The bikes, they are contagious.

[temve]

And here I was going to call my dad after the usual multiple weeks of not calling my dad (which is normal in my family, and no cause for alarm or grudges), to tell him about the adventure of preparing for my first triathlon and staging the shiny new bike out by the lake (green was really an excelent colour choice - she is so easy to spot in the row of literally hundreds of bikes!) and hoping she doesn't get rained on and all...

... and I find out, from stepmum, that he's out on a bike ride with his mates this weekend. A bike ride. My father. For whom sports only exist on TV.

Four old guys on their city bikes, and one driving the car with their stuff in it, doing a leisurely 20K a day around the flat North German countryside, stopping often for food and drink and seeing the sights, and of course frequent games of Skat which are sort of a given if one is a Northerner.

Heh. My father will be 75 next year. I'm impressed.

And apparently the bike virus is contagious.

Introductory post

[woldy]

I just joined this community, so I thought I'd come over and say hi.

At the moment I have three bikes, which strikes me - though probably not most people - as a reasonable and moderate number (I once met a guy with 11 bikes!). First there's my road bike, which is a Norco racing bike that I've made a bit more practical by adding a rack & fenders. I use it for commuting all year in the Pacific Northwest, so it gets a lot of abuse from the elements.

My Norco also gets a lot of abuse from the atrocious state of the roads in this city, so my front wheel rim was dented by a shoddily built resurfacing of a bike route that caused several accidents in the week before they rebuilt it (despite acknowledging that the surface was dangerous, the city refused to pay for a new wheel), and I recently broke a spoke on the back wheel. Oh for a city where 'bike route' doesn't mean an obstacle course of potholes, gravel, cracked uneven concrete blocks, and of course drivers who run red lights. But I digress.

Then I have 2 mountainbikes: a big bike for doing downhill and freeride, and a little bike for things that are more cross-country. The big bike is a Specialized SX Trail (yes, I have red rims & I love them) and it's pretty heavy, but great to ride on technical downhill :-). The little bike is a Marin Mount Vision that is 10 years old, although a few parts (including the front shock) have been replaced along the way. I mostly ride the mountainbikes in the summer, but they've had their fair share of riding in the rain, slush, and snow.

It sounds like there aren't many mountainbikers here, but it's nice to meet a bunch of fellow cyclists :-)