Guess I’ll Be Hitting The Dirt This Weekend

The soap opera with my bikes is this: Le Noir has been fully dismantled and the frame is being shipped today to its manufacturer’s headquarters in Florida to be replaced. Seeing as the 8-year-old bottom bracket of Old Yeller (my back-up Giant OCR3 roadbike that I’ve been riding since Le Noir’s retirement) was shot and I had acquired a replacement, I decided this morning to try to swap out old with new.

About two hours of struggling later, I conceded that the old bottom bracket wasn’t coming off without metal-melting alien spit and/or dynamite, and decided to let a professional bike shop handle it.

Since my first establishment of choice — Orange 20 — isn’t open mornings, I loaded Old Yeller up into my truck and stopped first at Palms Cycle on my way to work, where instead of that afternoon as I was hoping, I was told they couldn’t have the job done until Tuesday.

I was all “thanks, but no.”

So off I went to Wheel World on Sepulveda — a little closer to work — and for the heck of it in addition to the bottom bracket I ordered up a spoke tension/truing check for both wheels and a new chain.

As the clerk wrote it up I looked around the service area jam-packed with bikes and reticently asked what kind of time frame we were looking at. He retreated to a back table and counted through a slot stuffed with work orders.

“Wednesday,” he said.

“Yikes, is that the best you can do?”

“Talk to him,” the clerk said, pointing to the service manager upon whose mercy I threw myself telling hims I’d just come from Palms Cycle and they told me Tuesday. He consulted the same slot of invoices.

“We can probably have it done Tuesday. Probably. Call me that day.”

So I flipped a mental coin, with heads being I leave with the bike and drop it off at Orange 20 on the way home (perhaps to be told Wednesday, too), or tails, just leave it there and be done with it.

It was tails.

So now I’m without a road-ready bike for the next 5 or 6 days. And I’m hating that. Sure, if I were really diehard I’d saddle-up on my mountain bike and commute to/from work, but I’ve pedaled my old Ibex Apogee on pavement and with its Tigger-inspired bouncytrouncyflouncyjouncy rear-suspension spring, it’s really no funfunfunfunfun.

But you can bet with me jonesing for some bike action come this weekend I’ll be bobbing up and down on some dawn-patrol either up a trail in the Verdugos, or out the San Gabes way.