Cycling again- sort of.

Well, its 2 weeks since I last posted and my leg/knee has improved but still isnt 100%. Strange but I forgot that I had hurt it cycling to the Cycle Touring Festival at Clitheroe in late May. It was only when a Facebook friend asked about a route that I remembered walking down a 25% hill to stop the trailer jack-knifing that it popped into my head.

Anyway, I have been icing it regularly and applying a non-steroidal gel and it is definitely not as painful as it was . Still , that has given me time to quilt and I got the baby quilt finished.

If you look closely  , you can see the quilting and I used a combination of ruler work and free machine quilting. As I didn’t have quite enough of the red fabric I inserted a plain red piece and then appliqued a circle of an owl to blend it in. You can see it on the extreme left of the whole quilt picture.

I did try a bit of cycling last weekend. DH took me on our old tandem for a short ride and then I decided to try on Speedy, my Dahon Speed TR. Mistake!! I spent a lot of Sunday with an ice pack on my knee. DH wasn’t too happy about how the tandem was going as we haven’t used it for a long time.

In the mean time , I thought about DS1 who has a birthday this weekend. He hasn’t cycled much as his bike had a frame repair, and he didn’t think it was going to last.

I made a decision to try to help him.  Although  he is at least 6″ taller than me , his inside leg measurement is 2″ shorter than mine. I phoned Dave at Cyclesense in Tadcaster and discussed what size frame would be suitable. In fact he had been to the Koga factory in the Netherlands and had brought back a model made for the German market. So I sent DS1 down to have a test ride and the upshot was , he came back with it. Dave has been very helpful so a big thank you to Cyclesense. The model is an F3 but DS1 took some of the components off his old frame and this is how it looks.

DH then decided to use the gear shifters and replace the twist grip shifters and put them on the tandem. So off we went for another short ride.

We were hoping to get away for the long weekend but it wasn’t going to be a possibility but on the whole I am quite pleased as there has been quite a lot of rain on some of the days. However, yesterday was beautiful so we had a ride to Redcar and Marske. An advantage of riding as stoker, is that I can take photos while riding. Here are a few of them.

The sea was very calm and it was beautiful riding along the promenade towards Saltburn. I did need to stop and rest a little .

It wasn’t really my knee that bothered me but an unfamiliar saddle!!

 

We could see cloud beginning to build and the forecast was for rain later in the day. We headed back along NCN route 1 and DH asked if I would mind calling in to the LDS chapel we attend. He did what he needed to do but as we were leaving discovered a front wheel puncture. Fortunately we had a spare tube and a repair kit so while he did the change over , I applied a patch to the old tube. Teamwork.

So then it was off home via an old friends to fill his bird feeders and @ldi to buy fruit and we arrived home just before it began to rain. We don’t have a working cycle computer but estimate with the short runs I have completed about 50 miles in the 2 weeks. Hopefully, I will be cycling on my own soon.