Out and about

Here is another photo for "Mars", the Saigon Rose on Pacific Ave, the old part of town.

Another photo for "Mars" from www.bikeforums.net, this is the Black Duck Freehouse on 2nd Ave.

Some of you may have noticed that I've been using a larger picture size for my jpgs, I find that this works better because people no longer have to enlarge most of the pictures to see the details in them. I figured that today would work well for me to go take a ride downtown and finish taking the rest of the pictures that "Mars" from www.bikeforums.com had requested. Sunday morning is always the best day to explore the downtown, there is very little traffic so you can pretty much ride everywhere without worring about cars. It is getting very cold out, I had to ride with my earmuffs and gloves on, no snow though, the thick bank of grey clouds melted away in the late afternoon and it warmed up alot. I'm really getting used to the recumbent now, and it is getting more and more like a regular bike for me to ride. I've been looking at lowracer recumbents lately, I think that these are directly parallel to road racing bikes in terms of performance. I've never actually tried one, but I think that being that close to the ground would exaggerate the speed factor of this style of bike. Unfortuantly most lowracer designs would not really be that practical in everyday use. Being so low makes forward visibility an issue as well as making them less visible to traffic. There seems to be alot of debate on the net regarding which is better, lowracers or highracers, especially after this year's RAAM (Race Across AMerica) which pitted the two types of bents against each other. Many people are saying that one is better then the other, one is faster, etc. I don't think that it really matters, as far as speed goes between the two bikes, I think that it is more about the person riding it rather then the bike design. I think that the highracers were probably in a more comfortable position which may have contributed to difference in performance at RAAM. Anyway I don't think that it is fair to totally write off an entire class of bicyle based on the perfomance of them in a race. Anyway I will probably write again on Tuesday, tomorrow is Halloween night so I don't think that it is very safe to be out riding at night. Till next time, ride safe and have fun.