Year: 2017

Ellen here, writing in with a report on the first few days of a Pacific Coast bike tour!  Erica and I spent the first few days of our tour in Washington state (Seattle to Portland, which is a common randonneuring route in that part of the country).  It’s funny how working in a bike shop make you see the trees but not the forest – I am so used to being critical of uneven brake tension, poorly adjusted shifting, and finding that weird rattling sound from the bottom bracket, that I forgot for a second that I got into bikes because I like to ride them.  It’s good to be reminded to see the forest, both the figurative forest of riding bikes and the literal Pacific Coast rainforests that are gracing our eyeballs for the first time. Taking a month to ride from Seattle to San Diego is definitely going to do the trick.

For the weeks leading up to the departure date in early May, Erica and I had a lot of preparing to do. This was our first tour longer than 3 days, and we decided to go for 30.  There will be another blog post with our gear list and setup and patterns for how we made our own stuff.  But, suffice to say we had a lot of projects to do. Erica got a new bike for her 30th birthday (a Space Horse Disc! Custom painted!), and  we barely had any gear storage space, so we had to make a lot of our gear from scratch or modify it heavily to fit what we wanted. Get excited for that list, we got reeeal DIY crafty to make it all.

My 49cm / 700c Soma Double Cross and Erica’s 46cm / 650b Space Horse Disc

The night before our flight, Erica and I and our friend disassembled our bikes in our living room.  This is something I’ve done a million times at the shop. You can pick up a cardboard bike box and packing material for free at Broadway if you let us know ahead of time, or you can drop your bike off at the shop, and the mechanics will pack it for you for $60.  We’ll also ship it right from the shop for an extra $10 labor. If you book your shipping through Bike Flights, it’s usually a little cheaper than the cheapest rate on FedEx Ground if you give it enough time. Read more tips about traveling with your bike in my last post.

Without the use of bike stands, the packing took roughly two hours, during which we padded all the tubing, took off the front wheel and pedals, removed the racks and fenders, twisted the fork around, took of the handlebars, and stuffed sleeping bags, panniers, and rain gear into the boxes alongside the bikes.  JetBlue has a max weight allowance of 100lbs, and even with all that gear we maxed out at a 55lb box each.  Not bad!  Next time we’ll throw some extra wrenches in there.

Off to the airport we went, where we landed at our start point for the trip: Seattle!

Day 0: Boston to Seattle: 0 miles biked, 2,492 miles flown

• Worst part: Waking up at 4am, and writing “This Side Up” and “Fragile” all over the boxes then watching them get tossed on their sides the second they went on the carousel.  Seeing this carelessness in person, I can only imagine what happens behind the walls of the baggage area, or in the shipping terminals of FedEx.  I’ve unpacked bikes that have been shipped to the shop that have dents in the frame, bent fenders, wheels out of true, and all sorts of problems because of bad packaging coupled with bad handling.  Broadway takes a lot of care to package everything that could break, and in the moment I saw my bike get tossed roughly onto the conveyor belt, I was thankful for that training.

• Best part: Getting picked up by my cousin in Seattle who kindly let us explode the boxes in her driveway, reassemble the bikes, and repack our panniers with assistance of her curious black lab, Maddy. Have you wondered why there are so many dog photos on Broadway’s Instagram? That’s partly my doing. I’m a critter fiend.

Day 1: Seattle to Rochester, WA: 66 miles biked, 36 miles by bus.

• Best part: Settling into the ride and seeing West Coast vegetation for the first time.  It’s all so LUSH out here!  We started off the day with a 2-mile long downhill, and carried a 16 mph pace all the way through Tacoma and Olympia because of the thrill, energy, and a nice tailwind.  And, Erica and I quickly solved our long-standing pacing issue: Erica is extremely strong and fast, and I average 10mph with all my birdwatching and rockspotting. So, to even us out, Erica graciously offered to carry ? if the weight. It worked!  We felt strong, and the nerves of getting started on something big quickly settled into a hum of enjoying each moment of the ride.

• Worst part: Getting skunked on a snack run.  We realized we could stop at Costco along the way for free samples as mid-ride snacks. But, it was a Monday, so sadly there were none out and instead we soothed our disappointment by buying enough granola bars and dried fruit to last us for weeks. This extra weight turned out to be a big mistake in the long run, we carried about 1lb of extra, not-very-good snacks on us at all times.  The lesson after this was only buy what your body will be delighted to eat: food that will give you energy, lift your spirits, and make you poop.

• Mechanics: Erica started getting a pain in her right tricep, which she suspected was from too short of a reach.  We decided to give it another day to see if her tricep just needed to strengthen up.

• Lodging: That night we stayed with our very first Warm Showers host.  Warm Showers is like Couchsurfing and AirBnB, where it lets everyday people open up their homes (for free!) to touring cyclists who just need a place to sleep and a warm shower.  Our host John was a Seattle-area randonneuring junkie who knows Jan Heine and all the geeks from the internet. He cooked us noodles, and we stayed up late chatting before we retired to our hammock, which we set up in his backyard in a field of dandelions.

Day 2: Rochester to Castle Rock, WA: Biked 51 miles

• Best part: Sandy, John’s wife, made us lavender mochas in the morning as we talked about black holes and gravitational waves. Erica and I decided that we officially were spoiled by an excellent first Warm Showers experience.  We rode the rest of the day along a beautiful ridge that gave us views of snow-topped Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens.

• Worst part: The sun came out, and we quickly got hangry and stopped in a convenience store for giant freeze pops. I got the first sunburn of the trip.

• Mechanics: Erica discovered her bike shimmied when she hit 20 mph, and her tricep still hurt.  Now we started to wonder if the tricep pain was caused by trying to dampen the shimmy constantly.  My Brooks Saddle felt as comfy as a sofa cushion.

• Lodging: As we were taking a pit stop 10 miles away from our campsite, a woman struck up a conversation with us and offered us a place to stay that night.  After seeing that the 10 miles between us and a campground were all uphill, and smelling our smelly clothes that could do with a good washing already, we readily agreed.  We learned her name was Melissa, and we had pizza and watched “The Voice” together while talking late into the night. Blog post with the full story of Melissa and Bruce’s house in Castle Rock to come, because experiences with kind strangers like this are the most precious things we take away from adventures.

Day 3: Castle Rock to Ridgefield, WA: 45 miles biked.

• Best part: Melissa made us eggs Benedict for breakfast (so kind), which fueled us all day for a hard ride.  Our legs felt really strong, despite being tired from getting used to the weight of touring and the hills of the Pacific Coast.

• Mechanics: Erica’s derailleur hanger bent for a mysterious reason, but I was able to bend it back well enough to get back on the road. This was just the beginning of our mechanical issues for the trip, and there will be another blog post outlining all of those predicaments and their respective fixes.

• Worst part: We climbed Magic Mountain, which rose 1,500 ft in just 1 mile. There was no way around it, because it’s one of the only routes to get over the Columbia River into Portland, which is notoriously difficult for cyclists in Washington/Oregon to cross. It was definitely the most absurd climb of the trip so far, and I walked most of it.

• Lodging: Laurie’s house, our friend’s mom. We stopped at a nursery along the way where we bought an aloe plant as a thank-you present, but before we gave it to her we broke off a stem or two to rub on our still-sunburned skin.  Turns out that the roll-top Ortlieb panniers, when un-rolled, are great plant holders!

Day 4: Ridgefield, WA to Portland, OR: 16 miles biked and 16 miles on a bus

• Worst part: This was the lowest day of the trip, for sure.  It was the first day of hard rain, and our mechanical issues only intensified. Only 12 miles in, Erica saw a piece of hardware fly off her bike, which turned out to be one of the two essential bolts holding her brake caliper onto her fork. At this point, her front brake started chattering, her low gear shifting still sucked from the bent derailleur hanger from the day before, and her tricep pain was debilitating, so we decided to take the bus downtown rather than toy with our lives and our sanity.

• Best part: Seeing all the bike shops in Portland for the first time (we stopped at River City Cycles and City Bikes) and getting tortas. But that was kind of it.

• Mechanics: See above.  Everybody’s had that moment where, in the pouring rain/the dark/the woods, you think, “Man, this sucks, maybe biking really isn’t for me, it was just this stupid thing I picked up when I was 11, and now look where it’s got me.  F*$% this.”  That was how that day felt.

• Lodging: David Wilcox’s couch! He is a friend of Erica’s from Bikes Not Bombs and used to be a Worker-Owner at Broadway, and he lifted our spirits that evening over cones of very hip fancy ice cream.

And, just like a dark serial mystery where we leave you hanging at the lowest point in the plot, I leave you here having ended our stint in Washington State.  Will Oregon turn it all around?  Can the trusty mechanics on the West Coast save the day?  Will the good riding and energy in the rest of the state carry us out of the emotional and mechanical ditch we fell into?

Obviously the answer is yes, because that’s how all biking works for those who find power in powering their steel machine.  But you’ll have to read the Oregon Ride Report to find out how.

Monday June 26th – July 24th (NO CLASS on July 3rd), 6:30pm – 8:30pm

Price: $140 PLUS costs of parts

Want to learn how to build your own wheel? The Wheelbuilding class takes you step by step through the process!!

• Each class is two hours long and meets once per week for four weeks.
• Classes are part lecture and part hands-on exercises
• Wear clothes that you don’t mind getting grease on.
• Mandatory Prerequisite: Basic Knowledge of Wheel Truing

We are so proud to support and celebrate our LGBTQIA community members!  This weekend is Pride Weekend in Boston, and to give back to the community we are hosting a cookie sale all day on Saturday June 10th at the shop.  We’re open from 10am to 6pm, and all cookies must go!

Cookies will be donated by local bakeries and baked by workers at Broadway, and the proceeds from each cookie will be donated to Boston GLASS (Gay and Lesbian Adolescent Social Service) which provides counseling and support for queer youth in Boston.  Last year, we raised enough money to buy two of their youth bikes complete with helmets, locks, and lights.  All that thanks to the generosity and support of our incredible community members giving back.  Come back again on Saturday to celebrate with us this year!

Ellen here writing from the West Coast: Hello! I’ve biked through Washington state and Oregon, and now I’m in California where I sadly have to skip a section because a landslide took out a bridge in Big Sur. Instead of biking several hundred miles out of our way to make it around the detour, Erica and I are taking an Amtrak train from Salinas to San Luis Obispo where we can pick up the route again a la the Adventure Cycling Association’s awesome maps.

After 20-something days on the road, taking our bikes on a train is just one example of how we’ve had to figure out a few different ways to transport our bicycles other than riding them to make it this far. It turns out, bikes and public/private transportation options can integrate quite well, and sometimes they don’t integrate at all– but it tends to be very specific to what options you’re near.

So, if you’re looking to transport your bike for adventures this summer, here are your best options:

By plane

Option 1: If you’re flying somewhere far away, JetBlue lets you bring your bike in a box for $50 as long as it’s already packed, and it counts as oversized baggage. Panniers count as great carry-on baggage.

Option 2: If you’re going somewhere that JetBlue doesn’t fly to, or you generally plan a little more in advance, you can get your bike shipped ahead of you by using FedEx Ground or Bike Flights. Bike Flights usually ends up being a little cheaper than most other options, and the nice thing is you just drop your bike off at a bike shop (like Broadway, which will charge $40 to “flatten” it enough to fit in a box and pad it all with special packaging), book the shipping online, and the Bike Flights will pick it up from the shop for you. Then you choose a bike shop at your destination to ship it to, and you can either pick it up and assemble it yourself or ask the shop to do it.

By train

Option 1: Trains are a really great way to get around! If you’re taking Amtrak, you have to book your bike slot ahead of time. Usually Amtrak adds $20 per bike to the cost of your ticket, and you have to roll your bike to the first car in the train, and then run to the back where you’ll sit. Then you just roll it off when you reach your destination.

Option 2: Commuter trains (like the MBTA, BART, Metro, etc.) will mostly be cool with you rolling your bike on and off. Many have restrictions about bringing your bike on trains during rush hour, but Erica and I got away with getting on the BART in San Francisco at the beginning of rush hour and taking it to the end of the line (a whole 1.5 hour trip) and nobody hassled us about it.

By bus

Option 1: If you are lucky enough to have inter-city bus transit options, the busses usually have a rack for two, maaaybe three bikes on the front. We’ve found that it’s helpful to carry a bungee cord so you can lash the part of the rack that hooks to your front wheel, because the bikes do sway precariously.

I’ve also had the hook jiggle completely off the front wheel midway through the busride, where the bus driver had to stop and let me reattach it. This jiggle-down probably was possible because my front rack (a Surly low-rider) didn’t let the hook move into where it wants to be – if your bike doesn’t have a front rack, you might not have this problem. The bus might charge you an extra dollar or two for the bike, but using this kind of transit is decidedly the easiest and cheapest way to get your bike across towns and cities.

Option 2: Word to the wise, Greyhound stinks when it comes to bicycle transportation. They require that your bike is in a box, and you can buy a box from them for $15 only at staffed bus locations (boxes which bike shops like Broadway  will give you for free).  You also have to book it ahead of time, and much of Amtrak’s Connecting Thruway services are contracted out through Greyhound. So even though it might LOOK like you can bring your bikes on easily, you can’t.

Megabus is the same way (bikes must be boxed), but BoltBus seems to let you stash your bike fully assembled in the belly of the bus (but they assume no liability for damage, because bikes sliding around down there might get a good amount of damage). Erica and I have not tested either of these companies though, so we’d love to hear if you’ve have experience with them.

By automobile

Many parts of the country simply don’t have bike-friendly public/private transportation options. If planes, trains, or buses can’t get you and your bike where you need to go, cars can probably do the trick.

Tip 1: If you can drive where you’re going but don’t have a bike rack, you can fix two bikes in the back of a mid-sized sedan by lowering the back seats, taking out the front wheels of both bikes, and twisting the handlebars parallel to the bikes.

Tip 2: If you need to rent a car one-way, the rental company will usually tack on about $100 to the cost because they have to get the car back home after you use it. Ask ahead of time though, because not all companies let you do one-way rentals.

Tip 3: If you are transporting a lot of bikes and gear (line for a group of cyclists), U-haul is a great way to get a lot of space quickly. They even have flatbed pickup trucks for local-ish transportation, which is perfect for getting a bike or two across that tough spot. But, if you do a one-way rental, especially if the drop off is very far away from the pickup location, U-haul does have a steep upcharge that makes it impractical for many touring cyclists.

Tip 3: Obviously if you have a car with a bike rack, or you have a kind friend who had a car with a bike rack, this is always the most convenient way to get around. But, touring cyclists or cyclists who don’t own cars gotta figure it out somehow too!

It’s been a real adventure trying to figure out how to mesh country-wide public transit with bicycling, and hopefully this helps y’all figure it out easily enough that you can get your butts back on your bikes where you want to be!

Thanks to all who were able to join us yesterday morning for our Annual Pancake Breakfast for Mass Bike Week! We had a blast and it was great to visit with our cycling community over blueberry, banana and chocolate pancakes, orange juice and lots of coffee. See you all next year!

Our Annual Pancake Breakfast is next Tuesday 5/16! Join us to celebrate Bay State Bike Week as our mechanics trade their wrenches for spatulas and whip up delicious pancakes for you to chow down on from 7:30-9:30 a.m.! Vegan and gluten-free options available while supplies lasts. Coffee and orange juice will be there to energize the rest of your bike ride into work! #seizethespatula

Hey there, y’all.  I’m Ellen, one of the mechanics here at Broadway.

This is the absolute busiest time of year at the most bike shops (especially in New England, where everyone and their mother is so relieved by the warm spring weather after long, brutal winters that destroy bicycles).  But, while I’ll be away from the shop for the next month,  be sure to visit my incredibly dedicated coworkers — Kate, Tommy, Suzanne, Joe, Colin, Justin, Bettina, Jace, Susanne, and Chantal — who are covering for me. Instead ofwrenching, I’ll be biking down the Pacific Coast with my partner, Erica.

Erica and I met on a bike ride, testing out a route for a bike camping trip with the local femme/trans/women advocacy, wrenching, and social group Femmechanics (they also partners with us to host a free open shop time called Grrrease Time once a month at Broadway).

Erica has just finished her 5-year term as the Director of Fundraising at Bikes Not Bombs (BNB).  We at Broadway love BNB.They also serve bike commuters (but mostly on the other side of the Charles River), they pick up all our donations and recycling, and we love seeing their truck full of volunteers roll up outside our shop once a week.  To celebrate the end of such a fulfilling job, as well as her 30th birthday, she and I are going to bike camp down the Pacific Coast because … well when else do you get the chance to do this?

Caption: In the Arnold Arboretum testing out our soft goods: panniers, frame bags, and the hammock we’ll sleep in along the way.

Normally it’s a 1,600-mile venture, and most people do it over the course of 2-3 months.  We only have a month, so we’ll probably have to hop a few trains and buses to cumulatively skip about ? of the coastal bike route.

We’ve built up our own bicycles from bare frames –she an All-City Space Horse Disc and me a Soma Double Cross — custom painted them and rigged them up using gear at Broadway or scrounged from the BNB donation bin.  We’ve put in countless hours at both shops after they’ve closed, and we think we’ve made machines that will get us from Seattle to San Diego and see some rad trails in between.

Want to see how it all goes?  We’ll be posting regularly here and on Instagram (@broadwaybikes and @ellenmelooon) with updates from the road: what breaks or wears out, secret trails we find, the humans we meet along the way, and what 8 hours of pedaling every day teaches us about this weird world we live in.

Every winter, the mechanics at Broadway Bicycle School spend time reflecting on our place in the Boston biking community.  We know that we’re kinda like your bike doctors: We see you when your bikes are broken, when you’re getting a check-up just before a big ride, or when you are looking for your first bike or a new member of the fleet.  But what we DON’T get to see that much of are your rides.  The reason you get your butt in the saddle.  The daily grind on your commute or the once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

So this season, we’ve decided that we are going to start documenting and celebrating those big and small moments that make us all of part of this weird world we call bicycling. We’ll be featuring the rides that y’all enjoy in our community, weird bike projects, new gadgets and technology, our mechanics, Broadway lore, and all sorts of stuff that will document our community history.

We’ll also keep making time in between fixing flats and overhauling bottom brackets to document and celebrate some of the other rides that our staff and community members saddle up for.

So get pumped, and get out there!