4/22/07 bike

Well, the recumbent came in about 6pm last night, Saturday. After dinner and a movie we went up and brought everything into the kitchen and mostly Matt put the bike together. There wasn’t much I could do, either in know-how or strength, so I worked on a puzzle in the dining room and was there for the odd 3rd hand needed kind of thing. I was in there looking for pieces to go together and I’d hear “HHmm, what’s this? I’ve no idea where it goes, it must be an extra part.” Or “Uh, I think that goes there…” I have to say, and Matt know this, it didn’t’ instill a sense of confidence in me that we wouldn’t find ourselves on our ass in the middle of the road the first attempt we tried the thing.

We had arranged to bike with the recumbent today with a friend and were really not sure if we’d even have the bike. So today we take it out to the street to give it a try before taking it out on the trail. Good thing, too. Mostly because we found that in putting the bike together for the 2 of us, we need to shorten the front chain. There were several neighbors outside talking to each other since it turned out to be a really nice day – it was earth day, you know! The middle child across the street was asking abut the bike, and why it was so low. I don’t think she’d ever seen one of these before. Jennifer came out and was like “OH COOL! I gotta get a picture of this!” and snapped one with her cell. I hope she emails it to us and I’ll post it in the blog photos link area, wherever that is, but it’s on the main page. A few others were getting ready to leave and wanted to watch, but we were like – don’t wait for us, we’d rather have the room of the road. It took us a few times to even get our feet up on the pedals. We realized we were in a high gear and it was very hard to get started so we had to get off the bike to spin the wheels to adjust that. Then the girl from across the street had a good idea. Since we were having troubles with momentum, she suggested we go a little way up the hill on our road, kind of like pushing a car to jump-start it. And it worked. We actually got feet on pedals, and went about 3 houses length when we lost the chain. Once we had it back on we turned the bike around and tried to go again, this time we didn’t go up the hill and we got it going! YAY! And we were headed right for a truck. Not only do you have a totally different physical position, the steering and shifting is totally different. Handlebars are below you, so Matt has to learn how to ‘drive’ again, and he will need to learn how to shift without really looking at the shifter since it’s almost under his seat! You’ll be happy to know we missed the truck, and got 3 or 4 houses again before we lost the chain again. It was at that moment we decided we’d have to bail on the recumbent bike ride until we could adjust the chain length. Oh well.