Hey everyone, I'm back after 3 weeks off.
I'm taking some inspiration from
DQRider and posting a picture of today's bicycle. My photo is crap compared to his, but here it is anyway.
This is the first time I've ever ridden this particular bike to work. It's a Peugeot Performance 5000, which best I can figure, is a mid-90's mid-range racing bike, old enough to still have been made in France. I bought it several years ago for 250 Euros in Brussels, and rode it up to Amsterdam over three days. Once there, I put it into a cardboard box and brought it home, where it has hung on a hook in my garage ever since. The bike looked pretty much stock when I bought it, and came with early STI levers that didn't work very well. The front shifter worked okay, the back shifter hardly worked at all. For my European bike trip, I managed to coerce the rear derailleur onto a cog in the middle of the ring, and then just used the front shifter to gear up and down. Thankfully, the Netherlands is very flat, so shifting was minimal.
During my vacation this summer, I managed to find some gently used bar end shifters and brake levers at a snobby little boutique bike shop in the trendy area of town, so I finally refurbished the bike, along with new cables, bar tape (double-wrapped with yellow and blue to match the bike's paint scheme), and tires. The tires that were on there when I bought it were in decent condition, but they were teeny little 20mm things (horrible for riding on some of the European cobbled streets). These are 23mm. I would have liked 25mm tires, but the bike shop was out, and in fact, I took the last 23mm tires they had in stock.
The bike seems to ride nicely. I don't really like bar-end shifters; I would rather have down-tube shifters in fact, but those are hard to find. I also don't really like the narrow racing bars, but they're okay for an eight mile commute. Chilly morning, with the thermometer on my house showing 5C/41F, and damp streets from 48 hours of much-needed rain. (There was snow in the mountains, 400 km/250 miles west of here.) I too saw a couple of deer, which ran across the path about 100 meters from where I took the picture above.
Have a great day everyone.