The ride started in the morning at MSU Bikes, an important center for local bicycling and bicycle commuting activities. It's a new and, I think, still developing bike shop on the MSU campus, with a focus on rebuilding and restoring used bikes for use as every day commuters. You can bring your bike in and they'll help you repair it yourself, too.
The ride started in the morning with 20-mile ride through the rural roads south of MSU and into the areas south of Lansing where we often ride on our weekend ice cream runs. After the fun ride, there was an organized parade from MSU to the Capitol Building in Lansing, where we had lunch under a tent on the Capitol Grounds. Following lunch and a couple of short speaches and some instructions, we divided into about 10 teams and headed off to deliver LMB materials to the Legislators' offices. It was like nothing we'd done before.
To participate in the event, I took a day of vacation and we left Quinn in pre-school for a full day. We pulled the child stoker kit off the big blue Burley, and set it up so Cindy could ride in the stoker position. This was actually pretty easy. Within half an hour Tuesday night we had the bike ready for Cindy. Quinn didn't seem to mind. Aside from a couple of short test rides, it was really the first time Cindy and I had ever gotten out for a tandem ride together as captain and stoker on the same machine. In order to be sure we made the most of the opportunity, we logged more than 50 miles today on the big blue Burley.
It took me a few days to come back and add the photos from this day. We've been busy.
Cindy snapped this tractor shot on our speedy 20-mile tour south of East Lansing. This is Michigan. One thing we learned riding together is that having two adults on one bike doesn't make us any more likely to stay on course. In this short ride, we took two wrong turns, despite painted route markers on the road and a map in my jersey pocket. I think we just felt so care-free, out cranking along by ourselves, that we just forgot to think about following the route. We were also riding roads very familiar to us, so we weren't the least bit worried about losing our way.
Another interesting thing we learned was that Cindy is not comfortable with a cadence as fast as I often prefer. When we're captaining separate tandems, and riding at the same pace, I often bug Cindy (I'm sure she appreciates this) to try using a faster cadence. My reasoning is that the faster cadence seems to require less muscle effort and saves leg strength over the course of a long ride. But riding together on the Burley (with captain and stoker crank lengths of 175 and 170 mm) she didn't like my fast cadence at all! I suspect it has to do with the relative length our legs to our crank lengths. This is what I've read, and perhaps it's true. Imagine how Quinn must feel when he's back there. His cranks are shorter than the adult cranks, I think they're 125 mm, but his legs are much, much shorter than our legs. If it were an option (it's not) I'd like to try 160 mm cranks on Cindy's bike. I should measure the effective crank length on Abbey's shortened-cranks. Enough of this cranky discussion for now. Back to the ride...
After the ride, we had to wait for a while before the parade begain. We hung around at the MSU Bikes shop along the path by the river. The canoe rental has been around longer than the bike shop. That's our Burley tandem in the rack. Right in front of it is the big League of Michigan Bicyclists billboard trailer that led the Parage. "Same Roads. Same Rights. Same Rules."
Here's another nice picture of the back of my head. It's good that Cindy was taking pictures, because if it had been Quinn back there, instead of my head, the pictures would probably have focused on my butt. The ride started out on the Lansing River Trail, which is a pretty old trail that follows the river through East Lansing, through some of Lansing's industrial areas, and into downtown. We were supposed to ride two abreast, but at times that was difficult. Much of the time we rode beside the recumbent you can see in the picture above.
There were about 85 cyclists in the ride, and they were a very mixed group on all sorts of different vehicles. There were two Wiz Wheelz trikes, several recumbents, a bunch of old cruisers, new and old mountain, road, and touring bikes. Lots of commuter rigs. The thing that was missing, I think, was the classic fixed-gear or single-speed messenger bike. Lots of law enforcment bicycles from MSU and the cities. The bottom picture above is interesting also because you can see the Capitol Building, our destination, in the background. Note also that Tim, the manager of MSU Bikes, is on top of the concrete barricade taking pictures of the parade.
We had lunch on the Capitol Grounds, and they even had veggie sandwiches for us!
After the event was over, we rode back to MSU on the River Trail. The trail is really interesting because some sections are entirely made of wood, and are built out over the river as they skirt along big, old brick buildings. It's very nice, and some of sections along the river a quite pretty. However, the trail is old, and some of the wood sections are very rough. The asphalt is badly buckled in places, making sharply effective speed bumps on short intervals. It's not a path you can ride at high speed and it made us which we were riding a dual suspension mountain tandem at times.
We had left the Capitol at about 2 p.m. with our mileage at about 40. We'd skipped out on the last scheduled activity for the Event, which was to meet at 3 p.m at the Nuthouse, whatever and wherever that might be, but we needed to get Quinn at pre-school by 3:15 and Abbey at school at 3:30. Since there was road construction near the Capitol, we ended up walking the tandem for about 3 blocks between the Capitol and the River Trail, and our pace on the trail was pretty slow, so it was past 2:30 by the time we reached MSU, and we were still a long way from the pre-school. I had hoped we might have time to stop for a drink and a snack before we got Quinn, but with road construction, traffic and winding roads through the campus, and a stop for a train, we didn't reach Quinn until 3:15. We hooked up the trailer (we'd left it there when we dropped him off in the morning) and pedaled the final miles to Abbey's school. Right on time there, too, and just over 50 miles.
When we got home, we had Abbey take our picture...
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