike is hanging on the wall.  I never did figure out how to interpret the battery light.
• They installed a body float which I wasn’t expecting.  The thud buster on the red tandem was always set in the lowest position and it looks like the body float on this bike will similarly be as far down as it can go.  (If it doesn’t work I’ll put it on another bike and we’ll start the process of getting a version of the Brooks saddle that she likes.)
• The body float works with springs and R+E says it’s better than polymer discs.   I adjusted it down to the lowest possible position and the distance between the center of the crank bolt and the nose of the saddle is about the same as on Odette’s Stellar.  That means it can go up by at least the distance that it compresses. so there is a little room for adjustment.
• One of the cantis was stuck to the post when they went to replace it, so they replaced the post, too.  Evidently the posts screw in.
• I didn’t get the old free hub body back – oh well…
• The chainrings are Specialties TA rings (130 BCD) 52/38.  They couldn’t use the rings that were on the bike (FSA 53/39 because the big one was too big for the Di2 presets.)
• Alder warned me to be careful about shifting in the front until I’m experienced with it:  it will shift even under load and you may be in a situation where you don’t want to shift up.
• R+E felt that I needed wider brake pads than what came with the neo-retros.
• I needed to get the bike on a scale before we weighed it down with stuff  – Odette got me a new battery for my portable scale and the Taliani weighed between 30 and 31 lbs with saddles & pedals.  After I weighed the bike I removed the body float for a net weight reduction – maybe as much as a pound.  Cutting down the steerer would reduce weight a little and the charger and front wheel stabilizer strap were on the bike when I weighed it – so 30 lbs is probably about right.
• As I mounted the new pedals I noticed that the cranks are 172.5.
• R+E didn’t see a serial number (but they weren’t looking for one.)  I need to give it a good going over, maybe with a pencil to do some rubbings.   Then we’ll think about paint remover.
• The shifters have two narrow buttons – the lower one seems to shift up, the smaller upper one shifts down.  Left is front, right is rear, just like on a mechanical bike.
• Shifting too fast seems to cause the chain to grind.  It only happened once (while starting out across Aurora at 83rd) and I’m not really certain why it happened.
• I’m not sure what to do about the steerer tube – I either want to raise the bars or cut off the excess tube because the stump on top of the bars isn’t a good look.  First, it appears that putting the stem at the top of the stack would be about the same height as the red tandem; as they came from the shop they are about the same height as the litespeed classic.   Second, it appears that only the front brake is going to be an issue (i.e. it looks like  there is enough slack in the rear housing.)  There is likely enough extra inner cable on the front brake  so that I wouldn’t need to replace the cable, and with a double-ended ferule I ought to be able to add three or four inches of housing without unwrapping the bars.  (I would still have to undo the brake and reset them afterwards.)  I’ll probably live with it for a while and maybe wait for the first tuneup to fix the steerer.
• Alder asked what I intended to do with the parts that came off and I told him about the Tuscany.  (I’m not sure if he was just curious or if he was interested in some of them.)  My current plan is to do the cassette first (like, right away) and then the derailleur, followed by the brakes on the Stellar.  I’ll replace inner tubes (at least on the Tuscany) while I’m at it. I would like to have both bikes done before R+E finishes the Ibis.  Then I’ll take the Litespeed to Recycled Cycles for a seasonal tuneup and somewhere in the process I’ll need to clean and lube the bikes I’m riding in the rain.
• I shifted way down to climb the hill on 83rd (but I don’t think I went  all the way down) and it felt like I had lots of room.  We’ll have to see how it feels with Odette on the rear.
• Based on my ride home, triple vs. double won’t be an issue.  I want to lay out a traditional gearing chart comparing the blue and red tandems but that will mean taking the rear wheels off to count teeth on the cogs in the cassette and that will need to wait for a day when I’m not nursing road rash.
• Dan Toole recognized the Ibis (and said that he was just looking at a photo of it)  and then went to interview a cleaning service, saying that he had many fewer workers and that they didn’t have time to clean like they used to.
•  I need to experiment with the carbon saddle I mounted. Maybe we won’t do  a fitting, but I need to fiddle with saddle height both front and back.  I’ve got to figure out what saddle will work for Odette (probably not the Sprung Flyer) but after  discussing it with her we’ll start out with that raggedy padded Serfas.  I kind of hope she ends up liking the Flyer – if that happens I’ll get myself a B-17 or something (and a Brooks saddle bag,) and cosmetically the bike will look better.
• I wonder if we should move to different bars for Odette –  some kind of upgrade for the Prima TTT 220 bars on there now?  Maybe a Rivendale Wavie (or maybe those cut-off FSA Wing-pros?) or maybe some bullhorns would give her a more upright position than the drops do, and there’s no reason to carry around a handlebar section that she never uses.
• I wonder if hanging it up by the wheel is a good idea with the carbon spokes.  (It seems to make contact with the hook on the rim only and it doesn’t touch the spokes at all.)
• Eventually I will want to replace the blackburn bottle cages with something sexier.  I know that there are bottle cage mounts for mini-pumps that might make the battery look more symmetrical.

Odette agreed to a short ride on Wednesday to try out the Taliani.  Then, after breakfast, it was raining and we blew it off.  This was the second time we bailed out on a ride around Green Lake on the new tandem – we talked about it the day before I first took the bike in to R+E but ended up deciding not to ride then, either.

After lunch on Thursday I swapped the rear derailleur and cassette on Odette’s Tuscany for the titanium parts that came off the Taliani.  The exchange was uneventful – the chain from the tandem needed a quick link so I kept the chain from the Tuscany and it seemed to work fine.  I needed to fiddle with the barrel adjuster to get it to go into the largest cog but no real problems.  The inner tubes I got have a 42mm valve stem which turns out not to be long enough for those deep-section rims.  I ordered some more with 60mm valves and will use the others on the Stellar.

I took a day off after hitting a pothole in the rain and messing up my face.  On Saturday it was still raining and I didn’t feel like riding so I installed the Paul Components Engineering touring cantis on Odette’s Stellar.  The install was easy and the brakes are much easier to set up than the Rodriguez “big squeeze” cantis that I’m used to.  (I don’t have the hang of the eccentric washers that you use to adjust the toe-in and pad angle, but trial and error got me close.)  I replaced the inner tubes on that bike with new Continental 650C tubes so the bike should be good to go. Those 42mm valve stems really don’t work very well with my floor pump.  (I exploded one tube probably by trapping it under the bead even though I manipulated it all the way around before pumping. )

Here are the details on Odette’s bikes:

I spent the afternoon cleaning and organizing the garage. and really didn’t make a dent.  I found some more Rohloff parts – including a shifter.  I discovered that I have a lot of old cantis.  I found some smaller outriggers and I may try to combine one of those with a light stub.  I didn’t find a side-loading mini pump bracket. I wasn’t able to rotate the right hand shift lever on the Centurion, but it still works despite the crash and actually may not have been twisted at all.  I still need to swap out the front derailleur on my Litespeed for the one from the Taliani and clean the three bikes with fenders.

Tuesday, I swapped the front derailleur on my Litespeed Classic for the one that came off of the Taliani.  I think that I need more tension in the cable but it shifts up and down and doesn’t make any chain noise while on the stand.  (I’m not certain that the old one was broken, but it was way   out of adjustment and I couldn’t seem to get it back in range.)  I found the springs for the body float and spent a little time trying to figure out how to replace them. I finally gave up and downloaded their instruction sheet.

Early in the morning before a ride I changed the body float springs to two purples.  The procedure was not as easy as I was led to expect and the instruction sheets were not exactly clear, but it seems to only go together in one way and it compresses like it is supposed to.  Odette can straddle the frame with both feet flat on the floor but if she sits on the saddle she can only touch with her toes – so as far as she is concerned it doesn’t work.  I mounted the sprung flyer and we took our maiden ride – a couple of laps around Green Lake.  We came back to the garage and adjusted the nose of her saddle so that it didn’t point down quite as much and we raised my saddle a couple of inches (and moved her handlebars up as far as they will go on my seat post. ) The second two laps felt a little more comfortable so we did two more. Climbing up the hill on 50th with Odette on the back feels remarkably like it does on the red tandem. I’ve got to get the saddles sorted out (that carbon Selle Anatomica isn’t going to work for me this time, either.)  I need to raise the front bars and I need to find a set of stoker bars with more rise.  I need to order bottle cages and set up a tool kit.  Otherwise, the Di2 bike is coming together.

After Odette got me more new batteries, I measured the clamping diameter on the rear stem on the Taliani and got numbers that didn’t make any sense at all.  I finally figured out that it helps to zero out the caliper before measuring and determined that I need 26mm bars.  I plan to order a set of flatish bullhorns and we’ll take it from there.   I finally got 650C inner tubes with a 60mm valve stem and I installed one in the front of Odette’s Tuscany and put the other one in her saddle bag.  I replaced the carbon Selle Anatomica saddle on the front of the Taliani with a beat-up old Selle Italia, (a Mundialita, I think.)  I don’t know where it came from but it must have been on some bike that I got used, probably the Centurion.  That will hold me until Odette figures out whether or not she can live with the Flyer.   Ordering the bottle cages means a call to Peter White and I’ll deal with that in the next few days.

I raised the front bars up to the top of the steerer tube and I’ll figure out where I want them before cutting housing or cable or the steerer.  I figured out that what determined the length of the housing was the position of the hanger, meaning that if I left the hanger the same distance below the clamp I wouldn’t have to add any housing.  I end up with a hanger that is really too high and a long exposed cable segment, but it will work for now.  The first time I have it serviced I’ll need to cut the tube or add some housing to the front brake cable.

I got a pair of Origin8 bullhorns and got Odette’s buy-in to try them on the blue tandem.  The weather turned wet and we weren’t going to be riding any time soon so there was no hurry to install them.  The bar tape came off the Prima bars intact, so I wrapped the bullhorns with the old tape just to have something to hang onto while we adjusted their position, figuring that I’d save the new tape until I was sure the bars were going to work.  The bullhorns were the occasion for a conversation about saddles – I read Peter White’s comments to her and we talked about cut-outs and shapes.  Here are the links I gave to her:

• https://www.peterwhitecycles.com/bersaddles.php
• https://www.brooksengland.com/en_us/flyer-carved.html
• https://www.brooksengland.com/en_us/b17-softned-short.html
• https://www.brooksengland.com/en_us/b67-softened-short.html
• https://www.brooksengland.com/en_us/b135.html
• https://selleanatomica.com/products/x1

Eventually we’ll select another saddle and give it a try.

Before riding on Black Friday, I had Odette sit on the bike and tell me if she was okay with the position of the bullhorns and to make sure that they weren’t bumping her knees.  She wasn’t really into it but said they were fine.  After lunch I replaced the bar tape on the bullhorns with a different  used tape – and I moved the posts a little further around the bend and tilted them back a bit.  It’s still a work in process but I think that they’ll be okay when we get done.  While I was in the garage I looked at cassettes and was able to find the number of teeth marked on most of the rings. Here is a basic gearing chart for the red and blue tandems.  As I expected, even with a 2-by setup, the range on the Litespeed is comparable to that on the Rodriguez (3.78 on the Litespeed vs 3.74 on the Rodriguez.)  At 0.95 the Litespeed granny gear is actually a little lower than the Rodriguez’ 1.07.

The Specialites TA bottle cages from Peter White came the weekend after Thanksgiving – I mounted all of them except the one that will fit over the battery.  I wanted to mount a Zefal side-loading mini-pump mount on there too, and even though it’s coming from California and even though I ordered it in mid-November, it’s not expected to get here until Christmas!  I hauled Odette’s Tuscany upstairs and put it on her trainer.  I’m not betting that it will get much use but I know she won’t ride it if it is out in the garage, and maybe it will help her decide on a saddle.  I’ve been taking short rides because of a couple of atmospheric rivers – which leaves me extra time for waiting.  I mounted clip-on fenders on the red tandem hoping that we’ll get out for a ride eventually.  There isn’t any clearance in the front with the current tires (30s) so I mounted a 23 on a spare rim and figured I’d ride with that until spring.  The front fender mounts with a single bolt through the fork crown and I’m not very confident that I’ll get away without rubbing, but there’s one way to find out.

The little mini pump bracket I ordered back in mid-November finally arrived – two weeks early.  The real story is that I didn’t realize it was actually coming from the UK, but  I wouldn’t have had to wait so long if it hadn’t gone in and out of the Seattle distribution center so many times.

Here’s what it looks like after mounting the bottle cage and the mini pump bracket on the same riv nuts as the battery:

 

The 15th of December was a Monday and R+E wasn’t open, so I planned to call that Tuesday, figuring that after a month I’d waited long enough that it didn’t look antsy and that I ought to check in to see if they could tell me when the bike would be done.  After a wet ride I was scanning email when the phone rang and it was R+E saying that the Ibis was ready for me to pick up.  Odette gave me a ride over and I rode home in almost dry  conditions.   The bike shifts really well.  It has always been geared too low and that is even more noticeable now, but with Odette on the back it likely won’t feel as light.   Its started to rain as I pulled into the driveway but I decided to take some photos anyway.

Now I need to take the Litespeed in to Recycled Cycles and take my trashed glasses in to Eyes on Fremont – two things I’ve been waiting to do until the Ibis process was over.

Here’s my “made in America” gallery:

 

Here’s a gallery of Di2 bike photos:

 

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

For several years I’d been talking about getting a Litespeed tandem frame and building it up with Di2.  This idea was accompanied by a fantasy of stashing that tandem at Will’s place in Berlin so that we could ride in Europe without flying around with the bike.  Perhaps you can tell that I was not entirely serious about it.

Here’s what they say about Litespeed tandems on bike forums:

They started out as customs, then Litespeed played around with production-model tandems for a few years (’98 – ’02 or ’03?) and then switched back to build-to-order / custom fabrication

The first Taliani’s used Rick Jorgenson’s Tango uptube design but shifted to a more conventional, full-length internal tube before kicking into production and the basic road tandem design has remained the same since then.

Here are the Litespeed catalogues I could find on-line for the relevant period:

2006 – custom tandem mentioned, but no specifics

2004 – no mention of tandems

2001 – caliper brakes, looks like a carbon fork  [PDF]

2000 – cantilever brakes, specifies a steel fork  [PDF]

1999 – cantilever brakes, specifies a steel fork  [PDF]

1998 – cantilever brakes, specifies a steel fork

1997 – tandems not discussed

It is interesting to note that the ownership of Litespeed changed at some point in 1999, which may have influenced their appetite for low-volume, labor intensive,  high price-point products like tandems.

I saved an eBay search and went to the Seattle Craigslist periodically to see what was available there.  During most of 2024 and the first nine months of 2025 there were only a handful of Litespeed tandems listed on eBay (and none that I saw on the local CL).  I saw one, with an original Ultegra groupset, that was listed for $4,500 and which sat there for at least six months.  (It was a medium frame – 56 captain –  which was just slightly bigger than I wanted or else I might have made a bid of a couple of thousand.)  I don’t know if it sold or was just deleted but the seller didn’t lower the price and nobody was ready to pay that much for it.  There was another one at a similar price that I almost jumped on.  It was a medium sized Ultegra located down in Portland.  I equivocated too long and it sold, but it was a Santana anyway and not really what I was looking for.  It became apparent to me that there was no trade in bare frames.  Everything listed seemed to be not just a complete bike but decked out in bling.  Generally they were listed for much more than I would consider but they still came off the site quickly.  Somehow when people spend eight or ten grand upgrading a bike they expect to recover at least part of that when they sell it used, so they list their tandem for ten or twelve grand.  In my experience it generally doesn’t work that way –  fancy components don’t usually command much of a premium on vintage bikes.

For several months during the summer of 2025  my saved search didn’t turn up any eBay listings, but one day when I checked the Seattle Craigslist I found this listed for $2,500:

This is a rare titanium tandem that weighs under 30# on a bath scale! Size Medium. Seats are set for 5’11” captain and 5’4 stoker. Everything on this bike was upgraded to best of including Carbon spoke spinergy wheels, gates carbon drive, carbon FSA cranks, Campagnolo record 10 long cage and ti cassette, carbon tandem specific fork, titanium stems from Seven cycles, carbon bars from Zipp, titanium Campagnolo record seat posts! Can include shimano or speedplay pedals. Continental tires. Metallic blue custom powdercoat. None like it. I would put this up against any tandem at all for ride quality, weight, speed, shifting and braking, whether comotion, moots, seven cycles, Santana…whatever. This is 10# -15# lighter than most preowned tandems. Must see and ride to appreciate. I live on the Burke Gilman Trail in Lake forest park. Come test ride for 5-10 miles before you decide.

https://seattle.craigslist.org/see/bik/d/seattle-litespeed-titanium-tandem/7882773889.html

The post had been there for 17 days (updated 3 days earlier) so I confirmed that it was still available and arranged to come over to his place that afternoon to look at it.  Odette came and looked over my shoulder as I set up the meeting which gave me the chance to broach the idea of a third tandem – she didn’t object too loudly and agreed to come with me to see the bike.

I was afraid that the bank would be suspicious about me withdrawing that much money in cash (or at a minimum that they would say I needed to come back the next day) but Odette was polite and they gave her 25 – $100 bills with no questions asked about elder abuse or anything else.

The seller (“Brian”) was a guy about our age who said he had been married 40 years.  The bike was in his garage with bunch of other bikes hanging up – the nearest one was a Davidson.  He bemoaned the decline in people riding tandems and said that he and his wife bought a tandem together before they were married.  He said he had a quad and then a quint when his kids were young.  He had health problems that meant he couldn’t ride any more and he was in the process of cleaning out his garage.

Brian said that the bike was from the early 2000’s.  The Litespeed catalogue for 2000 shows a change in the seat post collar that year, and this bike seems to have the new style, so it should be from  2000 or later. The 2001 catalogue announces a change to Ultegra dual-pivot  brakes and since this bike has canti posts it must be from before 2001.  However, this bike has the David Lynskey signature on the left chainstay – probably meaning that it was built before the change in ownership.  It could be that it was in process when the deal closed and that the closing was at the end of 1999.   Or it could be that the new seat post collar got phased in during 1999 but didn’t show up until the next catalogue when they needed something for marketing. And, of course, if it was a custom build, all bets are off.

Here are links to Taliani specs for 1999, 2000 and 2001 – you can see the evolution of the brakes here, matching what is shown in the catalogue, and placing this bike in the year 2000 – but I’d take those user reported spec sheets with a grain of salt and question if they really put V-brakes on the 2000 tandem.  (The seat-post collar change was evidently across models, not tandem specific, and I encountered it once before while dating Odette’s 2000 Tuscany.)

In retrospect, Brian didn’t say he got the bike new in the early 2000’s, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he got it used some time after it was built.  He said that he had upgraded it at the start of the pandemic and that it hadn’t been ridden since then.  (The belt drive – and probably the FSA cranks – are older than that.)  He said that the powder coat was done at a place in Mukilteo and that he got the bike painted  just to make it  unique.

When we went to load the bike on the roof rack I couldn’t release the brakes to get the front wheel off and ended up having to deflate the tire.  Brian said that there were brake releases on the side of the hoods.  Google has a better description: To release the brakes on a Campagnolo 10-speed shifter, squeeze the main brake lever, then push the small, inner lever (also used for downshifting) inward. This action opens the brake caliper, providing clearance for wheel removal. You learn something new every day – but it kind of makes me think about how close Brian was to the operation of this bike.

On the way home I had the usual buyers remorse (not very serious, but I kicked myself for spending a bunch of money on a toy.)  This time my train of thought was something like “this bike has been freshly painted and has a new fork – maybe it’s stolen or he’s hiding a crash.”  I definitely didn’t get the vibe that Brian was fencing a stolen bike.  I couldn’t see any indication of crash damage.  It’s possible that he was flipping a frame he got somewhere sketchy, but it’s unlikely you’d pick a tandem frame for that kind of exercise and expensive components like Spinergy wheels aren’t what you’d put on a bike you’re flipping.  I’d like to get a serial number and ask Litespeed what they know about this bike, but I haven’t seen any sign of an engraving yet, what with the powder coat (no serial number – another red flag.)  I checked BikeIndex and didn’t see any Litespeed Tandems reported as stolen anywhere on their site.

That powder coat was one of the things that made me call this a “weird-ass bike.”  Who paints a Litespeed?  If you lay out the money for a Titanium frame don’t you want to flaunt it?  (I’m exaggerating here – the Litespeed catalogues include some bikes with paint options and at least one of the Litespeed tandems I saw listed on eBay was painted.)  The paint on this bike seemed to be intended to evoke a mid-90’s Lemond or something where the chrome sleeves and the colored paint meet in hard lines.   (Those white “Litespeeds” are official replacement decals and the heraldic blocks are newer and must have come with the powder coating.)   Weird.

I also reacted to the Bontrager fork as weird-ass.  Brian said he wanted to upgrade to a carbon fork and he wanted one that was tandem-rated and that this one was top of the line.  But Bontrager?  To me, it changes the whole esthetic of the bike to put something that big and bulbous out there in front.  Surely there were tandem-rated carbon forks available from brands that didn’t target the mass market.  (The spec site talks about about Co-Motion forks, but from a time before Litespeed switched to carbon.)  I expect that this fork is the reason that the brakes don’t match – vintage campy side-pulls on the front and Shimano XTR cantilevers in back.  The Bontrager fork didn’t have canti bosses so he must have gone to his parts bin and pulled out a pair of Campy Record calipers and said “good enough.”  (I’ve heard reports that Campy caliper brakes don’t stop all that well, but I believe that was directed at older models.)   In any event the mis-matched brakes undermine his intention to have a best-of-breed, tandem-rated, configuration.  (The cantis likely came stock but the brake pads are thin and wrinkly.)  Weird.

The other big-deal thing that contributed to the “weird-ass” reaction was the drive train.  The bike had Campagnolo Record 10-speed brake/shift levers, a Shimano Ultegra front derailleur, an FSA triple crankset, a Campagnolo Ti 10-speed rear derailleur and a Campagnolo Ti cassette.  Weird.

I’ve seen bikes that have Campy shifters and Shimano derailleurs, but except for very specific combinations they generally don’t work well together and people normally want a complete groupset.  My guess is that the FSA crankset came first and that Brian wanted to stick with the triple chainrings when he upgraded the rest of the drivetrain.  It wouldn’t be surprising if he had to use a Shimano derailleur to make those chain rings shift smoothly.  Campy made triple cranks in the ’90s and definitely made derailleurs that would work with them – but that doesn’t mean that a vintage front derailleur is going to work well with modern levers or with that set of Shimano chainrings.  Or it may have just been something else he pulled out of the parts bin.

When I got the bike it was set up 53/39/30 in front (FSA crankset) and 13/29 in back (Campy cassette.) That (30/29) is pretty close to a 1:1 gear ratio at the bottom, which is about what we’re currently riding on our Rodriguez:  30/32.

My last entry in the weird-ass category is the handlebar situation:  carbon in front  / alloy in back.  The front bars are  Zipp – expensive but they don’t match anything else on the bike.  If you’re going to shell out for fancy bars why not get FSA Wing Pro or something that complements your other components?  Besides, you got money for expensive titanium stems and seat posts both front and back but you can’t afford matching handlebars for your stoker?  Weird.

I took the Taliani in to R+E on a Wednesday afternoon (10/15) to discuss my project  with Alder.  When I told him that I wanted to convert the bike to Di2 his first question was “why?”  I didn’t have a prepared answer and responded with something about reviews and flawless shifting with larger jumps and just wanting to get educated about it seeing as how Di2 has been around for over ten years now and isn’t going away.  I didn’t feel like I was exactly convincing so I added that I was thinking about eventually needing to put Odette in front and thought that she’d do better with the effortless electronic shifting.  Somehow that seemed to resonate with Alder.   (He told me a story about accidentally shifting into the big ring while climbing all-out in a cyclocross race.)  Here are some Di2 links that I saved in advance of that conversation.

Here’s the list of questions I prepared for our conversation:

1. 1. 1. can you convert this tandem to Di2?
         1. which Di2 version?
         2. can you use the FSA triple crankset?
         3. can you swap free-hub bodies on the Spinergy hub and use that wheelset?
         4. can you drill holes for internal wiring runs?
      2. can you drill a hole through the brake bridge to mount caliper brakes on the rear?
      3. what about a steel tandem-rated fork (slender, like the one on our Rodriguez ultralight) but with bosses to get canti brakes up front?
      4. how do I remove the cranks (are those self-extracting bolts on the non-drive side?)
      5. why does the rear hub look like a narrow hub with a spacer?
      6. what do you recommend for a stoker suspension seat post?
      7. any ideas where I would find / uncover the serial number?

A couple of days earlier I took the cassette off the hub to verify that it had Campagnolo splines (the visible side of the cassette didn’t have any markings labeling it as Campy, and I wanted to confirm that it was a Ti cassette as described in the listing.)  When I put it back together I tightened it until it squeaked, but that was evidently not enough because it wasn’t shifting right on the ride over and when Alder went to count the cogs he exclaimed about how loose they were.  Luckily that cassette won’t be on the bike when I go to ride it home.  (Evidently only the four largest cogs are titanium, but before tariffs that cassette retailed for $300.)

• • The consensus of the shop (Alder, Smiley, and a random frame-builder) was that it was a cool bike
  • probably looking at 11 speeds in the back and two in front
  • I said I’d go for 50/34 over 48/30
  • to avoid drilling holes in the frame it sounds like we’ll run the wires under tape and use external battery mounts
  • the belt drive is old – from before the advent of a center track in September 2010 – I don’t know what they’ll recommend in that regard although it sounds like the FSA cranks are keepers
  • I shouldn’t think about caliper brakes.  Cantis are more adjustable and have more stopping power
  • to mount caliper brakes on the rear of this bike you’d need to add a reinforcing bracket or something, not just drill a hole
  • a steel fork with canti bosses would look good and give a more flexible ride
  • the Spinergy hubs are made by White Industries and ought to take a regular Shimano free hub body
  • those wheels were expensive, as were the Campy Ti rear derailleur and Ti cassette
  • body float seat posts likely need more room than we’ve got on that frame, at least the way the stoker saddle is currently adjusted. They need to have Odette come in for a fitting to see if it will work
  • l left the bike there, Alder will work on a quote

I hadn’t planned to leave the bike at R+E so when I left the shop I called Odette and asked her if she had time to pick me up.  We agreed that I would walk up  Ravenna toward Green Lake.  First she confused R+E with Recycled Cycles, then she had trouble remembering where Ravenna was.  She stopped three or four times to use Apple’s “Find My”  app but couldn’t project where I would be when she arrived.   I finally saw her turning left onto Ravenna from 65th (about halfway to Green Lake) and called her cell to say where I was.  She turned around but then got into the left turn lane and went back onto 65th…  We finally got together but I gave her a bad time about impending senility.

Alder called on Thursday (10/16) saying he had found a freehub body for the Spinergy wheels and had specced out an 11×2 set-up and that parts would come to about $2,300 plus $400 in labor to install.  I told him that was a bargain.  I told him I wanted a steel fork (and that I would supply Paul Components  canti brakes) and he said that the fork would be another $400.  I gave him a credit card but I expect there will be some additional costs (like a body float) and some stuff I need to procure on my own (like saddles).

The next day I started thinking about using those touring cantis on a go-fast bike and decided that doing it right would mean getting a set of neo-retro brakes.  I ordered them that evening, but nothing will happen over the weekend and I’ll be lucky to have them by the end of the next week.  R+E isn’t going to start working on this bike for at least a couple of weeks so my timing will still be fine.  (The touring cantis will go on Odette’s Stellar where they were headed before this whole thing got started.)   I cut a length of housing liner that ought to be enough for the run of brake cable along the top tube and I plan to put that in the box with the brakes.  I think it makes sense to cover the cable just to protect the paint but using a chewed-up length of exterior housing  leaves much to be desired.

Stuff still in process:

• saddles – I’ll start with that Selle Anatomica carbon saddle I’ve got in the garage; we’ll try to get Smiley to sell us something for Odette when we go in for a fitting
• Time Atac pedals / cleats – nothing to consider, I just need to get around to ordering them
• body float / bike fitting – we’ll do this separately after the conversion is done
• ProblemSolvers downtube shifter boss covers – unless Alder has a better idea I’ll order them myself
• bar tape – the front needs new tape; if we do anything other than black there we’ll do the same on the rear bars
• fork color – I think we’ll just go with black and see how it looks.  I may come back later and see if I can get the fork painted to match the blue on the frame
• front brake hanger – to mount the cantis we’ll need a hanger…
• chain – I couldn’t tell if the quote included a new chain but the one that’s on there now is 10-speed Campy and after the conversion we’ll need an 11-speed Shimano
• FSA belt drive – still unclear if I need to replace all or part of the old drive
• collect old parts – I want to make sure I come away with the parts that get removed: Bontrager fork, FSA chain rings,  Campy  levers, Shimano front deraileur, Campy Ti rear derailer,  Campy Ti cassette, Campy free-hub body, Campy 10-speed chain, Campy caliper front brake, Shimano XTR rear canti, outriggers,

Craigslist photos:

 

From July 26 to August 8, 2025  Odette and Jerry rode from Donaueschingen, Germany to Vienna, Austria

After Denmark we really didn’t have any firm ideas about tandem trips.  We agreed that we wanted to get back to Berlin but didn’t come up with loop rides that appealed to both of us.  At some point I realized that if we shipped our bike cases to the end of the route, we could do one-way trips and that really opened up the options.  At Christmas we talked to Will about travel in Europe and visiting him in Berlin –  he encouraged us to visit and agreed that shipping our cases there from the start of our ride was a pretty low hurdle to get over.

Odette wanted to go to Vienna and proposed a one-way trip ending there.  It seemed backwards but I didn’t ask too many questions.   Odette found a large German bike tour company – Radweg Reisen – that offered a standard trip on the Eurovelo 6 route down the Danube.  I told her that it was fine by me as long as they got our bike cases to the end of the ride and she assured me that they’d take care of it. We signed up and put down a deposit and then didn’t hear anything for a long time.  Odette eventually managed to get a hotel list and then a Komoot itinerary for the ride.  We figured out that by paying for the Komoot premium level we could export the daily routes as GPX files and although it seemed silly to start up with a new application, we got all of the route files for the German part of the trip and imported them into Ride with GPS.  There wasn’t any explanation for the absence of the Austrian part of the rides and there were some issues with track artifacts but it felt like things were progressing.

Starting in about May Odette began to get anxious about the length of the daily rides and the elevation involved and about hotels that were way out of the center of town and about places that didn’t have restaurants or that had restaurants that were closed on the day we’d stay there.  She was also anxious about the weather.  We ramped up the training rides to deal with the first fear and she emailed the tour company about the second one (to no real effect.)  For months we followed the daily temperatures at the beginning and end of the trip and that seemed to have a calming effect even though it looked like it could  be very hot in Southern Germany.

Eventually the final installment of the fee was due and the company clarified that the Austrian portion of the tour was being supplied by another big European bike tour company – Pedalo.  Coordination was not easy but we learned that  Pedalo had their own application and that there was no way to download GPX files from it.  We didn’t have direct contact with the Austrians, but the Germans assured us that written material would be available in Passau (the last German town before crossing into Austria) and discounted our request for GPX files, saying “you always have Google Maps”.    Odette remained confident that everything would work out.

Odette booked flights on Delta and then had second thoughts about a 1-hour connection in Amsterdam.  Having been delayed more than an hour by passport control there, I told her I wasn’t comfortable cutting it that close either, and she rebooked us through New York with a 3-hour layover.  We got the bike serviced and had new tires  put on it – The Polkadot Jersey shipped our front wheel to California to have a new rim put on it, and then weren’t able to get our bike ready until the day before we were set to leave.

The weather seemed to change and our concerns about excessive heat changed to concerns about  flooding.  I decided to take my touring shoes for wet weather and my regular bike shoes for warm days.  I also decided to take full rain gear. I broke down the bike and packed it into the cases. I took a headlight in case we needed to comply with German regulations.

The flight to New York was good –  everybody seemed determined to get us into the new Delta lounge in JFK but it was just crowded and not very interesting.  The flight to Zurich was fine although not a comfortable as the bigger Delta planes,  We had a little confusion connecting with our van but the ride was not too long and the boarder crossing wasn’t even a formality.

Donaueschingen reminded me of Frieberg further north in the black forest.  We stayed at a pretty traditional guest house (Hotel Zum Hirschen) that saw a lot of bike tours.  The food and beer was nothing special but it was still quite good.  At dinner time the room filled up with a collection of local customers that were all about our age and who obviously all knew each other.  We weren’t in the downtown or in the old city but we were within walking distance.  We arrived after lunch and I got to work assembling the bike.  Everything came together well but I had something of an audience.  I was tired from the flight and didn’t feel like pumping tires with a mini pump.  Odette was equally tired and wasn’t much help.  We walked the bike over to a bike shop where the owner shook us down for 5 euros to use his floor pump.

The next day we rode a short (15 mile) loop to verify that the bike was working.  We had enough navigational issues to remind us how much better we did outside of towns.  We went to a museum with an immense, idiosyncratic,  collection of fossils and stuffed animals (and a smaller but no less eccentric collection of modern art.)  We got ice cream at the town center.  We visited the spring that is considered the source of the Danube – but couldn’t figure out how to enter the grounds of the local castle.

Odette called the tour agency to find out what we were supposed to do with the cases headed for Vienna.  She was told that they had no intention of doing anything with the cases other than transporting them daily as regular luggage. The person at the agency said that we were welcome to make other arrangements but that they wouldn’t help.   They suggested that the responsibility for this arrangement lay with their Austrian partner, Pedalo.  Odette capitulated quickly rationalizing that it wouldn’t be that much of a hassle to deal with the cases at each stop.  I was really upset because it invalidated the whole premise of a one-way trip.  We had something of an argument but it didn’t change things – we weren’t going to get what we thought we were paying for and it was too late to do anything about it.

The next morning we got out relatively early.  The ride was mainly through wide valleys and quiet farmland.  Most of the farm roads were one lane wide – but paved.  Unpaved roads were very solidly compacted.  We didn’t stick to the river but seemed to seek out low traffic byways.  We saw a crowd at the seasonal sinkhole where the Danube completely disappears, but didn’t leave the route to investigate.

While the route had it labeled as Fridingen, our hotel (a former forestry lodge called Gasthaus Jagerhaus) was ten kilometers beyond that town, closer to Beuron.  We had to navigate around a road closure (for a parade?) in Fridingen and afterwards the ride was all in forest on double-track gravel.  We stowed the bike in a shed full of farm equipment and crossed the river on large stepping stones. Odette sang the “valderi-valdera” part from The Happy Wanderer as we hopped from stone to stone.   She was afraid of falling off a cliff and there were private property signs all over, so we crossed back and amused ourselves watching small fish in the shallows.  The lodge had a restaurant but it was closed and we were ten kilometers away from any services.  However, there was a snack bar for hikers where we could get food to eat in the “garden shelter.”  After an early dinner (the snack bar closed at 5:00) we watched a thunder storm leave an accumulation of hail on our balcony.

The path beyond the lodge was advertised as single track but it was just an extension of the gravel from the day before.  The navigation was pretty easy as we headed down narrow valleys.  (There were a couple of places where we climbed over limestone bluffs next to the river while the railroad went through ancient tunnels.)  We saw lots of towers and ruins of castles and monumental monasteries and abbeys.  Although it drizzled all day we never got Heavy rain.  The hotel in Obermarchtal (Gasthof Berghofstuble) was pretty modern with a pizza oven out back.  We parked the bike in a garage with a lot of cleaner-looking e-bikes.   We asked the guy at the front desk for a restaurant recommendation which he provided – recommending a restaurant (klostergasthof Adler) owned by his daughter and where he was the headwaiter.  It was quite a walk into town but we saw the old part of the village while we were happily wandering.

The next day,  after a false start,  we rode on to Ulm passing through wider valleys.  For some reason there were fields of dry brown wheat interspersed with shoulder-high green corn.  Much of the wheat had areas where it had been blown down or trampled.  I suspect that the change in weather that we’d observed  (hot and dry became cool and wet) interfered with the wheat harvest schedule, but I never got a satisfactory explanation.  We had an intermittent  light rain, more off than on, and shortly before reaching Um we encountered a police barricade blocking a bridge over the railroad tracks.  Our maps showed a route that didn’t go next to the railroad tracks and we crossed the bridge on foot with no hinderance – we later learned that a landslide just up the tracks from our crossing had knocked a train off the rails and killed three people.  For some reason Odette didn’t believe that the bypass route was the best option so we continued to a larger highway where we found a bikeway that was so muddy we ended up walking it.  

Just as we were entering the town I hit a line of pavers marking the apron for a bus stop and I caught them at an oblique angle.  (It just looked like a line in the pavement and I totally missed the fact that it had a 2-inch lip.)  The wheels were knocked out from under us and we went sliding across the road but escaped any real injuries.  Both Odette and I were paranoid about curb edges for the rest of the trip.

The pathway put us out at the river bank downtown and we had trouble navigating to our hotel.  (Google Maps wasn’t working – if you waited long enough you could see a map but there were no directions to your destination.)  There was a collection of homeless people under the bridge where our route ended and I thought about asking for directions, but then thought better of it.  We finally used a combination of the printed booklet and maps without directions to get us going in the right direction.

The hotel (Hotel Am Rathaus) was downtown but without a restaurant. The front desk was in a different building from our room but the bike storage was locked (and un-openable.)  Ulm is a pretty big town (with the world’s tallest church steeple) so finding a place to eat was not a problem. – we ate just down the block at Gaststatte Krone and were quite happy.

In the morning we rode on to Donauworth mainly keeping to the river and riding significant stretches of unpaved pathway.   As we entered town we saw a red squirrel who didn’t stick around to be friendly.  (He was a very impressive flame-orange color.)  We rode past a big Airbus factory after that. The hotel  (Hotel Donau) was nice – and the restaurant they recommended  (Goldener Hirsch) was very good.

The ride from Donauworth to Ingolstadt spent a lot of time in a nature preserve which was very pretty and pretty buggy.  We found the Hotel Bauer Garni which was a long ways from the center of town, not near anything, and which had no restaurant.   We’d eaten cheese and fruit in the nature preserve so we decided to walk into the old town center for an early dinner.  It was a long walk with a bridge to cross and several busy streets to get under.  Things weren’t helped by serious road construction between the hotel and the bridge.  We walked around the old town, noted the Audi facilities, and ate at an outdoor bistro (Theresienhof).  We spent a bunch of time in a bookstore and then a bunch more looking for a bike shop for chain lube.   We didn’t get either books or lubricant but we bought fruit and cheese for the next day.  While checking out Odette realized that  she couldn’t find the card key for the hotel.

It was late afternoon so we hurried back to the hotel – cutting through the construction site and having to scramble up a sand bank to get around the fencing.  The lady at the front desk was still there and didn’t seem upset about the loss – saying “you can get in with the second card, right?”  Odette had to admit that she kept both cards in the original envelope  and lost the whole thing…

Maybe an hour after leaving Ingolstadt Odette wanted a restroom and soon one appeared – just after I passed a couple of other cyclists.  I didn’t want to pass and then pull over so I asked if we could stop at the next one and then spent the whole ride looking for an open restroom.   Our route took us to Weltenburg and then restarted at Kelheim,  Before leaving Seattle we had noticed that there were two maps for that day but the guys at the tour company explained that Weltenburge and Kelheim were the same thing and Odette didn’t ask any questions.  There were crowds of people on the path around the Weltenburg Abby – theoretically the oldest monastery operated brewery in Germany.  We figured out that the path came to a dead end and turned around to get back to the road.  Google maps wasn’t working again but the maps we could get to didn’t show any road going around Weltenburg to get to Kelheim.  After riding the path a couple times we asked  a ferryboat guy how one got to Kelheim and he directed us to the tour boat at the end of the path.  We rushed onto the boat as it prepared to leave (finding half a dozen cyclists waiting for us) and discovered that the material provided by Radweg Reisen included a voucher for that very tour boat (which they had helpfully neglected to tell us about.)

The boat ride was calm and the scenery pretty.  Across the river we collected ourselves and started off towards Regensburg.   It rained really hard, but not for too long, and the sun came out before we reached the town – a beautiful old city.  Our hotel, Altstadt Quartier Hotel Muncher Hof, was right in the heart of the old town but only a couple of blocks from the pathway so navigation and cobbles weren’t much of a problem.  The bike parking was reached through the hotel lobby and had tools and a bike washing station.  We ate at an old monastery converted to a restaurant (Weltenburger am Dom) and I had Weltenburg dunkel which deserved the awards it has won.

Much of the ride from Regensburg to Deggendorf was on river dikes.  Much of the dike was unpaved and quite muddy from the rain which came down hard intermittently during the day.  There were some colorful markings on the Komoot maps which nobody had explained to us but which were probably detour routes to get  around the dike construction that had been ongoing for at least five years.  We persevered on the dikes and were able to ride through the longest closed section – albeit in a wet muddy fashion.  At one point we helped a german couple lift their bike down to get round a barrier and the man slid down the embankment when he attempted to reciprocate.  My main worry was that the construction guys were going to show up and throw us out of their workplace!  Coming into Deggendorf we rode through the port area and chose the path at the base of the dike because it looked like the gravel wasn’t as loose.  A quarter of a mile later we were in unrideable mud that went up over the tops of my boots.  Luckily our hotel, Hotel-Gasthof Hottl, wasn’t too far off.  The old lady at the front desk didn’t speak english and didn’t want to even try to communicate.  A younger lady eventually did take care of us.  Bike parking was through the lobby and we were really muddy so they sent us around the block and made us enter from the rear.   We ate at the hotel because nothing else was open.

The next day started out wet but dried out before we got to Passau.  We ran into more dike construction but we weren’t as aggressive about riding through the work sites.  (We backtracked from the first one we encountered to avoid a few hundred yards of loose gravel and rode a couple extra miles as a result.)  On this stretch there were signs rerouting the bike route around the construction which made us much more confident about getting where we were going.  We did almost get smushed by a fast car while transiting a cornfield, but that wasn’t construction related.  The Hotel Atrium Garni was across the river from the town and up a steep hill.  You had to ride up a ramp to a bridge across the Danube and we disagreed on the approach to that bridge.  We also experienced a flat tire while we were trying to figure out the ramps.  I located the puncture about a third of the way around from the valve stem but I couldn’t find anything in the casing  to cause a puncture.  The mini pump worked well driven by the threat of rain.

We walked the old section of town a couple of times and walked a covered mall once.  We found a bike shop and bought chain lube.  I cleaned the bike and lubed the chains and made sure that various bolts were tight.  Several of the couplers needed tightening.  I assumed that this was the cause of the rubbing sound we had started to notice from the right-hand pedals since when I lubed the pedals they seemed to spin freely without any noise. The replacement tube held for overnight and didn’t even need topping off.  The first night we ate at a traditional restaurant (Bayerischer Lowe) where the food wasn’t great and where we were seated outdoors, next to smokers, and instructed to clear out in no more than an hour.  The second night was much better.  (Laarco in the Hotel Pulus Bogen.)

Before leaving Passau we met with a guy from Pedalo who said “of course GPX files were available – you just have to ask for them.”  He also sympathized with our complaints about Radweg Reisen and had some advice about making the Pedalo app work.  The bike felt great out of the garage but we quickly ran into navigation problems and within a couple of miles we had a flat tire – again about a third of the way around from the valve stem.  I still couldn’t find anything in the casing but I changed the tire and started pumping only to find that the tube wouldn’t hold air.  I don’t know if it was a bad patch on the tube or if I damaged it getting the tire back on the rim but leaving Passau we had three good spare tubes and now we were down to two.  I reinstalled the tire with another tube and it inflated – only to go flat in about two miles.  When I changed tubes this time I was very careful not to pinch the tube with a tire lever.  I asked Odette to patch the two punctured tubes so that they would be ready if we needed them, but the cement was thick (from an unopened tube) and she apparently hadn’t ever patched a tube before.  Both of her patches came off before we got going again.    We got another couple of miles before repeating the process – I installed our final tube after an exhaustive but unsuccessful search for something in the tire putting holes in the tubes.  When the final tube went flat I got out the patch kit again as it was our only option – only to find that Odette hadn’t gotten the sandpaper back into the box.  I used the file on my leatherman to rough up the surface and I squeezed the last drops of cement out of the tube but it was a long shot that it would hold and it didn’t.   However, I did find a minuscule shard of glass embedded in the rubber that I couldn’t feel from inside the casing.  At this point we were six or eight miles from Passau on a bike trail at a wooded road crossing with no way to fix a flat – Odette was ready to call Pedalo   (for whatever that would have been worth) when the support van for Vermont Bike Tours pulled up and asked if they could help.  When he heard our story the driver offered us a fresh tube and before leaving he insisted that we take two more.  Having found that glass shard the first one was all we needed as it took us all the way to Vienna without even topping it off.

The route got easier from that point.  We took a ferry across to the North bank and rode there for a while before crossing back and finishing up on the South.  Odette had recreated the Pedalo route in Komoot so we had turn-by-turn that didn’t disappear when the phone slept.  (Inasmuch as it was all bike path along the river the turn-by-turn was a luxury.)  Even though it was a short day we wasted so much time on flats that it was late when we got to Aschach – so we headed straight for the Hotel Faustschlossl – which was across a bridge from the town and up an insanely steep driveway.  It took a little bit of doing but we got into the bike cage and parked the tandem and then got to our room and found our luggage.  Only our two backpacks and been delivered – and the luggage tag had been altered to show two pieces instead of the four we’d entered.  Odette called Pedalo who had some trouble understanding the situation but finally said they call us back.  They did call 45 minutes later to  say that our bike cases were on their way to Vienna.

We walked down the driveway and back across the bridge and ate at a Pizza place.  (pizzeria Santa Lucia)

The next day was all bikeway along the river and it was sunny and dry.  This was fortunate since we didn’t have any turn-by turn directions.  There was a ferry crossing, a hydropower crossing (where we didn’t understand the process and almost got out on the deck at the time when traffic was coming in the other direction) and a bridge crossing just before the end of the route.  After the flats we were hypersensitive to mechanical issues and we noticed a rubbing / creaking sound from the pedals for much of the ride.  My left foot started to stick when I tried to unclip and I eventually stopped and determined that one of my cleat screws was missing.  We ate at a cafe enroute and rode through a lot of vineyards and several cute touristy towns.  Grein was touristy but old and historic and very substantial.  There was a bike shop across from our hotel (Hotel Goldenes Kreuz) where I got a screw and a patch kit.  We climbed up a steep hill (on foot) to the local castle but it was late afternoon and the castle closed at 5:00 which didn’t seem like enough time to be worth the price of admission.  We ate at a guesthouse (Gasthof Zur Traube)  a few blocks from the hotel which had great food and beer.

The ride from Grein to Krems was more bike pathway by the river and more sun.  There was a ferry at the start and a bridge near the end but the river was getting very wide so crossings weren’t as frequent.  I was getting noise from my pedals but it wasn’t constant and I didn’t want to waste time tracking it down since I figured that the real answer was probably new pedals.  Krems is evidently a suburb of Vienna – it feels like a big city with postwar buildings and lots of freeways and railroads.  We stayed at a hotel (ARTE Hotel) next to the University campus which was apparently operated by the hotel management program.  The restaurant (2Stein) was interesting if not polished.  We gave up on getting desert and walked half an hour (past a prison) to a commercial district where we got ice cream.

The ride from Krems to Viena started out with a complicated bridge and highway crossing and then evolved into long stretches along the river broken by crossings of smaller bodies of water.  I was getting a lot of noise from my pedals and couldn’t find a way of pedaling to make it go away so I just tried to be as smooth as possible and attempted to keep the speed up so that I didn’t have to listen to it any longer than necessary.  We crossed over to Donauinsl – an artificial island that is used for flood control – and rode on that for the last stretch into the city.  The bridge crossing from the island into the city was complicated and we were hungry so not at the top of our game.  We missed the hotel (NH Danube City Wien) the first time we walked the bike past it,  but eventually worked our way back (Google Maps was still not working) and got checked in.

Bike parking was in an underground garage but there was no elevator access.  We parked the tandem and then went back around to the front to get our bike cases which we wheeled down to ramp into the garage. I broke down the bike and got it into the cases while Odette reclaimed the clothing we’d put in the cases and got us situated in the hotel room.  When I took the cranks off I found the self-extracting bolts to be loose both back and front on the right side.  I suspected that the noise was from the crank and not the pedal.  (This is a problem since if you ride with a loose crank you deform the hole and can never get it tight again.  Before the pandemic I replaced the cranks on the tandem for exactly that reason and I hoped I didn’t have to do it again.)  We hauled the loaded cases back around to the front and stowed them in the luggage room. The hotel  catered to busloads of tourists so it wasn’t a surprise that the lobby was overwhelmed by tourists when we showed up with our cases (we would learn that the morning breakfast was a free-for-all.) This made it even more mysterious that evening when we ate in the hotel restaurant and were the only guests.

We had two days off the bike in Vienna and we visited the Vienna Museum, the Modern Art Museum and the Leopold Art Museum.  We bought 48 hour subway passes which worked well – the Vienna subway is easy to figure out and not complicated to ride.  We ate at couple of semi-fancy restaurants )(Restaurant Vienne and Bier & Birli) and walked around the city quite a bit.  Google maps finally decided to work in the city and that helped our navigation.  However, the Delta app wouldn’t work so we couldn’t check in on line and had to get to the airport early to check in for an international flight.  That process was super simple and there was no explanation why we could’t do it online. The flight to Amsterdam was smooth – business class just means that the middle seat is left vacant.  The flight from Amsterdam to Seattle was long but typical – we both slept a couple of hours and didn’t have much to complain about.  Our bags came off the conveyor in Seattle at about the middle of the batch and the line at customs wasn’t particularly long.  The face recognition system seems to be working now since customs was shortened to a single click without even any questions.  The elevator to get to the parking garage is a bottleneck and the one to get down to rides hare level is just as bad.  The ride home was slow due to the traffic from an I5 closure.

Reflections:

• One way trips are still a good idea
• seemed like an easy tour and it was:  625 miles in 13 days with only 9,000 ft, of climbing
• I’d like to continue the Danube route on into Hungary
• We’re able to do back-to-back 60 mile days as long as the elevation isn’t too much
• I’m glad I bought a new pump – RoadMorphs rule!
• It’s a fallacy to think  that local tour operators book better hotels and plot better routes
• I visited Vienna in 1975 but didn’t see anything on this trip that I could recognize
• No problem finding english speakers and english menus – probably easier than in Berlin
• The touring shoes with Showers Pass waterproof socks were just right – I didn’t need the regular bike shoes
• Still brought too much stuff – need to work on reducing clothing & electronics
• Treppelweg FTW!

Photos

Maps:

8/8 – Danube Tour 13 – Wien – 56 miles
8/7 – Danube Tour 12 – Krems an der Danau – 53 miles
8/6 – Danube Tour 11 – Grein – 58 miles
8/5 – Danube Tour 10 – Aschach an der Danau – 45 miles
8/3 – Danube Tour 9 – Passau – 43 miles
8/2 – Danube Tour 8 – Deggendorf – 61 miles
8/1  – Danube Tour 7 – Regensburg – 59 miles
7/31 – Danube Tour 6 – Ingolstadt – 39 miles
7/30 – Danube Tour 5 – Donauworth – 58 miles
7/29 – Danube Tour 4 – Ulm – 42 miles
7/28 – Danube Tour 3 – Obermarchtal – 55 miles
7/27 – Danube Tour 2 – Fridingen  – 38 miles
7/26 – Danube Tour 1 – Donaueschingen – 15 miles

From August 23rd to September 10th, 2024, Jerry and Odette rode a couple of loops on the tandem in Denmark and visited Copenhagen with Will.

• why Denmark

Odette and I had talked for years about a trip to Scandinavia.  She’s never seen the northern lights and I’m curious about the fjords.  Last winter we started thinking about another european tandem trip, maybe starting from Berlin.  We thought about riding to Munich and maybe on into Italy.  We thought about Austria and Poland.  There is an established route from Berlin to Hamburg and a lot of options to loop back from the Baltic coast.  Eventually we realized that we needed to look at what we could get from a commercial tour agency, and the on-line places were selling trips on the Baltic coast from Hamburg, but not from Berlin.  If we were going to visit Denmark / Sweden it made more sense to start in Copenhagen than in Berlin.  So… we agreed to arrange a two-week ride in Denmark followed by a week off the bike in Copenhagen.  That would be all new territory for us and it would meet Odette’s requirements about distance and elevation during the bike portion.  We ended up settling on two off-the-shelf loops from ActiveScandinvia which let us see a lot of the island of Zealand but not much of the rest of Denmark:

• boot story digression

A year before the pandemic I gave up on boot covers and gaiters and bought a pair of Louis Garneau biking boots.  They had a Boa closure covered by a zippered gusset covered by a velcro flap.  They were warm, they were fairly dry, and there weren’t a lot of pieces to keep track of.   About three months after I bought them the Boas stopped releasing.  (Later I figured out that the ratchet mechanism  was fine and that I’d kinked the wire where it exited the guide-noodle.)  I could only open up the boot to take it off by pulling really hard on the gusset and eventually I broke the wire.  I knotted it and it worked well enough, but when the second one broke I pulled out the Boas and the wires and riveted in old fashioned boot eyelets.  As lace-ups the boots worked just fine (the snowboard boot laces I used looked like they were made for them) and I got three seasons of daily winter use.  This spring the zippers started to fail and the boots just felt wrong when the zippers gaped open.

I went shopping for new bike boots, looking for something without Boas.  (Odette has a pair of Shimano lace-up M-5 boots  that she likes, but they are six or eight years old and don’t seem to be available anymore.)  I decided to get a pair of Shimano EX-900 boots with Boas because they were marketed for touring and claimed to be designed more for hiking than for biking.

They come with two Boas on each foot – kind of doubling down since I started out looking for zero Boas.  They’re really light, about the same as regular bike shoes and much lighter than my climbing boots or even than my old Nashbar bike sandals.  They don’t have leather, the uppers look like really short pile carpet.  I liked them.

In preparation for the trip to Copenhagen Odette monitored the weather there and got increasingly anxious about rain.  We both packed full rain gear and planned to take our boots, but the question remained about what other shoes to  take?  I decided that the boots were the only bike shoes I needed and that since I wouldn’t have brown leather low-cut bike shoes I could bring brown leather low-cut street shoes.  The boots worked great for biking – we didn’t really get rained on so I didn’t test the water proof claims, but I didn’t have any complaints on the bike.   They were also great for walking – I wore them in a dozen towns and for a couple of days in Copenhagen and I walked a bunch and was really happy. The first day out I wore them with a pair of below-the-ankle socks and got a hot spot on my heel but I think that would have happened with any shoes.  I might not select them for really hot weather, but for touring I think that they’re a really good choice.

• tire story digression

Last year, in preparation for Portugal, we got the tandem serviced.  It had Schwalbe Marathon tires on it that had seen maybe 3,000 miles and which had lots of tread left.  The shop suggested new tires and I said I thought that the Schwalbes still had some life left in them.  When we picked up the bike after the service, Odette, true to form, wanted new tires and I didn’t want to argue with her in front of the shop guys so I said OK.  They  didn’t have Schwalbe Marathons in stock so they ordered them and we made a special trip back down the Leschi to get them installed.  (I made them fish the old ones out of the dumpster for me and I’m still riding them on my Fuji.)

This year the tires on the tandem also had about 3,000 miles on them, but the rear one looked “squared off” so I didn’t object when the shop suggested new tires.   They installed Vittoria RideArmor which were a lot lighter than the Schwalbes but promoted as very puncture resistant so I figured we’d be okay.

On the ride to Helsingør (the first real day of the tour) we got drizzled on and in the middle of a shower we realized that we had a flat!  I don’t exactly like changing tires in the rain, but I’ve done it a lot of times and it isn’t really a big deal.  However, this time I was simply unable to get the bead to unseat.  I guess that it was something about being tubeless ready but the tires just wouldn’t detach. I finally resorted to laying the wheel flat on the ground and standing on my toes next to the rim which broke it loose.  I found a granule of glass – not a sharp shard – in the casing and a matching puncture in the tube.  I replaced the tube and was pleased that it went on easier than it came off.  Unfortunately the standard length valve stem was a little shorter than the depth of the rim would have indicated and it was difficult to get our frame pump to latch on securely.  I got it inflated enough to ride and we made it to the hotel.  The next day the rear wheel felt soft so I pumped it some more and then obsessed for the rest of the loop about low pressure and puncture resistance.  I didn’t go to the trouble of swapping out the tube for one with a longer stem (under the theory that “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”  (I figured that I’d wait for a flat at which point I’d have to take the tire off anyway.)  We got back to the hotel in Copenhagen without issue and I borrowed a floor pump and, still without switching tubes, pumped the tire all the way up.  (I had a gauge that I carried with me for the whole tour but I didn’t bother to dig it out and just relied on my fingers.)  There were no tire issues during the second loop, but when I got home and wanted to reassemble the bike I couldn’t get the rear tire off the rim! to install a tube with a longer stem.  My toe jam technique didn’t work at home.  I broke two tire levers and pinch-flatted a couple of tubes but I finally got the tire onto the rim and it now has a tube that has a longer stem.  I think I’ll buy new tires before we go on any long rides.  Now I need to patch a bunch of tubes…

• tour agency digression

The first indication that this was not your usual bike tour outfit was when they tried to tell us that the hotel wouldn’t store our bike cases (“liability reasons”) and insisted that we were locked in to a contract even if the case storage was a dealbreaker.  Odette called the hotel directly and the problem turned out to be the agencies imagination.  They didn’t do one-off routes – their only suggestion was to pick two of their standard routes and ride them sequentially.  They gave us GPX files, a printed tour book and a digital tour book for the first loop.  They also gave us an app with points of interest and turn-by-turn.  They insisted that we couldn’t have anything but the GPX files for the second loop, but actually gave  us a printed tour book as well.  Most of the time they got our luggage to our hotel in the early afternoon but when we came to count on that they didn’t deliver until dinner time.  In the end, it’s a case of “you get what you pay for.”  We thought that the cost of the tour package (routes, hotels and luggage transfer) was reasonable in Danish Kroner – but it was actually quoted in Swedish Kroner which made it much less expensive.

I kept telling Odette that this was the consequence of dealing with a big company instead of the “sole practioner” places we used in Spain and Portugal.  She is correct in pointing out that having the local rep be the person who drives around moving luggage kind of defeats that argument.  She  thinks that there were actually two agencies involved, one in Sweden and its’ parent in Austria.  (ActiveScandanivia and Radreise, respectively.)  I suspect that somebody just dropped the ball on the second loop.

• colonialism  / slavery digression

So,  last year in Amsterdam we noticed how preoccupied the  Dutch seemed to be about slavery and the role the Netherlands played in colonialism and the slave trade.  (Every museum we went into seemed to have an apology and to acknowledge that the wealth and cultural heritage on display came, in part,  from human trafficking.)  Then, in Portugal, it was interesting to see how the museums there put a distance between their colonialist history and the present day.  (There was no denying the slave trade, but no apologies and a subtext that there was an equivalence between life under authoritarian rulers and life in a colony.)   Maybe this is somehow connected with our impression that Portugal was more like third world country?   Danish museums seem to pretty much skip over the issue.  There apparently isn’t an automatic connection between colonialism and slavery in the Danish experience – the colony in Greenland was about resource extraction,  the one in India was about trade (likely including the slave trade, but we won’t dwell on that) and the colonies in the Caribbean, those got turned over to the US.  The vikings raided English and Baltic villages for slaves  (thrall) and much of the Asian and Turkish treasure on display must have been a product of the slave trade. Slavery happened in Denmark as recently as in the US (up until the 1850s.)  Perhaps the Dutch feel guiltier because they were more successful?  There is an opportunity here for someone to write a book about blind spots.    Meanwhile it’s amusing to note the little oblique references that are almost hidden away in the Museum placards.

• the flights

We flew Delta / KLM to Amsterdam and then on to Copenhagen and vice versa.  We checked our luggage all the way through at the first airport.  We had priority status thanks to Will.  We got to the airport in Seattle quite early and spent a couple of hours in the lounge.  We went through customs in Amsterdam and had plenty of time for our transfer.  I started to use the fully reclining bed position but got claustrophobic and reverted to the medium recliner.  I brought my wireless headphones and listened to music the whole flight.  We got to the airport in Copenhagen way too early and had trouble figuring out which desk we needed to line up for.  Once we got situated the process went very quickly and we had a couple of hours to kill at the gate.  We both checked our backpacks in addition to our bike cases.  We only had an hour and a half for the transfer in Amsterdam and we had to go through passport control but it worked.  Our luggage was nearly the first on the belt in Seattle, the Customs line was short,  and the Lyft ride home was uneventful.  (The driver was Venezuelan and wanted to warn us about the dangers of socialism in the US.)

• the loops

We got to Copenhagen at lunchtime and put the bike together that afternoon in the hotel courtyard.  There was no secure storage so I took the front wheel off and locked it and the frame to a low bike rack while also putting a U-lock through the rear triangle and rim.  (It was less of a risk than it sounds since there were probably 50 rental bikes also lined up in the courtyard.)  The hotel had two storage rooms that were accessible to anyone with a room key – we saw some full size bike cases in the storage and felt better about pushing the agency on that issue.  We had dinner at a restaurant close to the hotel called Sanchez.  The next day was a layover so we rode the first six or eight miles of our Day 1 route as an out-and-back.  Central Copenhagen is busy and not a simple grid and despite the extensive bike network and GPX files we found it hard to navigate. We had some arguments about curb cuts and advance warnings, but for the most part the city riding was out of the way quickly and the more suburban riding was easy.  We had lunch at a neighborhood place on our route and dinner at restaurant called Gorilla in the meatpacking district.

The first day of the tour was cloudy and moist.  Odette wore rain pants.  The route was flat and without too many navigational issues.  We lost some time dealing with the flat tire but got to the Louisiana Modern Art Museum before lunch.  This was a really good museum with an outdoor sculpture garden and a couple of temporary exhibits.  We got to our hotel early in the afternoon. The GPX files took us to the ferry and the tour book expected us to use Google Maps to get to our hotel.  We understood that we needed to get across the railroad tracks and found the station we were looking for, only to discover that to cross under the tracks meant going down and up a flight of stairs.   It wasn’t that bad (some of the locals laughed at us) and we rode on up the hill to the hotel where we followed the signs for the bikeway.  We continued up the hill and couldn’t figure out where the entrance was – we ended up cutting through an apartment parking lot  because we could see the hotel building on the other side of a fence.  We took a dirt path that should have led to the back side of the hotel, but there was a fence between us and it.  We walked the bike a block or so on the trail before admitting that we were in the wrong place and heading back to the street, riding back down the hill, and taking the driveway next to the bikeway signs.  The hotel was nice, no bike parking but we could lean it up by the front door and immobilize it with bike locks.  Our room was great and the restaurant was very good.

The next day we rode to the ferry (avoiding the stairs under the railroad track) and rode a loop in Sweden.  Helsingborg is a relatively big town with impressive buildings and wide streets.  We started by riding up the coast to Höganäs – impressive views, sandy beaches and lots of cozy little houses.  Then we cut inland for maybe five miles and rode a big road back to Helsingborg.  When we got back to the Ferry terminal Odette was certain that I was heading to the wrong booth and got us into an exit lane and the attendant came out and redirected us.  Odette still couldn’t believe that we needed follow the bike signs and got us into a lane behind the wrong camper and the attendant had to come out and intervene once again.  The third time was the charm and we were the last vehicle onto the boat, just barely squeezing on and parking at the back of the pack.  I stayed with the bike for the sailing while Odette went up to the passenger cabin. Back in Denmark we found yet another way to the hotel and were not fooled by the bikeway signs at the entrance.   We ate at the hotel again and both the service and the food were as good the second night as the first.  When we left the next morning we forgot a pair of water bottles advertising Bike Holland.  Odette was certain she had also forgotten her underwear, but she later realized that it was all right there.

Third day we rode up the Danish coast a little past Munkerup and then cut inland to Hillerød.  The ride on the coast was pretty but we encountered a bunch of construction on the road.  The ride to Hillerød was mainly forest / farm land and was beautiful.  It was, however, mainly unpaved and neither of us had really anticipated ten miles on gravel.  The farm segments were more difficult than the forest segments.  There were a lot of railroad crossings – and a couple of trains – evidently commuter rail not freight.  The route eventually took us through the gardens of Frederiksborg castle which we returned to for a visit.  (There were lots of paintings of guys who looked like Frank Zappa, I was more impressed by the gardens.)  We had some navigational issues getting to the hotel which turned out to be a Best Western.  They had us park the bike beside the main entrance.  Odette was looking forward to dinner because the hotel restaurant was highly rated.  In fact, it was what you’d expect at a Best Western.

Fourth day we rode to Roskilde.  Much less gravel.  Still pretty country with big fields of grain and leafy vegetables.  On the way into town we stopped at the Viking Ship Museum for lunch and to see the boats.  The tour book took us to the Cathedral but we didn’t go in.  I sat with the bike while Odette tried to figure out how to get to our hotel.  I noticed that the housing for the disc brake was out of the cable stop and in the process of fixing it the bike fell over and put a scrape (and another dent) in the top tube.  It also stabbed my knuckle.  I got the brake back in order and realized that I probably ought to think about having the bike repainted – it’s been over ten years!  The hotel was a Scandia, they had covered (but not secure) parking and a decent restaurant.

On the last day of the first loop we rode back to Copenhagen.  We basically rode over to the coast and then followed the water back to the city.  We found  sand on the trail for a ways, but the ride was mostly paved.  There were some impressive underpasses and bridges by the airport but we managed the navigation in good form. We saw a lot of people in swimsuits (but not too many in the water.)  The route into Copenhagen was much easier than it had been on the outbound leg.  We stayed in same hotel (Absalon) and ate at the fish bar in the meatpacking district.

We had a two day lay over in Copenhagen so the next morning we rode a loop around Amager Island.  Odette selected the route from the public routes on Ride With GPS because it was about 30 miles long and because it was flat.  We found it to be both.   It revisited the final leg of our ride the day before – which would see again on our way out of town for the second loop.  It also had a generous helping of airport and related activities.  However, the bottom end of the island was spectacular.  We rode for several miles along a seawall that was pristine and wild (Odette thinks she saw otters.)  The villages on the return segment were picturesque.   We grabbed lunch at Tivoli Gardens and visited the Rosenborg Castle (more Zappa look alikes but this time with jewels.)  Dinner was at a place called NR.30 which left me with absolutely no impression other than remembering that it was in a former butcher shop.

The next morning we walked all the way from our hotel to Refshaleøen, cutting through Christiania on the way.  Christiania would likely be more interesting later in the day.  We sat on a bench and watched floatplanes and boats and bungie jumping from a crane.  We visited the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Museum where we saw an exhibit about light and color that was pretty disorienting.  The guide was amused by my boots / Boas.  We had lunch at the Refshaleøen food court and then walked back to the København Museum.  I connected with this museum as much as with anything in the city – the exhibit about small business on Amager Island was really on point and we sat through a documentary about squatters and alternative communities that put Christiania into perspective.

We started the second loop by returning to Amager Island and the complicated underpasses and bridges from our way into town a couple of days earlier.  We rode the sand along the beach again but didn’t wait for the Arken Museum to open.  In Køge our hotel was outside of town, beyond the miniature city attraction.  It did offer secure bike parking.  The hotel restaurant wasn’t open either for lunch or for dinner.  We walked to the harbor area and bought grapes and cookies in a grocery which we ate in the square.  The center of town is really attractive with a lot of handsome buildings.  The harbor area was where the action was, through.  We ate there in the evening at a place improbably called “Bossa Nova.”

The next day we rode to Næstved,  This was the day with the most climbing and the most miles of the whole trip.  Just before town we saw a herd of deer, presumably on a game farm.  We got to Næstved at lunch time and stowed the bike before eating at a restaurant a couple of blocks away.  (The bike storage involved passing through an elevator with doors on both sides to access a garage full of spare furniture.)  The town had a lot of impressive old buildings and twisty cobbled streets – we walked it twice.  There were half a dozen big churches that we didn’t go into.  Hotel Kirstine, where we stayed, featured a very nice modern room and a huge ancient lobby.  We ate dinner there and it was excellent.

Our ninth day of riding took us from Næstved to Korsør – except that we stayed in a hotel a few miles outside of town.  The hotel was weird – two parallel single-story arms stretching out from a two -story area with reception and restaurant in a mono-color beige brick.  (There were at least 100 rooms in each arm so our room clear at the far end was quite a walk from the front desk.)  The restaurant was not open for lunch but the front desk said we could get a burger or a salad at the bar.  Unfortunately there didn’t seem to be any staff around the bar (Odette offended a woman in a business group by assuming that she worked for the hotel.)  We got lunch although Odette had to compromise her vegetarian principles.  We were staying in what was probably a suite – our room was incredibly small and there was a similar room off a common hallway.  Further up the hallway was a living room / kitchen with glass doors out to a patio.  The other rooms seemed to be full of furniture and stuff and the patio was overgrown (and littered with an abandoned bikini) so our room must have been the only active bit – it should have been a great price given the size and position. Being at the end of the arm we did have a view out to the brush and the water beyond – and we had a great vantage point to watch the lightning during the thunderstorm that evening.  We parked the bike on the patio under the eves for partial protection from rain.  We put shower caps over the saddles for the only time on the trip.  For some reason I was nervous about the bike all night.  We walked down to the beach but it was pretty rocky and there were too many people for us to stay very long.  We walked a short trail to a dolmen in the woods.  We ate at the restaurant which had almost nothing on the menu apart from a burger and a salad.

In the morning we rode on to Korsør and then to Sorø.  We didn’t see any of the interesting part of Korsør since our route took us through the industrial district and the rain was threatening enough to limit our interest in side trips.  We did make a trip out to Trelleborg to see the Viking ring fortress, a really interesting museum without a lot restoration stuff.  Much of the rest of the route went through the same forest that we encountered on the ride to Hillerød.  This time we took a route requiring less navigation and no railroad crossings.  If Sorø had an old part or a downtown we missed it.  Our hotel was very nice and had a very good restaurant but the primary attraction was the reconstruction of the thatched roof that was in progress.  

The ride from Sorø to Roskilde was interesting in that we approached Roskilde from a different direction than before.  There was one section of unpaved trail where we stopped to inspect another dolmen.  That trail put us back on pavement at a golf course where we got held up for a few minutes by a motorcade with a very large motorcycle escort.  Odette thought the GPX files took us to the hotel and seemed surprised to end up at the cathedral again.  This time I waited with the bike while she went in.   We eventually made our way back to the Scandia where we had stayed a week earlier.  We parked under the covering again and dinner at the restaurant was about the same  (they didn’t have the brown ale that seem ubiquitous in the places we ate, so they gave me red ale which they claimed was about the same.)

For our final day of riding we headed for Copenhagen, but unlike the previous ride from Roskilde we avoided the coast and headed straight for the city.  The first part of the ride was bike trail next to a busy highway.  Then we picked up the C99 – a bike superhighway.  I was less than impressed by the C99.  At best it seemed like a standard trail and at worst it was obliterated by construction.  We made some wrong turns and  had to backtrack but eventually found the suburbs of Copenhagen and ended up on downtown streets we knew.  We parked the bike in the courtyard of the Absalom again and went around the corner to have lunch at a cafe called Apropos.  Our luggage showed up and we were able to get boots and non-essential stuff into the bike cases.  Will arrived late in the afternoon and we walked along the water at Peblinge So and had dinner at a neighborhood French place.

I loved the countryside and the coast.  The national park / forest was not super impressive.  My biggest take away was our navigation coordination which worked better than it has on most of our trips.  Basically Odette had the GPX file with turn-by-turn and I had the tour book with a higher level description.  (The turn by turn would have three operations ending with “left on Falligsvej” while the book would just say “go left at the church in Magley”.)   The tour books fit just right into the map holder on my handlebar bag. I think we finally got the conversion into RWGPS figured out and we agreed that if the two sources disagreed the route book would prevail.  .  We shared what was coming next in our respective queue sheets and if we missed on one source we would usually recover on the other.

• Comwell Hotels Digression

Comwell is a chain of about sixteen hotels in Denmark and a couple in Sweden.  We stayed at Comwell Borupgaard in Snekkersten the first couple of nights we were riding.  It was a really nice hotel with a big modern room and a really wonderful restaurant.  We noticed that we were booked in a couple of other Comwell hotels and that made us happy.  The Comwell Køge Strand in Køge was different.  While Borupgaard might have been a chalet in a previous life, Køge looked like it was designed to be a hotel – one story tangled arms, etc.  There were construction tools piled in the hallways and the restaurant was not open.   The Comwell Klarkskovgaard outside of Korsør was a step further down – interesting but impractical architecture, a room in an abandoned suite, and a barely functioning restaurant.   There is probably a story, but if you didn’t know better you wouldn’t think they were part of the same chain.

• Here are the maps:

8/24 – Copenhagen test ride – Vesterbro to Skovshoved OAB.  here’s the map.  16 miles

8/25 – Copenhagen day 1 – Copenhagen to Helsingør.  here’s the map.  31 miles

8/26 – Copenhagen day 2 – Helsingborg – Höganäs loop (in Sweden) .  here’s the map.  45 miles (approx 6 miles on the ferry)

8/27 – Copenhagen day 3 – Helsingør to Hillerød.  here’s the map.  37 miles

8/28 – Copenhagen day 4 – Hillerød to Roskilde.  here’s the map.  31 miles

8/29 – Copenhagen day 5 – Roskilde to Copenhagen.  here’s the map.  31 miles

8/30 – Copenhagen day 6 – Amager Island loop.  here’s the map.  30 miles

9/1 – Copenhagen day 7 – Copenhagen to Køge.  here’s the map.  36 miles

9/2 – Copenhagen day 8 – Køge to Næstved.  here’s the map.  38 miles

9/3 – Copenhagen day 9 – Næstved to Korsør.  here’s the map.  38 miles

9/4 – Copenhagen day 10 – Korsør to Sorø.  here’s the map.  39 miles

9/5 – Copenhagen day 11 – Sorø to Roskilde.  here’s the map.  38 miles

9/6 – Copenhagen day 12 – Roskilde to Copenhagen.  here’s the map.  29 miles

• Here are the tour documents:

First loop

Second –  loop

• Copenhagen

We spent three days with Will exploring Copenhagen.  It rained the last day.  We visited the National Museum (a big exhibit on colonialism and not too many Zappa look alikes) and the Architecture Museum (featuring a four story slide) the Cisterns (more light and color, this time with sound) and the botanical gardens.  We walked out to the Refshaleøen district again and walked through the meatpacking district a couple of times.   We noted the fancy  bridges and bike parking structures in various places, infrastructure that would have made Amsterdam proud.  As in Amsterdam, most of the  bikes on the street were not locked the way they would be in Seattle.  We saw lots of cargo bikes, including a lot with the Christiania nameplate.  We saw bikes with the Centurion nameplate – evidently a Danish brand and not related to my vintage Centurion.  We saw several  brands of rental bikes, some of which we recognized and some of which  seemed  Copenhagen-specific.  It seemed like every hotel had rental bikes with their name on them – something we didn’t see in Amsterdam.  We ate at La Bodega and at CoFoCo (both in Vesterbro, not far from our hotels) and at Alchemist.

Alchemist was maybe a little over the top.  They are clear that it is not the right place for an evening of business discussions or for a first date. The experience involves 50 food “impressions”, a drink pairing (chosen from a variety of price levels) and a lavish multi-media show.  It lasts four or five hours.  The foods served include sheep brains and insects – mainly for the bragging rights I suspect.  They have a large staff and don’t seem to be in any hurry to move diners along.  Will arranged it for us and treated us to something we would never have done for ourselves.  I got carried away and ordered an expensive champagne at the start, but I controlled myself the rest of the evening.  Truly once in a lifetime for us – and I totally enjoyed it.

• thoughts:
  • we do okay with the S&S cases as long as it is just to and from an airport
  • it works well to check our backpacks on the return flight
  • we need to work on lunch on the bike
  • we need to venture out from the hotels for dinner
  • we can probably do more than 30 miles a day
  • you can’t assume that every hotel in a chain will be up to the same standard
  • the biggest Parkinsons issue was having to carry a bunch of pills
  • I’m more likely to get dizzy on stairs than on the bike
  • the places in Copenhagen that we liked the best (Refshaleøen, and the Meat Packing district) were repurposed industrial zones
  • maybe instead of repainting the tandem I’ll just get a new bike

Here are the photos

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From May 15th to May 22nd Jerry and Odette rode day trips on the tandem out of Bend, Oregon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back around the beginning of 2024 Odette and I settled on a tandem trip to Scandinavia in 2024 – the thinking being that we ought to get in some more trips like that while we still can.  In that connection I pushed for some more local rides east of the mountains and went so far as to list out several possibilities (Selkirks, Okanagon, Coeur d’Alene trail, etc.)  The Travel  Oregon website had several multi-day routes and I had long entertained the idea of a trip that would include Crater Lake.  One of the options I listed was a group of official scenic bikeways near Bend – all of which were about 35 miles long and none of which had more than a couple thousand feet of elevation.  Predictably, Odette chose that one.

I booked a night at the River Run lodge in Maupin, followed by five nights at the Mill Inn in Bend.  (I had saved a bookmark for the Mill Inn almost ten years ago and kept seeing it in the bike vendors folder just waiting for a trip to Bend. ) I had been dealing with dizziness and arm stiffness but started ramping up my mileage thinking about an upcoming trip. Odette didn’t get back on her bike until April – the first zero tandem miles quarter for us in years as our first tandem ride since October in Portugal was on April 13th.

We did some old favorite rides, like the Centennial Trail and the Foothills Trail, and finally got comfortable on the tandem again.  We did a ride around Lake Sammamish with Alex and Carrie where Alex warned us that McKenzie Pass might not be open and recommended the ride across the dam out of Prineville.  I replaced the improvised brake spring on the front of the tandem with a pair of Paul’s Components springs that were too big but which seemed to work just fine.  I tightened the headset a little after the first couple of rides but the bike seemed to be fine mechanically.

In early May Odette ran the car into a low-hanging parking garage pipe and messed up the roof rack.  I disassembled the Yakima stuff and put the factory rails back together.  It seemed that one of the clamps holding the Yakima bars to the factory rails was trashed, but the tandem topper itself wasn’t damaged.  I was able to use pieces from my parts bin to mount the tandem topper directly to the factory crossbars – a good outcome from my perspective.  For the past several years the pivot bolt in the tandem topper has been loose allowing movement in the QR mount and permitting the bike to sway much more than was safe. My solution was to use a top tube adapter as a strut with a webbing strap tying the bike back against the strut to eliminate movement.  With the tandem topper mounted on the Yakima bar directly over the factory rail (as instructed by the manufacturer) the adapter fit with one end on the spare tire clip in the basket and the other end on the top tube of the bike.  With no Yakima roof rack I had no clip to anchor the adapter – so I moved the tandem topper inboard and clipped the adapter to the factory rail.  This had the major disadvantage that the carrier ended up pretty much in the middle of the roof and loading the bike meant lifting it up and leaning halfway across the car.  I reverted to positioning the carrier as close to the factory rail as the mounting hardware would permit and clamped a Yakima bar to the factory crossbars at a point where the adapter would fit.  Once I was convinced that the configuration would work I replaced the u-bolt clamps with Yakima hardware and found a shorter bar that didn’t overhang as much in the back.  Ten trips later I was still experimenting with rigging the webbing, but I’d figured out that a series of half-hitches wouldn’t loosen up.

I downloaded Ride With GPS routes for the five central Oregon scenic Bikeways from the Travel Oregon website.  Since each one started in a different city I also downloaded the descriptive text for each bikeway in order to know how to get to the start in the event we didn’t have internet access.   I also downloaded a spare RWGPS route starting in Sisters just in case we got there and found a McKenzie Pass closure.

We got up at our usual hour on the morning we were to leave.  Temperatures in Bend at night were still in the 30s so we packed boots and lots of jackets and warm gear.  Since we were driving we weren’t limited to carry-on size bags and we kind of loaded everything we could possibly need – but still ended up forgetting stuff like the powerbanks and mocha shots.  I took a short ride and then loaded the tandem on the car.  We took the route through Yakima and over Sherman Pass with a stop for lunch in Ellensburg.  (We couldn’t find the place we used to go to on trips to Baker so we headed for the place we used to go with Kevin, which was closed – and finally got deli stuff at Safeway.)  I hadn’t been to Maupin before and I liked the canyon but the town was small and scraggly (mainly fly fishing places) and I was worried about finding a place to eat.

It turned out not to be a problem – the motel up the road from our place had a restaurant (which was pretty good) and we found a nice bakery for breakfast.  The park where the route started wanted $10 for parking – if you could find the attendant.

Sherar’s Falls Scenic Bikeway – Travel Oregon

Our ride climbed up through town from the river to the plateau.  It was intimidating but not nearly as bad as we’d imagined from the drive down.  It was warm and sunny.  The mountains were spectacular.  The canyon was cool.  I saw a big snake (dead.)  We opted not to ride the 100 yards to see the White River falls.  The descent was over blown in the narrative, but the river at the bottom was amazing (the big surging watercourse we’d eaten dinner beside the night before got crammed into slots that looked narrow enough to jump across.  It seemed like we were on Indian land and all of the pull-outs were day-use-only and pay -for-parking.  On the other side of the river we rode past six or eight free BLM campgrounds.

After the ride we drove 90 miles to Bend and found the key to our B&B.  We walked to “Market of Choice” – a Whole Foods knockoff – and bought grapes and cherries and some instant coffee because Odette had forgotten the mocha shots she’d bought for morning caffeine.  We walked a few blocks to the old downtown and found almost nothing that we recognized from our last visit in 2007.  We ate at the Deschutes Brewery where neither the beer nor the food was as good as we remembered – perhaps because I’d eaten all of the grapes before dinner.  I locked the bike to the car and plugged the helmets into the charger before we went to bed.

Breakfast was at 7:30 and featured a well curated soul music selection and crispy bacon.   Heading out we were greeted by a note on the car asking us to park between the lines.  The drive to Prineville took over an hour but finding the park where the route started was not a problem.

Crooked River Canyon Scenic Bikeway – Travel Oregon

What was a problem was the discovery that we had forgotten our helmets and gloves and my pills.  I was ready to proceed, assuming that there would be little traffic on a weekday in May, but Odette refused and got ready to drive back to Bend.  Luckily I remembered that the narrative about the trip mentioned a bike shop in Prineville and I convinced her to go to the store and buy new helmets.  The place was open and the guy behind the counter told her we didn’t need helmets – but sold her a pair anyway.  He also said that they had been repaving McKenzie Pass a few days earlier and he wasn’t sure if it would be open to cyclists yet.

The ride was great – no navigation, no traffic,  almost no climbing.  It was warm and sunny and pretty much perfect biking weather.  I did, however, forget to bring the frame pump that I’d put in the car.  The Travel Oregon website and the RWGPS route had us stopping at a campsite shortly before the dam.  The bikeway sign at the park had the route going on just a little further and crossing the dam.  I remembered Alex’s description and planted the idea that we’d consider continuing once we got there and took a look.  We admired the layers of basalt and volcanic ash and kept waiting for the climbing to start.  Eventually we got to the turnaround campground and decided to climb the rest of the way to the dam.  Odette wouldn’t cross once we got there but from the other end you could see the reservoir and I determined that it was worth the trouble.

We drove back to Bend, I took my pill a few hours late,  and we walked a few blocks to the Old Mill district for a dinner at Greg’s Grill.  (The district is constructed around massive parking lots and feels more like University Village than like Whistler, but the trail along the water is nice.) The place was fun, the food was good, the beer was fine.  As a topper to the day, Odette got a text from a neighbor saying that there was package on our porch and our deck umbrella had blown over.

I took my next pill after 8:00 – maybe four hours later than usual – and slept very well, making me think about a permanent rescheduling.  In the morning I had waffles and noticed that the music was different but still remarkable.

 

 

Madras Mountain Views Scenic Bikeway – Travel Oregon

 

We drove to Madras after checking twice to make sure that we hadn’t forgotten anything.  The little city park at the start was full of people and totally parked in.  We eventually parked on the street next to another pair of cyclists who told us that they were there for a local club ride.  They were following the same scenic bikeways route, but we deviated just before Metolius and we dropped them for good at one of the overlooks to Lake Billy Chinook.  A little later, on a climb over the edge of Round Butte, we overtook another group who said they were camped at Cove Pallisades State Park.  (They were all at least 40 years younger than us, so climbing faster after a winter layoff – on a tandem no less –  was really reassuring.)  We drove back to Bend and ate at Hola! – a Mexican / Peruvian place.  The food was not spicy but good, the beer was exceptional (tranquilo especial, a Mexican style ale brewed in Bend.)  We walked the old downtown some more and found at least one place that triggered memories.  (New York after twenty years was not nearly as foreign as Bend after fifteen.)

Twin Bridges Scenic Bikeway – Travel Oregon

We had breakfast at the B&B – sticking to the waffles and listening to vintage rock, and then rode from the Inn on a route that started at Bends’ Mirror Pond.  The route was a lollipop and the highlight was supposed to be two crossings of the Deschutes.  For us it was the construction on the lollipop stem that made a traffic circle impassable and navigation around it pretty challenging – in both directions.  It was also the most climbing of any of our rides, which might have entered into our assessment.   I saw another three- or four-foot long snake – probably dead but without any obvious damage. The mountains were spectacular and although the weather was cooler it was still good for riding.  We had a disagreement about which street to take to get back to the B&B from the mirror pond and we ended up depositing Odette at the door of a bike shop (where she was convinced that she had lost her glove.)  The guy at the shop told her that McKenzie Pass was closed to both cars and bikes and would be closed for a while.   Odette found her glove in our room and then paid another visit to Market of Choice buying a variety of snacks.  We ate at Blacksmith and really enjoyed ourselves.

With McKenzie Pass no longer an option we debated a ride for our last day.  Since they were predicting rain in Cle Ellum, there was an unspoken agreement that we’d do a long ride on Monday and skip the Ellensburg loop we’d talked about doing on our way home Tuesday.  There is a scenic bikeway from Sisters to Smith Rock but it is over 30 miles one way and Odette wasn’t interested in 60 miles.  I proposed riding the potion of that route from Sisters to Terrebonne but Odette looked at the map and realized that I was still talking something like 50 miles.  After some more back and forth she found a RWGPS route from Sunriver to La Pine that was just under 50 miles  but with virtually no elevation.

The commercial part of Sunriver had a bunch of new buildings and one of the traffic circles on the way to the public parking was under construction and impassable.  We floundered around for a while but eventually parked the car and then got to repeat the traffic circle dance on the bike.  The ride was flat with views of farms and fields on the way out and forest on the way back.  We saw some elk early in the ride and a coyote near the end.  The forest seemed really healthy. There was smoke from a controlled burn at the end of the ride.

We stopped at the Sunriver country store and bought ziplock bags and duct tape to wrap up the saddles for the drive back to the wet side.  We ate at Bend Brewing where both the burger and the beer put Deschutes Brewing to shame.  Bend Brewing didn’t have dessert, though, so we wandered around looking for some place to get pastries.  We ended up in a funny little food truck court and eventually gave up, not realizing that the bakery we were looking for was apparently inside the beer place there.

So that was the end of the riding.  Breakfast featured music from KEXP!  It started raining just out of Redmond and kept it up all the way back to Seattle.  We drove over Government Camp for variety’s sake and I remembered why I always go through Yakima.  We almost hit a deer just west of the pass.  Somehow Google Maps got us off I-5 south of Southcenter and then we missed a couple of turns before finding 509 and our way home.    We had a lot of stuff to unload and tons of laundry after that.  On the other hand, the wrapping kept our saddles dry.  Our neighbor told Odette about watching the birds chase a raccoon out of our lilac while our umbrella was getting set back up.

Here are the photos:

Gallery

Here are the maps:

5/20 – day 5 – map.   Sunriver – La Pine loop.   48 miles
5/19 – day 4 – map.   Twin Bridges Scenic Bikeway.  38 miles
5/18 – day 3 – map.  Madras Mountain Scenic Bikeway.   30 miles
5/17 – day 2 – map .  Crooked River Scenic Bikeway.  39 miles
5/16 – day 1 – map .  Sherar’s Falls Scenic Bikeway.   34 miles

Here are some RWGPS routes:

Sherar’s Falls
Crooked River
Madras Mountain View
Twin Bridges
Sunriver – La Pine
McKenzie Pass
Sisters – Smith Rock

Here are some thoughts:

• day rides from a stable lodging is a model that works for us
• we could do this in Winthrop or Chelan or other towns east of the mountains
• the roof rack will work – it’s just going to be more work to mount a ski case
• I’m going to be glad for all those new bolts and for using Yakima wing nuts
• we need to get back to Bend to ride McKenzie Pass
• I need to take more photos

 

 

 

Between November 5 and November 19 Jerry and Odette biked on Mallorca and visited museums in Madrid

At the end of our summer trip to Alsace and Berlin I thought we had agreed to take a non-bike trip somewhere warm, instead of our usual ski trip.  I put in a plug for Mallorca because I’d long wanted to see what drew all of the Brits and Germans.  I didn’t have any illusions about Odette suddenly becoming a climber, but our experience with the tandem on German trains made me think we ought to explore the options to hauling our bike around.

Several months later we had a come-to-Jesus talk about when exactly were we going to book that trip.  It turned out that Odette was worrying about money and thought that maybe if she postponed it I’d forget about it.  When I pointed out that she already had a credit with Air France so that we weren’t talking that much expense she relented.  Then we had another conversation about waiting until April because November was the rainiest month in Palma.

Eventually, about two weeks  before we flew out, we committed to a tour.  Once again, I rode my usual 40-50 miles a day while Odette concentrated on Duolingo. When we got the information package I realized that our routes would be in RideWith GPS format.  This struck me as a much better set-up that the proprietary stuff we’d encountered on our last trip and it inspired me to pay for an upgrade to my account so that I could have voice output on the turn-by-turn.  I also ordered a couple of phone holders for the handlebars.  Odette bought the roller bag she had been coveting.

Early in the pandemic I replaced my Dromarti bike shoes.  It seemed like a waste to  throw out the old ones since the uppers were still in pretty good shape.  I emailed the manufacturer and asked if they sold a kit to convert to flat soles and was told that while no kit was available any competent cobbler would  be able to build them up.  A year passed and I prevailed on Odette to take them in the the curmudgeon in Ballard we used for shoe repair.  He said that they weren’t reparable and that I should be glad I’d gotten my money’s worth out of them.  Another year went by and I saw an ad talking about their new classic shoe – with a flat sole.   I took my distressed uppers to Swanson’s in Wallingford which told me they’d be pretty stiff for walking but that putting a flat sole on them would not be a problem, although with their backlog it would be the first week in November before they were done.  I agreed and then we booked the trip with a flight out the day after I was to pick up my shoes.

We got an early-morning Lyft to the airport and realized on the way out that we’d forgotten the euros we’d brought back from our last trip.  We flew Delta to New York (no meal!) where we waited something like four hours for a flight to Madrid.  Odette was scared about the time required for customs and bussing to another terminal so she scheduled a flight that gave us something like an eight hour layover in Madrid but which departed from the terminal where we arrived.  In short we spent most of a day sitting in airports – but after applying the Air France credit the airlines only charged us a couple hundred dollars!  The flights were uneventful, the waits even more so.

We got to Palma and it was warm and sunny,  The drive into town was notable for the Cathedral and an angular building that was evidently a STEM facility. Odette looked out toward the water and bike path.   We checked in to a very nice hotel in the old part of town and then walked a bit of the main road into downtown.  (One remarkable thing was the upside down church near the museum of contemporary art.)  We had a fantastic dinner in the hotel restaurant and admired the view from the top floor.  In the morning we walked out and back on the beach and took a short exploration in the old neighborhood by the Cathedral.  We stopped at a pastry shop and then connected with a taxi for the ride to Alcudia.  (More like a step van, actually.  The driver pissed off the police by parking in traffic to pick us up and then got pulled over for going wrong way on a one-way street….)

The hotel in Alcudia had six rooms in a remarkable old building.  We got checked in and then walked around the church and followed the wall all the way around the old town. Late in the afternoon we walked out to a bike shop (not having left enough time for the walk) and picked up rental bikes that we rode back to the hotel. We had dinner at a pizza place that was surprisingly good and which had a menu that went well beyond pizza.

The next morning we took off on a ride to Cap de Formentor – a 35 mile ride (with 3,500 ft. of elevation) described as the best ride on Mallorca.  We got to the first switchback and Odette pooped out. We headed back to Alcudia taking a route through Pollensa and I had a flat tire about five miles from the hotel.  Obviously that wouldn’t have been much more than an annoyance except that the bike (a heavy alloy hybrid with 2-inch tires and 7-speed gearing)   had a generator hub on the front wheel which was secured with cap-type nuts instead of a quick release.  We called the bike shop in Alcudia and they said they’d bring a wrench out to us if we could tell them where we were.  That was actually easier said then done – the roads didn’t have names either on google maps or IRL. We finally emailed GPS coordinates that were only slightly off and they sent a van  which found us and delivered a replacement bike.  We had dinner back at the same pizza place.

The following day we rode from Alcudia to Caimari – 25 miles with another flat on Odette’s bike and with a short loop at the end that Odette vigorously advocated shortcutting.  We stayed in a very nice small hotel with a full set of tools in the bike storage room and with a dedicated bike washing area.  I capitalized on the opportunity to use an allen wrench to adjust my saddle height.  I didn’t avail myself of the bike washer.  We ate at a traditional Mallorcan place that featured an outdoor grill.  The grilled meat was excellent and the staff was entertaining.  The next day it rained and there was no way Odette was going to get on a bike.  We walked around the village ( I wanted to buy a patch kit since we were down to one good inner tube) but the one bike shop wasn’t open.  We had lunch at a cerveceria and went back to the place with the outdoor grill for dinner.

From Caimari we rode 17 miles to Sineu and checked into an old hotel that must have once been a nice place.  Then we rode 20 miles out-and-back to a winery.  The reds were quite nice and we had two 6-bottle boxes shipped to Berlin for Will.  Odette had another flat on the way back but we still rode that segment in good time.  When we got back to the hotel she called the bike shop in Alcudia and they sent somebody out with a four-pack of new tubes.  We ate at a restaurant on the main square with a really impressive basement room and a good menu.  The next day we rode a 24 mile loop covering vineyards and archeological sites.  We tried to eat at the same restaurant by the church but were told it was fully reserved.  We settled for a pizza place with an inferior basement and noticed that there was still nobody seated in the preferred place when we finished up and headed back to the hotel.

The next day Odette was uncomfortable and wanted to see a doctor.  We spent the morning exploring options and walking the old part of town to find the public clinic.  Odette took exception to the way they managed her complaint, but didn’t want to ride her bike to Inca (the closest hospital) so she settled for an antacid and the discomfort vanished almost instantly.  We went back to the pizza place for dinner and asked Cycle Fiesta if they could have our pick-up happen earlier.

The next morning we packed and organized the bike stuff and then settled into the cab for a short ride back to Palma and the same hotel we’d stayed at when we arrived.  We spent an afternoon walking the old town and visiting the Cathedral and the museum of sacred art.  We had dinner at the hotel restaurant again – we were indoors this time so the view wasn’t as spectacular but the food was still very good.  The next morning we had time for some more walking in the old town and then a cab took us to the airport and a flight to Madrid.

Madrid was colder than Palma and it was threatening rain.  Our hotel was right across from the Prado, positioned for the tourist trade.  It was a big boxy five-story thing that took up a whole block and was still pretty much invisible because all of the space at street level had been rented out to souvenir shops and tabacs with a profusion of neon storefronts.  Our room had twin beds.  For breakfast they served instant coffee.

We spent four days in Madrid.  We ate at different restaurants every meal – some fabulous and some pretty regular.  We visited the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza, and the Reina Sophia.  The last one was the most interesting because of the posters and publications from the 1930s. We also walked through the botanical gardens which must be really nice when it’s not winter.

We had an early morning flight out of Madrid and got to the airport far enough ahead of time that nothing was open.  The flight to JFK was uneventful but customs in New York were slow (albeit pretty organized) and security was even slower and far less organized.  Our boarding section had already been called when we got to the gate but we slipped on and even found room in the overhead for our stuff.  The flight to Seattle was remarkable only for the woman with sneezing fits across the aisle from us.  They don’t serve a meal that direction either.

It was cold and rainy in Seattle when we got back.  We took a Lyft home and congratulated ourselves on a successful trip to a warm spot.  Two days later Odette tested positive for Covid.

Here’s the itinerary:

MALV0711OB Itinerary

Here are the rides:

11/7 – Mallorca 1:  Alcudia.  map.  3 miles

11/8 – Mallorca 2:  Pollansa.  map 1.  map 2.  25 miles

11/9 – Mallorca 3:  Caimari. map.  25 miles

11/11 – Mallorca 4:  Sineu.  map. 17 miles

11/11 – Mallorca 5:  Binnissalem. map.  20 miles

11/12 – Mallorca 6:  Costix. map.  map.  25 miles

 

Observations:

• The shoes held up just fine and were comfortable for walking
• Odette psychs herself out on bike rides and on physical symptoms
• You don’t get to know a city by holing up in famous museums
• The more challenging rides on Mallorca would likely be doable tandem and a trip in the spring would be a lot of fun
• The most random encounter on the trip was in the Prado when a stranger came up to me to demonstrate that he had the same hand tremor that I have
• rental bikes are not a plan
• Things would have been easier with an iPad – maybe I’ll load RWGPS on the old  MacBook air and see if that helps
• the RWGPS routes worked well and with our bluetooth helmet navigation was pretty good (but we didn’t try any urban centers or any complicated route adjustments)

 

Photos: