Long Rides and Dead Batteries

Strange characters dressed in spandex
I've been building up my cycling mileage in anticipation of El Tour de Tucson (November 21), which means I've been spending a lot of hours pedaling up, down and around the mean streets of Tucson wearing spandex shorts, garishly colored shirts, and stiff-bottomed shoes that are impossible to walk in. I've fully appreciated the need for the specially designed bicycle shorts (and the incumbent padding) ever since I started riding semi-seriously 20+ years ago, but I've only started to wear the specially designed cycle jerseys in the past few years (and I have to say that I've come to appreciate those as well - love the pockets in the back where I can store my bagel and energy bars). Still, I always feel a little silly when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror before I set off on my excursions. And I still have an aversion to the "matching outfit" look that so many cyclists seem to embrace. Personally, I favor the plain black shorts look, and the last thing I want is have something like blue and yellow stripes on my shorts that match the jersey and socks. Anyway, I was on a ride a couple of weeks ago, and I'd pulled over at the park up in Catalina (north of Tucson), when this guy pulled in on a really, really beat up bike. It was a sort of mountain bike, but it looked like it had been made out of a bunch of spare parts and the seat was duct-taped together and he was hauling a sleeping bag and a bunch of other gear, so obviously he wasn't just out for a quick ride. Actually, the rider and the bike were kind of a matching pair, because he looked kind of beat-up and slapped together as well. He was lean and sun-baked with long, greasy hair and a tattoo of a naked lady on his forearm - obviously a high-class kind of guy. So he asked me where I was from, which isn't what you usually get asked by fellow cyclists as you're riding in and around Tucson (since most people riding in and around Tucson are from Tucson), and I said, "Tucson," and he kind of sniffed and said, "Is that all?" and I kind of shrugged and nodded, and he said, "Yeah, well I've come from Vancouver," and we got to talking (actually, he talked and I listened) and I found out that he'd been on the road for three months and was heading to Florida eventually, and he was with a female when he started but she couldn't handle it after five hundred miles and he was better off without her (he had a whole lot of other things to say about her, but I can't really include any of that because this is a family-oriented website) and was there a grocery store nearby, and the road from Phoenix to Catalina was horrible and caused him to split a tire, and was there a bike shop anywhere around where he could get a new tire, and so on. After about ten minutes of this, he headed on down the road and I stood and watched as he faded into the horizon. Kind of like those old westerns where the hero rides off into the sunset, except in the old westerns the hero is riding a horse instead of a beat up bicycle, and the hero is actually a hero, and the person watching is usually the woman he left behind or the kid he saved from a villain or the townspeople he freed from tyranny. But otherwise, it was exactly the same.

My so-called mechanical skills
For as long as I can remember (since long before I was knee-high to a grasshopper) I've had an uneasy relationship with automobiles. I don't particularly like to drive in the first place, I hate how much they cost to operate, maintain, insure, etc. in the second place, I detest the fact that they're (we're) destroying the environment while sucking up resources and indirectly leading countries into conflicts in the third place, and most of all, I hate when they don't work the way they're supposed to. So when Katie informed me that the battery on the Honda had died, I uttered a few choice words, then went to check it out. Sure enough, the battery was dead. So I sent Katie off to get a new one, and when she brought it home, I proceeded to hook it up. Once every cable was attached and every bolt was tightened, I put the key in the ignition, twisted, and… nothing. Hmm. I tried again. Still nothing. So I got out of the car and checked the battery cables to make sure they were put on correctly. Everything looked okay, but nothing worked. At that point, I was completely stumped, so we contacted the Honda place and they asked if I'd taken the plastic covers off the posts. Of course I took the covers off the posts, I'm not a complete idiot, and I have installed a battery before. So they asked if I checked the fuses, which I did, and they were fine, so they suggested we call a towing company to have it hauled in to the shop, which we did, and about an hour after it was taken away, I got a call from the Honda shop saying the car was fixed. "What was wrong with it?" I asked, and the guy said, "Uh, you left the plastic cover on one of the posts," which made me feel like a complete idiot because I remember taking one of the covers off, but obviously, I didn't take both of them off (which is a pretty important step to forget to do). So I guess I'm a complete loser when it comes to fixing cars.

On that note, we'll wrap up this little ditty and hope that your batteries stay charged, your spandex stays stretchy, and your oceans remain deep and uncluttered.