Late February

I had the good fortune to be accepted into a study abroad program in college. It was more than twenty years ago, and through some miracle I found myself in Ireland, England, Scotland and then turned loose upon the European continent for six weeks. Having had the opportunity to see Germany and Ireland, Scotland and France, I now wonder more at the capacity to diminish travel accessories than the panacea of architecture, art and culinary experiences I missed out on.

I brought a portable CD player that only worked on level ground, needed two AA batteries for three hours of music and a carrying case with 40 compact discs, and if traveling with a few books was not enough, I bought more books from a Parisian bookstore called Gibert Jeune and carried them home to gather dust on a bookshelf for twenty years. Last summer I finally got around to reading one of them, and let me tell you Leo Tolstoy had it right, "We can know only that we know nothing..." but you can skip everything but the last fifty pages and it still makes sense.

I don't do a lot of fishing in the winter, and while I initially made efforts to ride my bicycle as frequently as possible, my winter cycling is woefully thin compared to many, many regular cyclists commuting throughout the winter in Minneapolis and Saint Paul. What I have noticed from previous mileage is the tendency for roadways to become narrower as the snow accumulates along the peripheries. Bicycle trails are well maintained however, so negotiating debris fields along certain stretches of roadway between moving traffic and parked cars seems unnecessary by comparison.

Last year's total mileage was about a third of where I was four years ago, I appreciate the fancy Velo Viewer infograph telling me I climbed Mount Everest once, but it is not as comforting as not having foot pain. As such I spend more time riding Metro Transit buses and trains, watching the consistent diaspora of bicycle styles between Minneapolis and Saint Paul. On the same day a casual observer will see skinny-tired steel frame single speed fixies with leather strapped pedals being ridden through the same snow, slush and ice as a person on a carbon fat bike with monolithic tires set to 9 psi. The benefit of there being ample snow means the cross country ski trails are more usable, where it is more likely to see a fat biker negotiating single track mountain bike trails than a rebuilt single speed.

Speaking of ample snow, it just snowed again and it sounds like it will snow some more before March. By April it might still be around, but hopefully the transition between road tires and studded tires will not include too many instances of the former on ice or the latter on asphalt. 

Early season skiing on man-made snow, Minneapolis . Photo by Michael McKinney

Finding the bike lane, Minneapolis. Photo by Michael McKinney

Art Shanty Projects on Lake Harriet, Minneapolis. Photo by Michael McKinney

2017 Velo Viewer Infograph, Michael McKinney

December Sunset, Saint Paul. Photo by Michael McKinney

Skiers racing along Nicollet Mall, February 2018. Photo by Michael McKinney

After finishing War and Peace around Mid-Summer, the remainder of my Goodreads Reading Challenge was mostly non-fiction books, with a couple of Tom Clancy and John Grisham books in there too.

 

Michael's 2017-reading-challenge book montage

Michael's favorite books »

Tight lines.

November Update

Walter Donovan: Where are these missing pages? We must have them back!

Elsa Schneider: You're wasting your breath. He won't tell us, and he doesn't have to. It's pretty obvious where the pages are... He's given them to Marcus Brody.

Henry Jones Sr.: Marcus!? You didn't bring him along, did you? He's not up for the challenge.

Walter Donovan: Brody sticks out like a sore thumb. We'll find him!

Indiana Jones: The hell you will! He's got a two-day head start on you, which is more than he needs. Brody's got friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan. He speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom. He'll blend in, disappear, you'll never see him again. With any luck, he's got the Grail already.

[Cut to Marcus in İskenderun]

Marcus Brody: Does anyone here speak English? Or even Ancient Greek?

- Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade

That quote reminds me of It's a Wonderful Life, and the uncle who keeps a pet crow. The holidays are approaching, the weather has cooled off and fishing season has wound down for me. Three weeks ago the bail spring on my fishing reel broke, so I contacted Daiwa and their customer service department kindly forwarded me two new ones.

It took a little elbow grease but the new spring works, the reel is again functional and next year I'll hopefully get back to enjoying the distance from Minnehaha Falls to Lake Calhoun, which has formally had a name change to its original Dakota name, Mde Maka Ska.

As far as baking, biking and books goes, here are some recent efforts:
A couple loaves of bread from my Half Ass Kitchen;




My Goodreads reading list for the 2016 Reading Challenge; 

 

   

      2016 Reading Challenge
   

       

         
       
     

        Michael has
            completed his goal of reading
            40 books in
            2016!
     
     

       

hide

     
     

        44 of 40 (100%)
     
       

          view books
       
 

...a recent bike ride from Saint Paul to Lake Minnetonka, about 46 miles on a sunny afternoon;

Sometime over the summer I happened to see a number of beautiful sunsets over Lake Hiawatha, so I thought I would add a photo of that in here too.

Tight lines, rubber side down, don't forget the salt, adieu, ciao, whatever.

Happy holidays.

Lake Hiawatha Summer sunset 2016, Minneapolis. photo by Michael McKinney.

I apologize for the sloppy formatting and inaccessible hyper links.

Meantime, the fishing has been decent.

So what does a person do with a painful case of gout and two broken metatarsal bones? How to navigate through the days when walking is painful and running is out of the question? Never mind cycling, trail running and self-sustaining behaviors of good intent, what about getting dressed in the morning without grimacing in pain, slipping in the shower or simply keeping a job?

I got back to working, eventually, but I had to wear a removable plastic cast on my leg for a month, and then intermittently for another month. I am still not running, but have been cycling more, and riding Minnesota's NiceRide bicycles as much as wearing comfortable cork and leather sandals will allow, (they're good for the gout).

Did I mention the fishing? Since working at Target Field in the early part of this year, I had the initiative to steer away from fly fishing a little bit, in order to more simply cast on lakes the Rapalas, Mepps and poppers fly casting does not accommodate without snagging tree limbs or pedestrians on the back cast. So while it has not been particularly pleasurable or devoid of pain, I have managed to catch a nice walleye, a couple northerns, a bass or two and made it back into some Wisconsin trout streams for the more refined "single barbless hook" fly fishing I used to enjoy more readily.

If it all sounds too good to be true, consider how stadiums are cleaned.

As per Breads, Bikes and Books, I did finally get out and ride my sixth or seventh century on labor day. It started as a nice day to get out and ride, so a simple ride out to Stillwater seemed feasible. As I started I added a short loop onto the front of the ride, and after sitting with friends and relaxing in Stillwater, completing a century didn't seem impractical or even all that noteworthy.

It was however a beautiful day with a surprising lack of confrontational episodes.

Here is the link to the MapMyRide route I created.

Lake Nokomis Largemouth Bass, Minneapolis; Photo by Michael McKinney

Mississippi River Smallmouth Bass, Minneapolis; Photo by Michael McKinney

Minnesota NiceRide Selfie, Stone Arch Bridge, Minneapolis; Photo by Michael McKinney

Storm Clouds, Minneapolis; Photo by Michael McKinney

Saint Paul Sunset; photo by Michael McKinney

Removable Cast and NiceRide, Saint Paul; Photo by Michael McKinney

Goose Biot Stone Fly; Photo by Michael McKinney

Willow River Rainbow trout, Wisconsin; Photo by Michael McKinney

Stearns County, MN, Blue Moon; Photo by Michael McKinney

Minnehaha Creek walleye, Minneapolis; Photo by Michael McKinney

Pierce County, WI, Brown Trout; Photo by Michael McKinney

Minnehaha Falls, Minneapolis; Photo by Michael McKinney

Kinetic Linkage

I bought a Garmin Forerunner 210 in July, and have been making a consistent effort to record and track my rides on Garmin's website, Strava and MapMyRide for the past three or four months.  I selected Friday's ride into Minneapolis, a Thirty-Three mile ride along the Greenway, Cedar Trail and River Road then back to St. Paul.  There was a decent southern wind and rollerskiers were out in abundance. 
The GarminConnect, Strava and MapMyRide blog widgets allow me to post a coded link with a map and some information about the ride, as I have done here, but I'd rather be out riding.  The blog widgets will indubitably be garbled and messy, impossible to discern from somebody else's information and basically a waste of time. 
When I purchased my Felt F75X, I also bought a pair of studded winter tires from Finland.  Bring on the cold.

                    Create Maps or search from 80 million at MapMyRide
               

Footnote - this is a fantastic read.

It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels by Robert Penn

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


What can you say about a guy from Wales who rode around the world because an Irish woman inspired him?  foolish?  Naive?  Soft hearted sentimentalist? I am sure somebody has already had their say about Robert Penn's private devices, his proclamatory penchant for his own garage, his mountainous ascents, the people he hob knobs with, his own rough scrapes flying down nepalese gravel roads...it all sounds so free spirited and liberalizing a reader might be sidled with grief for their own lack of experience. 
As a journalist approaches a story though, Penn forgoes his own (admittedly infrequent, compared to an average Strava user's twitter feed) philandering, and adopts a humble, awed perspective, as if he were holding the museum curators hand after wandering into the lecture hall after closing time.  As a cyclist and as a journalist, he wants to know the long history of each component: the chain, the seat, the handlebars, the derailleur, the frame and does each piece of engineering the justice it deserves.  As a cyclist himself, Penn comes across as an individualist and nearly peerless - his attitude seems appropriate for the characters he encounters while building himself what amounts to a white elephant.
The vast majority of people who ride a bicycle would never have recourse to something like Penn's investment, but any of them could take it out for a spin. Perhaps that's what Penn would want to know he had expressed in his memoir - dream bike or not, if it's got two wheels, a drivetrain, a seat, handlebars and a sturdy frame, it'll roll.



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