Tundra_Man 

Consecutive bicycle work commute number 859:

My wife left town this last weekend to spend a month with her elderly widowed father and help him out for a while. So I'm manning the fort at home. One of the things that's on my to-do list while she's gone is to get a few things on her car repaired. Now's the time to do it, because she won't be needing the vehicle.

Her car is a hatchback and I figured I'd just throw my bicycle in the back so when I drop the car off at the shops I can ride to work from there. Previously I was able to barely fit my road bike in it if I lowered the rear seats of the car and took off the front wheel of my bike. However, given this week's forecast I was going to need to haul the fat bike. Yesterday afternoon I did a test-fit and sure enough, the bike wouldn't go in due to the handlebars being ridiculously wide on this bike. So I stepped back and figured out a "plan B."

I still had the old bike rack from her old car that is designed to strap onto a trunk. I had been meaning to sell it on Craigslist for more than three years, but just have never gotten around to it. I pulled it off the hook where it was hanging and managed to get it strapped to the back of the hatchback. It's a little sketchy, but it seemed to be staying in place. I decided to risk it rather than going with "plan C" which would be driving the car to the shops and then walking to work.

This morning I woke up to 10F degrees, a 25 mph wind, -8F wind chill and two inched of fresh snow. I spent a half an hour blowing the snow off my driveway with the snowblower, then I loaded up the bike and drove to the shop. Today's maintenance item is new tires. Her old tires had been put on new when we bought the car, but were the absolute cheapest tires the seller could have found. For the last three years we suffered through the winters with horrible traction because I felt bad getting rid of tires that still had tread on them. This year they were getting bald enough that I could justify sending the old ones to the landfill. I had a few moments where the bald tires were sliding around in the snow, but I made it. I was more concerned with someone behind me being unable to stop and slamming into my fat bike hanging on for dear life to the rear rack.

After dropping off the car, and convincing the guy behind the counter that I really didn't need a ride to work and that I would have ridden my bicycle even if I wasn't having the car repaired, I headed for the office. This snow is exactly what a fat bike excels at. It was bombing through the powder without slowing down, and in the spots where cars had packed down the snow on top of the layer of ice it didn't slide at all. My old winter bike really struggles on the snow packed down by cars. Had to fight the headwind and ride mostly uphill to the office, but that will mean an easy ride back to the shop at 5 PM when I return to take the car home.

Got to my desk two minutes before 8 AM and then listened to everyone coming in late complaining how bad the roads were to drive on.