New (to me) commuter, and sundry ramblings-on about my bikes.

[pancom]

It's been dead around here, so let's see if we can get some baby pictures going. Whatcha got in your stable these days? This is my new-to-me commuter, yet another twenty-something-year-old steel frame, dragged out of my boss' shed where it had been languishing and put back into service.

Comments

[missingkeys]

Mine's a Tecnobike "DASISTMEINRAD".

I originally bought this as a "cheap" bike because my eldest asked for a bike for her birthday last April and I didn't want to take up jogging. I also hadn't cycled for a decade before I bought this one, so I lacked confidence and then went and bought him about two inches too short for me. I didn't really take up cycling except with my daughter on weekends for the first few months, then I decided to try it out, got addicted, and ended up doing 100km+/week (almost exclusively commuting).

Honestly, I could have bought a car for less than what I've spent on old 'Mein Rad' over here--if you fancy playing 'spot the difference' with the ad for this year's model here there should be at least twelve differences. Still, I do love my bike.

Photo taken after some unintentional ice biking: the weather was positively Spring-like for a week, until I got on my bike and an inch of snow dumped down in the time it took me to finish my errand and ride home.

[pancom]

That's a serious attack of weather! Where I live, the only surprise weather we get is summer thunderstorms (and I've ridden home in more than one of those). If we were getting that much snow, there would be no milk or bread on the shelves and the schools would be closed.

[missingkeys]

Ooh, yes. I'm not originally from here, and I'm far more used to thunderstorms--though in summer they're less of a surprise and more of an everyday occurrence in summer, heh. I just got totally stuck with this one, though. I'd left the house on an overcast morning with my outside thermometer reading a couple of degrees above zero, and the skies just opened partway through.

The schools across the road seemed to just shrug and let the kids go out for a bit longer to make snowmen. :)

[pancom]

The summer thunderstorms are pretty much a coin-toss here, and just unpredictable enough that the weather forecasters never really know. If I stayed inside every time there was a reasonable chance of a storm I would never get out there. When I lived in the Midwest they were a lot less antsy about snow, but now I live in the South, in a city that gets basically the same weather as Atlanta. When the snow sticks to the ground here, it's pretty much a state of emergency.

[missingkeys]

I didn't see the snow until we visited relatives when I was even--I come from Brisbane, in Australia, and snow is unheard of. Minus temperatures are unheard of too, so you can imagine my surprise when I found out that people cycle in the snow. I've read up on it and I have a lot of respect for ice biking, but I fear I'm not so great at it.

You can generally tell when there'll be a thunderstorm in Australia, though: it gets ridiculously hot, and so humid you can't move. There's almost no chance you'll be caught in one because very few sane people would go, "Wow, it's like a sauna right now. What an excellent temperature for cycling." German weather is not so predictable.