The past few weeks have been crazy-busy (for lots of positive reasons), so I haven't had a lot of time for day rides. This past Sunday, however, I managed a ride up into the Gatineau Hills, my usual day ride and escape from The Buzz. We're nearing the end of the summer, and we've been blessed with sunny warm days, sometimes with brisk drier winds from the NW, now and then with moist air from the SW.
This Sunday's ride was notable for the near-absence of cars from the roads in the park. (Motor traffic is banned on summer Sundays between 6AM and 11AM, but even after 11 there were very few cars.) In their place I saw maybe 120 mostly young people, training for cross-country skiing a few months hence on their long inline roller-blade skates. Of these, perhaps 25 or 30 were para-athletes -- a skier with only one arm, a blind skier with his guide, several athletes in chairs, usually with able-bodied friends or family members in support. This is in hilly terrain, mind, and they were all working hard. I'm privileged to enjoy good health, and I don't take that for granted, but the sight of these people, young and old, able-bodied and much less so, was inspiring. I'm not sure I'd have the dedication that some of the para-athletes showed.
My ride covered a loop of about 65 kms. I used my derailleur Eclipse, formerly my touring bike and now my go-(marginally)-faster bike for day rides. I had that refreshed earlier this year, with Surly Crosscheck steel forks replacing the 14-year-old original carbon-fibre items, new Velo Orange rims replacing the Alex originals, spiffy VO snakeskin-pattern alloy fenders, new Avid shorty canti brakes with nice Koolstop pads, and a new Deore LX 11-32 cassette, replacing the Deore 12-36 I had used for touring. Drawing on my experience with the Raven, I also added 3 cms worth of spacers to raise the bars slightly. These changes have made the bike more comfortable to ride, and the lower stress of day rides has made my troublesome rear derailleur much less so.
Below are a couple of photos taken from the top of the escarpment, looking N and W over the Ottawa River with the lowlands on the Québec side in the foreground. The day is a bit hazy--it's those moist winds from Ohio, Michigan, Tronna and such places, bearing miasmas and whatnot from the post-industrial society SW of us. (Ottawa never really attained "industrial society" status, so "post-industrial is as much a wistful tag as anything...)
Atop the escarpment, I met a clutch of riders from Sacramento, California. They were on a tour of Ottawa and Montréal, and thought they'd died and gone to heaven. Everything so clean and beautiful, they said, everyone so polite. I thanked them for their kind words, and said that we were conscious that we had a jewel in the Gatineau Park -- in a few months, the greenery would be gone, and we'd be up here on skis. 'Til then, we could continue our bike rides in the coming glory of the autumn, or go paddling on the lakes a little bit to the east if we wanted to do so.
I used the Eclipse for my ride because Osi, my Raven, is resting after our exertions in June/July in the Big Hills in Alberta, BC, and the US Pacific NW. Cleaning my bike after my 2300-plus kms in the mountains, I found a handful of tiny longitudinal cracks in my Mavic XM719 rear rim near some of the spokes on the non-drive side of the Rohloff. (The front rim showed none.) This is a good-quality rim--recommended by Peter White, for example--but it's also a mid-weight rim (475 gms), and other riders have found similar problems. I think that the combined stresses of weight and the spoke angles demanded by the Rohloff have been too much for it. Knowing that the problem wouldn't fix itself with just a dose of privacy, I decided to use my Eclipse for day rides while I ordered another, heavier-weight rim. Exal offers a good selection on their website (
http://www.exal.eu/en/rims-touringbikes-mountainbikes-trekkingbikes-citybikes) but retailers for their 26" rims seem very scarce. I ordered instead a Velo Orange product, which at 590 gms should do the necessary:
http://store.velo-orange.com/index.php/components/wheelsets-rims-hubs/rims/vo-26-escapade-rim.html That's been shipped, so I expect to have the wheel built and in the next week. Reports to come.
