Another longish ride...

So I went on a pretty long ride today with my friend Albert, his wife and their son. It was tons of fun! Not nearly as much pain this time which was nice. I started to feel the pain about half way (20 miles or so) and decided to give myself a little knee massage while riding. What's weird is a minute or two later my left knee popped and I had no more pain for the rest of the ride! I wish my right knee had popped too...

I decided I wanted to ride a different bike so I pulled out my Nashbar Alpha Road 5000 to get it ready.

(Sorry...I haven't quite got the picture thing down on this site...)

I had previously taken the bars off of it to swap them onto my girlfriends Cannondale Black Lightning (Sorry...No pic yet). Albert was nice enough to give me another Nitto as a replacement but when I went digging for bars I realized that I had sold or given away the ones slated for this bike to someone and didn't have a decent replacement that would fit my new stem. Bummer deal!
So at this point I hauled the GF's bike off the hook to adjust it, air it up and swap the saddle for a nice Rolls I had laying around. It was then that I remembered that I had on a previous ride skidded the rear tire enough to go through the rubber...Doh! A tire change was in order but I didn't have a spare tubular so I started digging for a different wheel. It needed to be a 700c with a 7 speed freewheel. Well the only one I had laying around wasn't optimal 'cause the rim is a Fiamme Speedy with an angled sidewall and there was no freewheel. I just happened to have used freewheel in the stash so I cleaned it up, installed it and slapped the wheel in the dropouts. I messed with the limit screws a bit and adjusted the brakes to get them acceptable and took off to the rendezvous point to begin our ride. That's when I noticed the freewheel skipped in one gear. Just one!
Anyways...Other than the one skipping gear which I carefully avoided I had no other problems. There were tons of people out on the MUP which was both nice and frustrating at the same time. I was actually pretty stoked to see so many people out riding bikes and going for walks. I just wish they would pay more attention to their surroundings and be a bit more considerate to others.

All said...Today was a good day!

Oh ya! I also counted all the rear derailleurs in my collection this evening...
I'm up to 31! And there is only one Japanese one. A Shimano 600.

Cheers!