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I-90 Trail

Another bit of progress on eastside trails. (I’d seen the land use signs last year but didn’t realize that they’d made this much progress:)

There will be a tunnel where the trail goes under the 405/I-90 ramps (which allows them to widen the Factoria Blvd exit from eastbound I=90.)  There will be a bridge over Factoria Blvd and then the trail runs on the North side of 136th up to 150th.  At that point it cuts over to the South side of I-90 until the existing pedestrian bridge where it moves back over to Northrup Way.

MTSG_Alignment

They’re building the bridge now – they don’t have money for most of the trail sections so we’ll see when that materializes.  I’ll likely continue to ride the street, but the bridge over Factoria Blvd will be nice.

Here’s a link to the construction alert and here’s a link to the Bellevue capital works write-up.

here is my (old) I-90 writeup

here are selected rides starting at the I-90 tunnel

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2020 Cycling goals

Last year I wrote

The last couple of years I worked I commuted by bike quite a bit, running up 8,000 or 10,000 miles each year. When I stopped working I knew I needed to maintain my activity level so I decided to try to bike every day and settled on a goal of 1,000 miles each month. I soon realized that short months during ski season get in the way of a monthly goal, and I restated my ambitions as 12,000 miles a year. 2018 was the fourth of those, and I hit the 12,000 mile mark at the end of October. At first I figured I’d just work on getting more than in 2017 until I realized that with a little push I could get to 10,000 on my single bike. I managed that, and ended up with 4,000 tandem, too.

2019 was kind of a repeat – I hit 12,000 by the end of September and 14,000 before Thanksgiving.  I ended up just a little over 10,000 on my single bike (again) but this year we rode 5,700 tandem.   Here it is according to Strava:

So what’s in store for 2020?  Same basic approach – try to ride every day, aim for about 1,000 miles / month with more in the dry months and less when it’s wet.  The big unknown is that Odette will be done working at the end of June and we have big home improvement and travel plans.  I think I’ve gotten a little carried away with “bike therapy” and maybe having her around more will let me back off a little, but we’ll see.

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Bags

I bought Odette a new MacBook for Christmas and picked it up at the Apple store on the wettest day of the last decade.  In doing so I discovered that the Swift Industries panniers I bought (which don’t fit on the lowriders on my Rodriguez) will hold a 16″ MacBook Pro in the original packaging and that they’ll keep it dry even in a very heavy rain.

I had Will take some photos of Odette and me on the Ibis to use on my 2020 recent rides pages since we didn’t have a single photo of us on a bike from 2019.  I mounted the panniers since they matched the rando bag I usually keep on the Ibis.  Here are the extra images:

 

 

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Racks

When we got back from Tibet I reassembled the bikes and decided to keep the “lowriders” on my Rodriguez.  (FWIW, Nitto calls them “hub area racks.”)  During the trip I’d mounted them directly to the fork and they overlapped the axel so that I had to remove the skewer every time I needed to dismount the front wheel.  Back home I used P-clamps which moved them forward enough to avoid that problem.

 I liked the way it looked and performed and bought a pair of small panniers from Swift Industries to match my rando bag.  Unfortunately, the clips on the panniers were spaced too widely for the hub area rack, so that wasn’t going to work.  However, I still had an extra large size rando bag that would work on the Franklin and I could set it up with matching panniers if I mounted front racks.

In the mid 1990s I bought matching front and rear Topeak racks for two mountain bikes – and I think we used them for exactly one trip.  The rear racks were big and beefy (they had an internal cleat to store a Kryptonite U-lock)  and both of them failed when welds cracked. I salvaged the square aluminum clamps that held them together before I junked the rest.  The front racks were not so beefy and they had a spindly hoop that didn’t inspire confidence but the triangular hub area part was probably better designed  than the Nitto ones for hooking into panniers.

I thought that I might be able to mount the bottom part of the front racks on the Franklin, sort of like the way the hub area racks mounted on my Rodriguez. I discovered that the hub area part didn’t detach, but the hoop did.  With a couple of my salvaged clamps I used Nitto struts and rack bolts to rig a brace to the front rack in place of the hoop.  I worked hard to get the angles right and to avoid that erector set look, but the curved light mount didn’t give me many options – I ended up clamping onto the canti strut right where it joined the rack.

The only problem was that the clamps were intended for a larger rod than the stock used for the rack.  I didn’t have any shim material handy, so I folded several thicknesses of tinfoil into a shim and figured I’d come up with something more permanent if I decided to leave the rack on the bike.  (The folded tinfoil was too wide and when I trimmed off the excess it looked like it had been chewed off.)

A year later I took the Franklin in to get the oil in the Rohloff changed. The rack was still on the bike and I thought it looked ok and it rode fine.  I noticed a chain rub (or rather more like a fender rub) on the downstroke on the non-drive side and I asked the guys at R+E to take a look at it while they had the bike.  They called me to say they’d traced the noise to a broken clamp on the  drive side of the front rack!  I swapped it out for another clamp and the bike rode silently – inspiring me to mount the second of the two front racks on the Ibis.  (I didn’t spend as much time on angles and parallel lines – this time I clamped to the rack stock and not to a strut so it kind of crosses over the lowrider.  the spacers I used to line up the mounts give plenty of space for the clips, though.)

When I put the struts on between the rack and the low rider I used a couple of pieces cut from a beer can as shims.  That worked well enough that I went back and replaced the tinfoil on the Franklin with similar beer can shims.

While I was taking these photos I realized that I had two Rohloff equipped bikes in the same place at the same time – probably not something that happens every day.  Here’s the group photo:

here are the rear wheels, closer:

and here are those racks:

And here’s what got me started: