Planning and scheming

UPDATE: Check out the slideshow on the right that shows the bike rack!

I've decided to bring two bikes with me on this trip, and neither of them are Will's.

Heather gave me a copy of Vermonter magazine which had an article listing 10 family rides in Vermont. Lots of them look interesting so I want to ride one or two. Last year in Maine, I accidentally did a 30 mile ride on my mountain bike, in the middle of nowhere, with only a small ice cream shop to tide me over until I got back into familiar territory.

I've learned my lesson, so this year I'm taking the Centurion Elite GT, which is a sweet lugged steel touring bike circa 1983. The guy I bought it from, who happens to be a bike geek like me in Little Rock, says they're pretty rare, and production only lasted a couple of years. What I've read on sheldonbrown.com and in the Classic & Vintage forum seems to bear this out. I do know it's a sweet bike and it fits me perfectly, since I added the new tall Technomic stem. (You can see the 1984 catalog for this bike here. My bike is the opposite color scheme than the bike pictured, a nice champagne color all over, with brownish maroon outlining the lugs and on the head tube.)

I'm also planning on hitting the mountain trails in the area of Vermont they call the Northern Kingdom--specifically Mount Burke. It's a ski area, but when there's no snow, there are developed trails for mountain bikes.

I figure if Will and I want to ride together, maybe in Delaware when we're camping on the ocean, he can suit up on of these bikes. Both of them have some room in the seatpost to go up. Bikes aren't allowed on the grounds of the first place we're going (Blue Ridge Assembly in Black Mountain, NC), and he'll be at camp the last part of the trip.

The Centurion is getting a work over at Sam's bike shop, and he's moving the downtube shifters to the bar ends, like this. He's also removing the "suicide levers", which are the brake levers that cross in front of the flat part of the bars, and that were standard on every 10 speed I ever rode in the '70s. They work fine on the Elite, but some of those from the '70s did not, so I can see why they lost favor. Still, I'd like to have brakes up there, so I don't have to jump to the hoods to brake if I don't wanna (some habits are hard to break). So he's putting interruptor levers on for me, too.

Since there are going to be two bikes, and they do the most to make the inside of the Element crowded, I had to come up with a solution to hauling them. They can't go on the outside, because of risk of theft, and I don't want them hanging out there in the rain. (When I took my mountain bike in for its 90-day post-purchase check up, the mechanic found a tablespoon of water in the bottom bracket--he accused me of leaving it out in the rain! NO WAY! But it did ride on the back of the Beetle in a rain storm. Who knew so much water could get in that way?)
So the bikes have to be inside.

I have this fantasy that we will keep everything organized in the car and Will will remember to put his colored pencils and his PSP games back in the backpack and zip it up every time; that everything we take will fit in neat little packages; everything I need will be accessible from the comfort of the driver's seat and Will's shoes will always be right near his feet. But it's just a fantasy! So, more better ways of securing the bikes is in order.

It'd be nice if I could just take both rear seats out, attach one bike to each side, fully assembled, and put all the gear in between. But last year I did that and ended up having a passenger, with nowhere to sit. Will sat in a lawn chair in the back for a ride from Albany to Plymouth, VT, and I don't want to do that again. That means they go side by side one one side, and one seat stays down, like a regular day.

The last apparatus I fabricated just held two bikes by the forks (wheels off) on a 1' x 1.5' piece of plywood. It slid all over the back of the car, despite the rubbery feet I put on the bottom. The forks would turn and make everything crooked. A new solution was needed. The rear wheels would have to be tied down.

Lots of ideas floated around. To make the package smaller, I could remove the pedals. To keep bike grease off the seats and protect the derailleurs, I could either cover up the drive trains, or position the bikes side by side with the drive trains to the inside. Looking through the shop for an ideas and an appropriate piece of wood, I found a longish 12" wide board leftover from the bathroom renovation. Seemed long enough to hold a bike, so I took it to the bike garage.

Half an hour later, with my Trek 4300 mountain bike and my Trek 1000 standing in for the Elite, I was marking up the board for installation of fork mounts. I managed to get the two bikes lined up pretty well, with no seats touching each other, no bars touching wheels, and no cranks in contact with each other. No pedals can be left on, either!

The next step was to figure out how to attach the rear wheels to the board. Finally found some nylon webbing straps at Wal-Mart, 6 feet long. I thought I would only need enough to go around each rim through the spokes (about 8 inches), but after looking at it, the 6 footers could go all the way up over the top of the tire. That seemed like a good solution, so we drilled holes through the webbing, through the board, and attached washers under the screws to keep the webbing from fraying and pulling out.

The bikes aren't solid on the board--but solid enough. The board and bikes move as a unit and that's what I wanted. Now to keep it from sliding around--we found some kind of rubber treads that you put on utility trailers or something. We cut them to fit and put them all up and down the bottom of the board. I'll be trying it out tomorrow to see how it works.