My first time posting in quite a while, but yesterday / today (I had an overnight work trip) was my first cycle commute, both in my current job, and probably in a decade. I'm in Australia and it's fast heading towards summer here, 68 F today. Instead of taking it easy by riding what will become my normal route home, I had lots of spare time and decided to turn a 10km ride into a 30km ride..... and this extra time is one of the reasons I got caught out trying to ride through a thunderstorm with hail, torrential rain and lightning. Next time I might just pay a little more attention to the towering black clouds that were bearing down on me before making those kind of decisions :)


https://ibb.co/cYLPL6

From your avatar I just assumed you always wore the neoprene mask. Does it have to be warm? If not, consider a dust mask type deal or even the doctors masks.

Cool and clear here again - upper 30s. 16.2 miles for the morning. Still working on that 6,000 mile annual goal. About 640 to go with only 6 weeks left, some of them short.

Friday!

:lol:, how ironic is that?! In the past I've worn a neoprene mask below about 20, i.e. nose hair freezing temps. It does have to be warm. that's the whole idea - warming air before reaching my lungs. Ah well, thanks for trying!

34F this morning and gusty headwind. Not really enough to be a problem but I'm tired... what a slog. TGIF!

after a couple weeks of moderate to heavy N winds every morning (my morning commute is ~90% due north), i finally had a nice 15 mph S wind this morning pushing me into the office. whee!

38F, still, wet

commuting obstacles
 

@noglider those are great pictures. I always appreciate your posts with pictures it is so different from my commute.:thumb:

also a great picture @Hardyweinburg :thumb:

This morning I saw 27.4F on the GPS. I also scared a 2-4 point buck this morning. He took off down the greenway. I tried to keep up but he was moving. I was also afraid he would feel threatened and turn on me.

I had to replace my chain earlier this week and had other commitments yesterday and today are my only two days of riding. The new chain revealed my cassette was worn out. THe bike shop is letting me borrow a cassette until we can order one in next week. My old cassette was 12-27 or 28. this cassette is 11-23 (I think) It is definitely harder to push a 32lb bike around. legs have been tired with ride home and ride in this morning but better to be riding than not. Old cassette got 10003 miles on it. Not bad for a $13 cassette.

This November I have had to replace the chain and now cassette and it needs at least a rear tire (bald)
Last November I put a new chain on as well. :twitchy: November seems to be the month of bike maintenance. I need to start budgeting for this.

Wednesday night it was cold, dark and very rainy as I grabbed the brake going down a hill--only to hear a sickening grinding noise! Brake pads were worn out, stores were closed.

I limped it home slowly, then drove yesterday to buy pads, and installed them last night.

Nice and dry today.

Friday was a big day! Friday marked 3,000 miles just for commuting, and also my 100th commuting day of 2017. Everything after about 2,500 commuting miles has been a record for me. Can I get to 3,500 for the year? We'll see!

This morning was the first sub-freezing commute of the season, and also my first sub-freezing commute on my e-bike. I was very thankful for the e-bike because it made the 55 minute ride much more bearable and even enjoyable to some extent (compared to 80-85 minutes the road bike would have taken me). For the first time I was able to wear my balaclava fully covering my face, with my glasses, without major fogging issues. I think because I wasn't breathing nearly so heavily. And with a tech base layer, long-sleeve cotton tee, and my Nashbar softshell jacket, I was pretty comfortable. Also tried wearing boots with my SmartWool socks, which worked okay I guess. The boots aren't really wide enough and my toes were starting to feel cold after 55 minutes of riding.

But overall it was a good ride!

First sub-freezing ride for me this fall at 29F. An early downhill on the way to the gym got my face pretty cold. The ride from the gym to work was much more pleasant as the sun had risen and felt nice. High of 57 this afternoon.

Short week this week. It already feels like Wednesday!

Cool, -10C/14F, but nice. A bit of snow on the roads and a bit of ice at parts too but I had my mountain bike with studded tires so I was fine (a couple of sideways slips but nothing to even mention, oooops, I just did). Toes were a bit cold but I didn't realize the temp before I went out.

26F this morning with a bit of headwind but nothing like the winds we had over the weekend (made national news). It's supposed to be near 50 this afternoon with 30mph gusts going my way home - breaking out the sail!

48F raining

First winter commute this morning
 

Here in Jerusalem ,Israel
About 12C and light rain.
I got to work wet but happy 😅

38F for a decent morning ride. One guy had to pull out in front of me before I made my left on to the street he was coming out of. I pretty much expect it from that spot though so I wasn't surprised at all.

It seems more squirrels than normal were either threatening to run into my path or quickly getting out of the way. They must be buy preparing for nut sales on Black Friday.

Nice ride in. It was ~43F but I dressed for 50sF since it will go up to 56F or so later on. Its a really nice day for riding! ;) I have been off the bike for a few vacation days. They were not much of a vacation this time since my mother in law passed away last week, unfortunately. My brother in law will be making the arrangements once the county coroner releases his mother.

Well, I gotta be honest. Consecutive commute number 413 stunk. For the first time in a long time I really was thinking I should have driven. Of course, now that I'm here I'm glad I didn't.

Woke up to a temp of 18F, about 10 degrees lower than predicted. 30 mph steady winds from the north (of course the direction I'm heading) with gusts well above that.

Had to take the hybrid with the rack and panniers because I'm bringing home the Thanksgiving turkey after work. That bike is normally slower than my road bike, but it's even more noticeable in the wind. On level ground I could hold about 8-9 mph with a lot of effort. Going down hills I could hit 10-11. We won't even talk about going up hills. Arrived 12 minutes late on a 4 mile ride that usually takes me less than 20 minutes.

Because of the short distance to the client's office this morning I just wore my work clothes with my windbreaker over it. Normally that's plenty for a short ride like that. My upper body was fine, but this morning the wind cut right through the pants and made my thighs extremely cold. I got some serious wind burn even with the layer of pants. Now that I'm sitting here at the office it feels like someone is pulling every hair out of my legs simultaneously.

In 3 hours I have to ride 8 more miles into this wind to another work location. Thankfully I packed a pair of winter riding pants that I'll put on which should make things a bit more bearable. But I'll have to account for the extra ride time caused by the wind.

Warmer today, 41F but a wicked headwind. Focused most of the way on how nice the ride home will be with a tailwind and upper 40's temps

Decided to take the Legend to work today (I've been riding the Unique almost exclusively lately). Pumped up the rear tire to what I thought was a decent pressure, but my Park Tool pump is quite frankly terrible, and it's hard to get a reliable reading on the gauge. But I was in a hurry to catch the ferry, so I didn't spend too much time on it (thought I was at about 95psi).

Got to the ferry no problem, and then when I start to walk my bike off, the rear is dragging. I look down and not only is it flat, but about a quarter of the tire is off the rim and the tube underneath is complete split down the center seam! Never had that happen before.

Office is only about 8 blocks away from ferry landing, so I just put the tire back on the rim and pushed it to work. Was looking forward to feeling the difference between the bikes as I went over the 59th street bridge on the way home, but alas it wasn't mean to be...

This morning's commute gave me a very strong tailwind. It was fun. I was fast, as verified by my GPS app, and I made very little effort. Now I have to head home, and it's going to be at least a little tough. Oh well, it was fun.

Yes, wind was pretty crazy this morning.

What do you think of those new concrete barriers on the path? I noticed them last week, as it was my first time over there since everything happened, and I'm not sure what to make of them.

I also noticed a police sign "reminding" everyone that electric and motorized bikes are not permitted on the path, and that they should be reported. I can get behind that.

The barriers annoy me. They are a knee-jerk response. They're preparing for the last disaster rather than the next one. And I fear I'll have a moment of inattention and crash into a barrier. But for the first few days, they sat on the path DIAGONALLY so passing them was insanely dangerous.

I'd be cool with the motorized bikes if people who rode them did so in a cool way, but a few don't. In fact, even though I occasionally go faster than 15 mph, I've come to believe there should be a 15 mph speed limit on the path. If everyone followed that, motors shouldn't be much of a problem.

I have not bee great about riding the last two weeks. I have been solo parenting and decided that I needed to take it east since when I get too stressed that is what causes infections.

But I rode today in another one of the great PNW(ish) bouts of liquid sunshine. The boat required quite a bit of bailing and today I finally pulled out the Helly Hansen vinyl rain gear and the rubber calf high boat boots. There was a lot of rain. But it wasn't as bad as last Monday and Tuesday, I stayed home with the kids both days, since I didn't have childcare so i couldn't work; also it was very windy and not worth the trip to town. But Wednesday morning I got to the boat and we bailed about 500 L of rain water, it was the fullest the boat has ever been.

[MENTION=339610]Darth Lefty[/MENTION] I was headed back home and got within 25 yards to two eagles hanging out on the log booms. Even though I see several most days they are still awesome birds. I will post a photo later; if any good ones came out. It was rough and rainy.

[MENTION=60072]HardyWeinberg[/MENTION] and [MENTION=152773]noglider[/MENTION] How do you post such large photos? What size are they typically? Mine always get rejected for being too large from my phone camera and I am too lazy to find a size reduction software. I have had issues ever since the forum platform update.

I don't post them on bikeforums. They are on google photos or ridewithgps. Start quoting one of my posts, and you'll see the URL of my photo. (You don't have to post the reply.) When bikeforums displays a page, it resizes the photos to fit your browser window.

Thanks.

Do you paste the link directly to the text box, or do you use the link or image icon in the editor?

This is just the link pasted.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/C8Qvq2ZPnKVPT6lC2

I don't actually know what size my pix are for other people. I use a graphic editing program (corel photo paint) to rescale from whatever my phone takes down to 2500 pixels wide. While BF states 100kb is the limit, my files are usually ~300kb, at 2500 pixels, vs 3-4mb as they come out of the phone, but BF clearly downscales them somehow (from my end they seem to go down to the neighborhood of 1280 pixels wide, which used to be huge, but doesn't look so big to me these days).