I am extremely blessed to live in Madison, WI, which is a fairly bike-tolerant community. I commute to work (about 1.5 miles) year-round. The only days I miss are days when snow is falling and the roads were already snow-covered when the snow started. My bike is 6 years old and has never been cleaned. The rust and grit are holding it together, in my opinion. I get 1 or 2 flats per year, and as noted below, I had to replace my front wheel once. Here are some interesting things that have happened to me while biking.

But first, let me tell you about my NEW BIKE! The old Trek 720 mentioned above finally seized up in summer 2004. What can I say -- it served me well for 8+ years or year-round commuting. I now own a Gary Fisher Zebrano, and bike technology has changed since the mid-90s...this new bike is bigger, lighter, much more comfortable. We'll see what kind of staying power it has. Maybe I'll even clean it occasionally :)

• Monroe Street in Madison is an artery into Campus and the Isthmus. I also use it occasionally to commute into work if I go to a bakery on Monroe street to get a Cinnamon Bun. (Wild Grains for you Madisonians -- they also sell a killer Ciabatta) Between the coffee shop and my office there is a long hill, which I climbed slowly, meaning the cars in the curb lane had to slow down. This ticked one charming individual off -- he drove by me, told me to get off the Fucking road, and then turned off at Edgewood College, where he was dropping off his child at the Catholic Elementary School there.
• My normal commute home takes me past a playground (that's really a parking lot) at the church we attend. One day I thought I saw a friend of my daughter's playing there, and I looked a little longer than I should have. I crashed into the back of a parked Minivan, taco-ing my front wheel. Fortunately, no one saw this beautiful example of biking. My only injury was a sore jaw from where my face hit the rear of the minivan.
• The railroad tracks at the end of street were converted to a bike path. I took to riding the long way home from work sometimes -- 20 miles vs. the normal 1.5 mile commute. The day the dashed-yellow dividing line was painted, I biked home and was astonished to see around my head (on a clear, hot summer day) a rainbow! The glass crystals that were scattered into the paint of the stripes were refracting the light from the sun around the head of my shadow. It was an interesting and unexpected visual delight. The crystals were all over the path and the adjacent grass. After a few rainstorms, the effect was gone, alas.
• The aforementioned bikepath is also a nice early morning diversion into work, and I took to counting the numbers of rabbits I saw. (I was normally biking at 5:30 or 6 AM). The most on the 20-mile ride was 25. This was in early Spring. As Summer progressed, the number of rabbits decreased. I also saw 5 deer one morning -- (the path goes by corn fields) and usually saw 1 or 2 deer each week (about 4 rides weekly). A typical fall hazard is geese which inhabit the waters around the Sewage Treatment plant. They are nasty things to bike through. (This bike path skirts the Sewage Treatment Plant).

SSEC // March 4, 2002 // webmaster@ssec.wisc.edu