Held Up

Things seem to happen in weird ways sometimes. Sunday I went for a ride with Carlos on a single track that he calls the Alligator run that’s around the quarry. It’s honestly the first time I’ve tried doing a single track and now I know why I’ve never done it with my bike and why if I want to do them in the future I should really get a mountain bike. The wheels, brakes, and center of gravity was wrong. It was a difficult run but i managed to get through it. What happened though was my chain started giving me issues during the run and I knew it was time to get that replaced. It turns out that my rear freewheel needed to be replaced as well so I got a new freewheel that has 4 more teeth than my last one which means going uphill will be something like 16% easier. At the same time they told me my bottom bracket needed to be replaced as well (I knew this from when I was leaving LA as the mechanic there told me the same thing) so I figured while I had it in the shop I might as well get that fixed. Only problem with all of these repairs is once again my bicycle is too old for the parts they have in stock so they have had to order parts which means I’m here until at least Friday while I wait for parts to get in. I must say I’m glad this came to a head while I was in a large city rather than anywhere else in the south island as it’ll get harder and and harder to get things fixed elsewhere.

I think I’ll be kinda sad to leave this place, it’s been a fun time here. I’ve learned to play Zug um Zug, a German board game. It’s easy to impress a 13 year old as my card shuffling skills always amaze along with my typing speed. The food has been good and lots of laughing every day. Suffice to say it was easy to postpone leaving here another week to get my bike fixed. But I have to remind myself that February is almost over which means winter is fast approaching. The weather has been wonky the last few weeks with the temperature dropping to 9 degrees Celsius one night (48 degrees for reference.) Mostly due to the winds whipping out of the south pole. In that vein I’m planning to leave Monday once again, hopefully successfully this time.

On a seperate note I was going through some old pictures of mine as I was tryng to burn them to DVD and found one of me before I started cycling and decided to make a comparison picture, startling to say the least.