Last night, just as I was cleaning up after dinner, my daughter toddled onto the front porch and started playing with the bike trailer. "Mommy, bike stroller?" she said as she climbed into it and tried doing up the buckles.
"Do you want to go for a bike ride?" I asked her.
"Bike ride?" she responded. I think that means yes. So I strapped her in properly and put on her helmet and decided to go for a little family bike ride. It's nice to get out and do a bit of exercise with my daughter - we rarely get a chance to do that, so it's nice to fit it in when we can. Besides, I'd just had a little more for dinner than I intended to and I figured a little extra calorie-burning at the end of the day couldn't hurt.
So off we went for a bike ride. Eastwood was starting to make some weird noises, a rhythmic clinkity-clinky-clack every time I pedaled. When I was coasting it didn't make that sound, but when I was pedaling it did. Sometimes it got so loud people a block away were staring at me. This can't be good.
After about 20 minutes of tooling around our neighbourhood, weaving through the grid of residential streets, we started heading back. A few blocks away from the house, the clickity-clacking reached its peak, there was one loud clink, and then suddenly I was pedaling but feeling no resistance. I tried shifting gears up and down to see if the chain had just fallen off the cogs a bit, but that didn't work. I coasted to a stop despite pedalling frantically. Okay, what's going on here?
Somehow, the cassette had detached from the rear wheel, and in the couple minutes that I played with it on the side of the road with my daughter looking at me quizzically, I couldn't figure out how to fix it. So I walked the bike home, dragging the trailer behind it. So much for our family bike ride! What really sucks is that I had JUST switched the saddle from Mike onto Eastwood, this time taking Evillerider's advice and switching the saddle rather than the whole psot. And what really sucks even more is that I can't ride Mike right now because I haven't fixed that broken spoke yet! Given that Mike only has 24 spokes per wheel as it is, I figured it would be best to hold off riding him until I get that fixed.
So I have TWO bikes out of commission right now. Hence, driving today. It's okay, I had to go to the bank after work for a financial appointment anyway so I had to drive regardless. Nevertheless, I'd better get this out-of-commission bike situation under control - I still have the whole rest of the summer to bike-commute, and it'd probably be helpful to actually have a bike for that!
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