Today I had Betsy drop Nathan off at River Market Cyclery, to meet me there after work. I had taken his bicycle in for brake work and seat adjustment two Saturday’s ago, but had forgotten about it until yesterday. I called this morning to see if the bike was ready — it was scheduled for last Wednesday, and they were just finishing work on it (they’d had their own busy backup, so it worked just fine). We arranged to pick it up after I got off work today.
When Nathan and I arrived we were third in line to be waited on. It had rained earlier in the afternoon and was misting on and off. So we waited about 15 minutes, and then Darren rang up our bill, and spent another 5 minutes after that adjusting Nathan’s bike seat. He kept on adjusting it up just a little more. While I am still taller than Nathan, I think he might have the longer legs already.
From there it was a bicycle ride home, through rush hour traffic. I gave Nathan the rules of the road, and then we took third street to the bicycle lane on the Heart of America Bridge. My new bicycle got way ahead of his, so I waited for him on the other side, and then we took the turn along the bicycle trail and up Swift.
At the corner of Swift and Armour we ran out of bicycle lane on our route, so I gave him another infomercial. There are no east-west bicycle routes in North Kansas City, but you can ride with traffic if you follow the rules. And then we were off.
Traffic was fine. It was misting but not unpleasant, we kept about a 12 MpH pace. It wasn’t until we crossed under the 4-lane and started up the climb to the faster speed zone that the rain started coming down more.
When you get to Walker Road, we want to take a left hand turn, but are on the right side of three lanes. So I kept going slow watching for a gap, and then we did a diagonal to our turning lane.
It was when we were climbing the hill into Avondale that Nathan asked me if I knew the time and I asked why. Because he needed to log a workout for his online PE course and wondered if he could use the bike trip. Made perfect sense to me. So I told him, 30 minutes, 5 miles, average 10 mph.
I didn’t realize when I asked him to come pick up his bicycle from the shop that I was helping him do a homework assignment.
At The Rainbow 