Biking in TC

So yesterday I decided to bike to town. I hate driving; I refuse to be dependent upon the automobile. It's one thing I really miss about Portland. And Mark and I had wound up with two cars parked at his work, for reasons that are too boring to explain here. So I thought okay! This is the golden opportunity, the reason to get my butt on the bike, get motivated! Plus, though it was 17° out, it wasn't snowing. At least not at that moment.

So I located my very wonderful cold-weather biking pants, which actually I hadn't gotten much opportunity to use in Portland since it's usually rain that's the issue, not cold, and I loaded up on the socks (three pairs) and inserted some toe-warmers and stuffed wool mittens into my ski outer-mitts and broke open some hand-warmers on top of that and piled on the long underwear, fleece liner and down jacket, scarf, ear warmer and hat on top of that, and put a fleece face-mask in my pocket, just in case. And started off for Mark's work, to pick up the car.

And you can probably guess that I was WAY TOO HOT!

Definitely did not put on the fleece face mask. Undid the scarf and moved the hand-warmers to the special pockets that are on the OUTSIDE of the mittens.

And then my neck was freezing but the rest of me was sweating.

Well, I haven't quite perfected the clothing thing. You'd think I hadn't biked around Iowa City for 11 years! Ahh, how quickly we forget.

Anyway, besides being too hot, I ran into a few other obstacles. The road was plowed, so no problem there, and I have my nice knobby-tire bike. But when it came time to get on the sidewalk because the road there is very busy, it was impossible. And to top it all off, my bike suddenly refused to change gears. So I ground to a halt pretty quickly and had to walk. Here's what it looked like:

Let's take a closer look at this lovely path:

So I walked along until the path cleared up, hopped back on the bike, then back off again as I came to THIS:


It seems that when the snowplow goes by, it just sprays dirty snow all over the bike path! Lovely, eh?

Anyway, at this point I realized I had actually missed the turn that takes you under a bridge and into town, so I had to haul the bike back over this mess and break tracks through (thankfully) nice white, fluffy snow to get downtown. And finally, I made it! And then it was fun biking through town and I managed to get right down 6th street, though the snow was a little deeper there because it's a side street. And I made it to Munson and voila, got the car. :-)

Moral of story: biking to town in TC during winter is not impossible, but allow extra time.