New stuff

Welcome to Bicycles & Icicles, where you will never have to read a damned thing about Don Imus. Because this is a blog about bicycles, and we just don't care about sour old crackpots with eyebrows as long as Howard Hughes' fingernails.

Around here, it's all bikes, all the time. I don't bore you with complaints about my aches and pains, the check I had to write to the IRS, or my extramarital crush on Marisa Tomei.

Hmm. Come to think of it, I could start a separate blog on that last one. It might have a good run until the cease-and-desist orders start showing up.

But I digress.

Anyway, as I was saying, I don't bore you with details of my personal life or other non-bike stuff. Nosiree. I bore you exclusively with my bike-related rants. And I haven't even had time to do that for several days, because I've been busy getting used to my new skinny bike and re-learning about life on the road instead of the trail.

Returning to the road after 18 years of mountain biking is full of little surprises—like the fact that I'm stopping less often to take pictures, or that it's harder to find a place to take a leak. On the trail, you can just step a few feet into the trees. On the road, all the good trees seem to be in someone's yard. That could get awkward.

And I'm learning to use this newfangled contraption called a GPS-enabled bike computer. I've always been happy with a basic, 25-dollar bike computer, but this Garmin Edge 205 showed up at Christmas and offered to do all sorts of things I never knew I wanted or needed. Elevation, calories, speeds, training routes. Although it appeals to my inner geek, most of this crap is lost on me.

In my hands, this is just a fancy little device that tells me how fast I'm going and how far I've ridden, and then, when I get home, shows me the whole ride by drawing a red line on a Googe Earth map.

That doesn't make me any fitter or faster, but it looks pretty cool.