Various Mother's Day Malfunctions at River Legacy Park

I made my Mother's Day call to my mommy on the drive to River Legacy Park to ride my bike. I didn't know if it'd be dried out enough for the mountain bike trail, but I was optimistic, because the Tandy Hills were dried out yesterday.

Well, I got to the mountain bike trail parking lot, saw the trail closed cable was not up. But I saw a lot of clumps of mud in the parking lot. Not a good sign.

I got my bike out, got it ready to ride, loaded it up and hopped on. When I went to switch sprockets the chain went all limp, stuck trying to make the switch. I didn't know what was wrong. I got all greasy getting the chain on the sprocket. I don't like getting greasy.

Got back pedaling again. Going up the first steep part, as I put pressure on the crank, the chain messed up again, going limp. This causes me to pretty much have to jump off the bike. The same thing happened again. Then a third time on a very steep uphill, I came very close to a bad wreck.

So, this was not being fun. In addition to the malfunction, the trail was very muddy, in way too many places. The mud began to build up on my tires. The trail should not have been open. Between the mud and the malfunction I decided to shortcut it out of there and head back to my van to see if I could figure out what was wrong with the chain.

I figured maybe the chain, gear shifting thing was malfunctioning due to needing to be lubricated. Lubrication seems to have become my go to fix-it solution. So, I sprayed some White Lightning on anything that moved and set off to pedal the paved trail for a few miles.

The first picture above is looking across the bridge that the paved trail crosses to get to the north side of the Trinity River. It was on this bridge that I had my best bobcat encounter, with the bobcat coming on to the bridge from the south side and me from the north, with us meeting in the middle. It was a friendly meeting.

The second picture is looking east from the middle of the bridge. There were a couple guys fishing on the left bank, well, the bank on the left in the picture.

There were a lot of people picnicking, barbecuing, walking, roller blading, skateboarding, biking and scootering today.

I'm thinking I may need to take my bike to a bike doctor. Does anyone know a good one? I've taken bikes to Bicycles, Inc. in Hurst a couple times with bad results. The first bad result was the gears sprockets needed to be replaced. And so Bicycles, Inc. did so. I get the bike back with the new gears, go to ride it and the chain has all sorts of problems.

So, I take the bike back to Bicycles, Inc. and am told that due to it being a new gear set, or whatever it's called, I needed a new chain, because the old chain had been worn in to match the old gearset. Why was this not taken care of in the first place? They had no good answer.

And then about a year ago my new bike was missing a couple spokes and the wheel had gotten out of round. So, I took it to Bicycles, Inc. I was told it'd be ready to pick up the following Tuesday. I go to pick it up. Ooops. They hadn't got it done. I was told they could get it done within a half hour. I said fine, I'll go to Wal-Mart.

When I got back to Bicycles, Inc. the wheel had been trued, as good as it could be, I was told.

I got out of there, put my bike back together, and found that the wheel was way wobblier than when I brought it in to Bicycles, Inc. This was to be my last time taking any business to Bicycles, Inc. in Bedford.

And then I kept getting one flat tire after another. After the fifth flat, or maybe the sixth, I figured out that the Bicycles, Inc. bike fixer guy had not put back the liner that keeps the spokes from causing flats.

I had a good place to get my bike worked on when I lived in Washington. There must be a good place somewhere in Texas.