7-12-09: Catching the Cycling Fever

So instead of working on my boring (read: disastrously dull) microwave engineering homework, I watched TV for about an hour this afternoon. It turns out that Versus has some really great Tour de France coverage.

Which reminded me: I haven't taken my bike out of the basement since the snow melted.

My bike is a yellow 1998 Kona Kilauea, and looks pretty much like the bike you see below on the right (picture found online), except it has different handle bars that look more like horns (the guy told me they were for racing). I got the bike as a birthday present in...1998. I rode it pretty frequently for a few years, then stopped pretty abruptly.

It hasn't had a tune-up since about 1999, but it's doing surprisingly well. I had to do a ton of cleaning, took off the ugly Kryptonite bike lock for which I lost the key years and years ago, and tried pumping the tires up. The back one seems to be fine, but the front is dead. Both tires are extremely old, and I'll probably just replace them.

It's a mountain bike, but I don't really want to do mountain biking anymore. I live in a small city (the smallest in Connecticut in fact), and would like to use the bike for a few things:

1. Biking around the area on weekends.
2. Morning exercise.
3. The very occasional 11.0 mile commute to work. They have a bike rack in the executive garage that I would like to start using. I plan on doing this at least once this summer and hopefully a few times by the year's end.

So, I really don't need the mountain bike tires anyway. My good friends Scotty and Taylor, avid bicyclists, have graciously offered their help in the matter, and have pointed me in a couple good directions. The thing is I have to stop being so damn lazy and actually get this bike road-ready and get on the road.

Let's see how this goes.