Yesterday evening, after getting home a bit earlier than usual, I dusted off the old Pennine, pumped up the tires, and took a little easy spin around Audubon Park. The weather was just about perfect and the park was crowded with joggers and walkers and bikes and bad golfers lobbing balls through the Oak branches onto the bike path. It was something of a change to be on the old racing bike that I first built up around 1972 when a custom frame and fork could be ordered from England through the local bike shop for around $100. This was back in the days when "10-speed" didn't just refer to the number of cogs on the cassette. It kind of brought me back, though, to be riding that bike around Audubon Park on the same road where a couple of NOBC members first invited me to the local novice race in City Park. By the time that summer had ended, I was ordering a custom blue and green Pennine with spear-point lugs, Reynolds 531 double-butted tubing, Cinelli sloping fork crown, chrome Campi dropouts and a hand-painted mountain scene on the tops of the seat stays. It was quite a step up from the mass-produced Atala with cottered steel cranks and center-pull Weinmann brakes that I'd been gradually upgrading with Nervar cranks, Universal side-pull brakes, Zeus pedals, and Normandy Luxe / Fiamme tubular wheelset. That frame is still hanging in my basement with a cracked down tube; the result of a couple of years of commuting 20 miles a day with a heavy bookrack on the back, I suppose.
So anyway, the Wednesday ride was pretty typical today -- nice steady paceline -- interrupted only by a couple of excursions onto the grass to get past the drilling rig that's still blocking the path out in Kenner. Elise and the new guy Quentin were both on hand today. Those new NOBC jerseys really do look nice.
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