Author: Jerry

It’s April and we’ve settled on a couple of significant tandem trips for 2025:

 

June trip:

Winthrop / Chelan

6/9 – 6/11 Sun Mountain Lodge, Winthrop
6/12 – 6/13 Driftin Cabanas, Chelan

MON 6/9: drive to Marblemount, ride Marblemount,  drive to Winthrop, stay SML

TUE 6/10: ride Chuwich, stay SML

WED 6/11: ride Carleton, stay SML

THU 6/12: drive to Grand Coulee,  ride Grand Coulee,  drive to Chelan,  stay DC

FRI 6/13: ride Navaree Coulee,  stay DC

SAT 6/14: drive to Leavenworth, ride Plain,  drive home

 

July / August trip:

Danube Cycle Path

Crude map of the route – with the towns we’re stopping  in as waypoints

(This is Google Maps routing – we’ll actually ride the EuroVelo route 6  with the route adjusted by the agency handling our lodging / transfers.  Also, we have too many waypoints for Google  so the final day, which is excluded from the map, is a ride on into Vienna. )

komoot

RWGPS

7/24 – fly to Zurich with the tandem and get a car to Donaueschingen, Germany (the source of the Danube and the start of the Danube Cycle Path)

7/25 -8/11 bike to Vienna with an extra day at the start, a layover day in Passau and a couple of extra days at the end.

Wikipedia on towns we’ll be stopping in:

Donaueschingen

Fridingen

Obermarchtal

Ulm

Donauwörth

Ingolstadt

Regensburg

Deggendorf 

Passau 

Aschach / Brandstatt

Grein / Ardagger

Krems

Wien

8/11 – fly out of Vienna.

We’ve got about 90 days to get back in riding shape and some details still to work out but this is exciting!

 

2026 trips

We also put down a deposit on Santana Adventures Dubrovnik to Athens bike cruise from October 21 to November 1, 2026.  We’ve looked at Santana since back in the day when they were exclusively for tandems, but we never felt like we needed to spend the money and preferred being on our own.  Now that we’re older the convenience of being with a group based on a boat is more attractive.  This also looks like a great trip on its own merits.

I hope to get in another local trip in 2026 – maybe the Selkirks or the Okanagan.  We will probably want to go someplace warm in Q-1 2026 and maybe we can take the bike along for that (think New Mexico or Arizona…)

January 2025 in Seattle was abnormally warm and dry and I rode just over 1,000 miles – well above what I’d expect to do at that time of year.  The end of January / beginning of February, was cold and wet – only a little snow but Ice for a couple of weeks.  I stuck close to home and only did about 150 miles before Odette and I left for a trip to Europe.  When we got back on March 4th I knew that I wanted to get 1,000 miles in during what was left of March.  That would still leave me with the shortest quarter since Q-1 2014, so a little more than 1,000 would be better.  In order to get there I figured I’d ride 40 miles a day for 25 days leaving a couple of “spare” days to make up for bad weather or to overachieve.  I started out with old favorites and quickly realized that I’d done half-a-dozen days without repeating a route.  Naturally that prompted me to wonder if I could do that for the full 25.  I turns out that I could – here are the maps – 25 rides for 1,032.5 miles, 53,576 feet of elevation and no repeats.

I would do a few of these differently next time, but if anybody is looking for a 40 mile ride starting in Phinney Ridge, any of these would be a reasonable place to start.

tandem repaint

 

A little bit more mileage and elevation this year compared to 2023 (14,073 vs. 13,717 and 726,005 vs. 720,518.)  Not too shabby for the first full year with a PD diagnosis.  The real news is in the tandem numbers:  1,729 for the year vs. 2,959 last year.  That’s what happens when you only get 111 in the 4th quarter and nothing in the first.

Here’s the link to the annual and quarterly numbers.

Great minds think alike – shortly after I finished this post i read this blurb in a Rivendell weekly email:

Question of the week
I get a lot of good questions emailed every week and I’ve decided to answer them here, in case anybody else finds it useful. Here’s a good one:

Hi Will,
I was catching up on newsletters, and saw you’re putting dynamo lights on your new Clem. I’m doing the same thing. If you have time, I’d love to see how you run the wire to the rear light. This is my first experience with dynamo lights, and getting the wire to hug the frame and rear rack (Nitto 32R) nicely isn’t intuitive to me.

I do it quickly and sloppily, and I’m happy with that. I use thin black zip-ties and coil the wire around the housing or frame tubes. I was hunting around for a “clean” solution to routing wires back to a rear light when I realized that a thin zip-tie really can’t be improved on, and is in keeping with the spirit of having everything external and easily figured out. The one thing I do that can be considered a little fancier than what’s strictly required for the system to work is I put a dab of solder over the wire in the crimps. That way, I don’t have to worry about the wires ripping out if I yank a little too hard on the wire. Peter White has instructions on dyno wiring and crimping.

The Secuzed is the rear light of choice for Riv employees. It’s affordable, super bright, and stays on long after you’ve stopped moving too. Plus, I think it’s the only one we sell that isn’t specifically made to mount to a rear rack, and most of us are front-rackers.

The Secuzed’s included mounts work fine, but I prefer to find a bracket in Mark’s bin-o-stuff, bend it 90 degrees in the vice, and attach the light to the upper seatstay braze-on instead. If you don’t have a stash of random brackets, a hardware store will definitely have something you can use.

Then the next week Jan Heine did a journal post on setting up dynamo lights!

I suspect that there is something of a surge in sales of lighting systems around Christmas – I know that I got a hub for my Fuji that way.  For what it’s worth the Peter White discussion is still the best.

 

 

Dynamo lighting on Odette’s bike

.The bridge will be closed for up to eight (8) months of construction starting in late June 2024, after school has concluded for the academic year.

During construction, Ames Lake-Carnation Road NE, between West Snoqualmie Valley Road NE and NE 52nd Street, will be closed at the bridge location. .

This comes after the eight month closure of Lakemont Blvd.

• • • Lakemont Boulevard SE from Forest Drive SE to 155th Avenue SE: Full road closure 24 hours a day, seven days a week for approximately eight months starting Oct. 24. Signed detour via Forest Drive SE to Coal Creek Parkway SE, connecting to Newcastle Golf Club Road via Newcastle Way. Closure is necessary for emergency construction of a bridge to stabilize the roadway. Visit BellevueWA.gov/lakemont-culvert for more information.

Makes last year’s Woodinville-Duvall closure seem mild by comparison.

So here’s where I ended up on Strava:

That means that during the ten years since I stopped working I have ridden 134,970 miles with 7,114,013 feet of elevation.  (Due to the corruption of my Cyclometer database, 2014 elevation is calculated using the average gain/mile from the subsequent years.)

I’m pleased that both distance and elevation increased in 2023, the year I got diagnosed with Parkinson’s.  I haven’t locked into goals for 2024 yet, but I’ll be pleased if I can put in more than 12,000 miles again – and get a full ten years in the Strava database.

At the end of Q1 I have logged 3,212 miles in 2023.  From the beginning of 2014 (when I was done working) to the end of 2022 I logged 121,253 miles .  Together that’s 124,465 in a little under 10 years.

 

The circumference of the earth is 24,901 miles – five times around the world is 124,507.  Should have pushed a little harder and gotten in the last 42 miles.