Running Errands

It turns out that lifting bikes for over a year is not terribly good for the wrist, especially when I always have to use my right hand, so this week I’m off work while it gets a rest.

However, I still need to eat, and also to do the other things that need doing like pick up a brace for said wrist to take the pressure off the joint. This meant cycling to the local county town. Life is hard.

The old centre of the town is open to bicycles and pedestrians but closed to cars. I’m not sure why there’s a large bronze snail at the end of this road, especially one wearing sunglasses, but there we go.

Errands run, I took a longer route back in the hope of not entirely losing the fitness I built up commuting. This was once the commuting route, now a convenient way to avoid traffic between towns.

I’d have liked to go a bit further, but I can’t take time off on the basis of a damaged wrist and then go around putting unnecessary pressure on said wrist. Besides, it’s been a very busy few months and this is a good opportunity to tidy up all the corners of the apartment that have been ignored for far too long…

Riverside

Germany tends to be very definite about the seasons. Where I work apparently has a Mediterranean climate, but the river passing the village comes from fairly deep in those hills in the background, so we always know when it’s been raining; it only take a few hours for the river to come up…

And up some more…

This isn’t as high as I’ve seen it, but we have more rain on the way. Those high banks aren’t just for decoration.

Sunrise

It’s that time of year again; days are getting shorter. However, there are compensations.

Display team

I decided I needed a proper display in the bike showroom. The rest of the shop has a series of very carefully themed displays, and the bikes were just stacked against the wall, and I wanted to make this area look like it’s part of the overall shop. I also reasoned that I can rotate through themes, like Mountain Bikes, or Trekking bikes, commuter bikes, city bikes, et c, and advertise on the company website; we can even announce them in advance and build up anticipation. Apparently customers are also more willing to pay a bit more when a bike is well displayed.

It also helps hide the gaps when we haven’t had time to make as many bikes.

Any project would need to be quick, as in “by Friday”, because we’re busy enough as it is; cheap, because we don’t have a lot of money; and safe, because customers rather object to being flattened by bicycles, no matter how well repaired.

In the end I decided to use pallettes, and spent a week or so stealing every example I could find from various corners of the organisation. Then I took a couple of clients to the showroom to work out how to make a display. This is the point of the job; we are here to train people who have been out of work for a long time; involving them in decision making helps boost confidence, motivate and work on soft skills like discussing ideas and taking criticism.

Also, they often come up with better ideas then I do, so when one of the clients did exactly that, we set up the pallets as he’d suggested and I screwed Really Big Screws into them until the pile stopped wobbling.

Job done, we could now get the bikes…

Then the manager turned up, looked at the assempled pallets and decided there needed to be a bike raised up at the back. Cue several hours with a table saw, more Really Big Screws, and a rapidly sanded post to hold the raised bike upright.

We just made it; Friday lunchtime we rolled all the bikes into place, just in time for the Boss to wander through the door. The boss is happy, the manager is happy, bikes are selling, and so far, nothing has fallen on any customers.

Now we have a breathing space to work out the next design. The Manager is sending me pictures of complex bike stands incorporating clothes hangers and accesories.

Looks like I’ll be busy for a while…

Brompton Abroad

Despite the lack of updates I’m still here, sort of, when I’m not scuttling to Stuttgart and back on the train.

This is an interesting experience at the moment because it turns out that if you bring in a nationwide railcard for all local public transport in the country, making it extremely cheap, then a lot more people end up using local public transport.

This is a good thing.

Unfortunately, all our shiny new local trains were ordered a year or two before this ticket was even thought of, and now all those extra passengers are trying to use services designed for a lot less people, so what used to be a fairly lightly loaded Sunday afternoon train has become a rather full Sunday afternoon train, and even the rather cavernous cycle storage sections are getting filled up, a process not helped by the addition of people going on holiday who now use the ‘regional’ train and seem to carry a great deal of luggage.

Thus the folding bike has become a fixture on trips to visit the family; much less stressful all round while still being able to ride from the station to final destination fairly quickly. It’s a lot easier to lug around stations, and is less likely to inadvertently whack fellow passengers.

Still looks a bit strange in photographs though.

Dark Side

The bike refurbish project is finished. Given the colour I’d say I was going to the dark side but people I know would confirm that I’ve inhabited the dark side for some considerable time.

This was a somewhat opportunistic experiment to see if there was a can-based paint that is strong enough to survive on a bike, and also the same about stickers, because obviously I can’t have an anonymous bike; after all one has to have some standards.

I also decided to try out a rear-mounted kickstand. I prefer centre mounts because they look far better but I’ve also had many cases of loaded bikes falling over because of the kickstand. I decided the aesthetic of an upright bike is probably better than a scratched horizontal one, so I found one of the least ugly examples and will see how it goes.

‘Vagabond’ pre-refurbishment.

In keeping with the history of this as a tatty commuter bike, it’s new name is the “Vagabond”, defined by the dictionary as “one who travels or wanders from place to place”

Now it will be used by the Elder Son, mostly commuting to work or racing across the village in all weathers to respond to callouts as a voluntary fireman, so the paint job will probably be tested to destruction…

Project Overload

Apparently I don’t have enough to do because when Elder Son requested that I check the the front gears on his current bike I promptly turned it into another project. This may seen a bit odd, especially as the bike in question is our commuter bike; the main reason for this bike’s existence is to look far too tatty to steal when we’re elsewhere.

I have some excuse; the bike was getting a bit too tatty even for this job, and some preventative maintenence needed to be done on the paint and frame. I also wanted to test some specialist paint for bike painting, and wanted a bike where I could make misakes. However, the main reason was that I hadn’t done anything like this for far too long and I needed to do something creative. I imagine extroverts have the same feeling when they don’t have enough social events.

I’d agreed with Elder Son to fix the bike while he was with the family in Japan; of course this created a small logistical issue as the bike was then 250k from my workshop, thus ironically the first use of the shiny new Brompton bike was to ride to Stuttgart and stay there while I transported the tatty elderly commuter back to Freiburg…

I’m a bit further along now, so I should be able to swap the bikes back next week.

German problem…

Last week we had a very German problem at work; the Cafe ran out of Schnitzels.

To avoid a culinary disaster I was asked if I minded going for a ride and getting paid for it going to pick up an emergency order from the butcher in the next village. I selflessly agreed to take one for the team.

It was tough, but someone had to do it…

I folded.

So… I’ve bought a bike…

This isn’t the sudden decision it may seem. On several occasions over the last few years I’ve “considered” (Read: “Talked my self out of”) buying a folding bike; it would have been especially useful when commuting to college in Stuttgart, and travelling to and from various internships and interviews, but of course at the time I was an imporverished student and so it fell flat.

Germany now has a monthly ticket valid on all local transport, which is a great idea for people like me who travel a lot on trains, but it also means a lot more people want to use the trains too, especially in summer. Even the barn like cycle accomodation on our trains hasn’t been enough and I’ve been refused travel sometimes.

My short term solution to this was travelling ridiculously early before the tourists woke up. As seen above that was generally effective but meant leaving the family at silly O’clock on Sunday to be sure of arriving at work on Monday.

After looking at every possible alternative several times to delay making a decision, I realised that a Brompton would be best able to achieve what I wanted. I was a bit unsure about this; Bromptons have a reputation; they’re very good, but they are also more expensive -considerably more expensive- than their competitors. On the other hand, when I bought my first “proper” bike in 1997, that was considered highly extravagent, but I still use it every day a quarter of a century later.

So when when I found a Brompton at a dealer in Freiburg which ticked all the boxes and felt great to ride, I procrastinated a bit more by leaving it for the weekend, and then decided to buy it before I talked myself out of it again.

So far it seems to be a good decision; the bike is comfortable and pleasant to ride; it’s certainly less stressful to bring on public transport, and remarkably, I’ve managed not to look too much of an incompetent twit when folding it or unfolding it on the train, which counts as a win of itself, frankly.

Not reaching Selby

It’s my fault we didn’t reach Selby.

The plan was to take Beautiful Daughter for a ‘long’ ride along the “Solar way”, on the former railway between York and Selby about 20k to the south. We’d stop off at a bike cafe in the town and then trundle back up. The “Solar Way” is so called because there’s a scale model of the Solar System on the route to look at which I knew would interest Beautiful Daughter*; it was also traffic free, and after the experience of Yorks cycle “infrastructure” the day before I wanted to keep off roads as much as I could.

To try and find a traffic free route I’d planned to travel north out of York and over the river on the bypass which at least had a continuous cycleway, if you ignored the “Cyclists Dismount” signs that is.

Once off the “cycleway” and alongside the river yours truly pointed out a large building through the trees, mentioned casually that it was the “That’s the Railway Museum”. This scuppered any chance of reaching Selby that day, because of course Beautiful Daughter had been binge reading Thomas the Tank Engine books for the last week, and immediately wanted to visit.

Negotiations began. We agreed that we’d go along the railway until an old swing bridge; we couldn’t miss this as it now has a large Sculpture of a Fisherman on the top. Then we’d eat a picnic nearby, and ride back. This would give us a longish ride but hopefully allow some time in the museum.

Once on the riverside path the cycling got easier, and after a short detour to Cycle Heaven to look at interesting bicycles, we crossed the racecourse and reached the railway path, where we found the Sun, or at least a model of it, and went along finding ‘planets’ to the great curiosity of Beautiful Daughter, until we reached the “Fisher of dreams” bridge, so called because it now sports a large scuplture of someone fishing.

Beautiful Daughter was more interested in the fisherman’s bicycle.

We went a bit further and ate a picnic, one of Beautiful Daughter’s favourite activites, then she made a big concession and allowed me to ride a few more Kilometres with her before turning back. This was in return for a break at a Playground in a park she’d seen on the way down, which we duly stopped at so she could give it a good resillience test.

Then we went to the museum, where Beautiful Daughter of course wanted to sit on the Japanese Shinkansen, subjected a number of locomotives to hard scrutiny, asked several questions I couldn’t answer, and nearly exploded with delight when we enquired about a locomotive which wasn’t in the museum and and found ourselves taken to see a model by a very enthusiastic staff member.

We can always go to Selby next time…