For reasons I’m beginning to understand only a bit, and am not quite yet equipped (or perhaps inspired, or both) to remedy, the videos I shoot on my phone look like compressed garbage when I upload them. What is this, 2012?
Anyway, here’s a little bit of today’s cross-county-line ride. Before the turnaround, and well before today’s flat. So sick of flats.
This, too, was before the flat. Good thing, as this was well away from the house. But you aren’t thinking about any of that when you see turkeys:
Anyway, just before getting back to the house I had another flat. It was on the last big downhill which, in my experience, is the wrong place to have your rear wheel to go down. At the bottom of the hill is a hard turn that leads up into our neighborhood. But I stopped short and figured, ehhh, I’m walking this in.
Because I could try to re-inflate the tube, or swap out to an extra one, right there on the side of the road — like I did just four rides ago! — or I could just walk the last mile in and do all of that in the comfort of my bike room or home-library.
So I walked it in. Problem: bike shoes. So you take those off and walk it in feeling a little ridiculous: spandex, helmet, walking a bike and barefoot. At some point you have to figure the people in your neighborhood, to the extent that they notice you, are just used to it.
Bobet, I hope so.
Anyway, you could be mad at flats, or pleased with the opportunity. If my tire hadn’t gone down I would have whizzed right through here at 20-some miles per hour and not even noticed this redbud tree (Cercis canadensis) demonstrating its cauliflory.
It’s a trait some species exhibit, where blooms can grow directly out of the trunk. Cauliflory, by the way, is ‘stem flower’ in Latin.
And, yes, I looked up the scientific name. There’s only so much stuff I can keep in my head, after all.
Also on the walk back … and this is just after The Yankee got to the house, put her things away and walked back out toward me with my sneakers. Which was great, because half-a-mile barefoot is quite enough, thanks. Anyway, we walked it in together, which was also nice, and we saw this:
And that’s how the weekend begins. I hope yours begins with pretty things and nice gestures, and fewer mechanical issues.
