It’s raining. Which means no trail riding for Michelle tonight. Fie! Woe! Crapitty-creap-crap-crap.
And maybe I’ll do the brakes on the Schwinn in the interim, and go ride that around a bit tomorrow. I thought it might actually be easier to pick stuff up off the ground from that bike, since it basically doesn’t have a top-tube (step-thru frame) We’ll see if the gearing is low enough to cope with lumpy park lawns.
I love showing up places on this portly old girl’s bike. It’s absolutely the opposite of everything that is currently fashionable in cycling. It’s not a boingy, rough-n-ready mountain bike, or a whippy, sporty road racer. It’s an old-school, mid-range-quality “gaspipe” Schwinn, one of millions made between the 1960s and 1980s, but it’s an amazingly sweet ride. Plus. I feel it is rather stylish.
Sure, it takes a little work to get ‘er going or get stopped, but once it’s rolling, it has a smooth, mellow ride quality. A little squirrelly at high speeds, as it’s kind of light in the front end, but it’s still pretty sweet, especially at about 12-15mph (wild guess, speaking as a girl who does not own a cyclocomputer and would be more than reluctant to wire one up to this beast. Now, if I could find me a vintage “bicycle speedometer” that was contemporary with the Schwinn and still worked, I might consider it…