The Race to Imperial County

Everyone has at least one nerdy goal.  Nerdy goals are somewhat cool in that they often show something about the goal setter in a very unique way.  It’s obvious that I like to ride bikes and I’ve been to a lot of places.  My nerdy goal is to ride into every county in California.  One of the things that I really love about this place is that the different regions are well so different.  Often times there is so much geographic homogeny that we see little difference between places.  California is not like that.  Each of them has some differences, even if they are subtle.  I had the map out to see how I was doing and realized I had just two to go: Riverside and Imperial.  I’d been in Riverside before, just not on the bike.  I’d have to go through it anyway to get to Imperial so I figured I’d hit two birds with one stone.

I’ll also put out there that rides for me often serve different purposes.  Sometimes it’s to share the afternoon with friends doing technical riding.  Other times it’s to go out and take pictures.  Sometimes I just need to think.  There are those few times that well, I need to fill that nerdy goal.  This ride was the latter.

This ride was one that I was dragging my feet on.  Life seemed to have 100 different things going on and I was late in getting all the needed items in line to prepare for departure. Putting this sort of stuff off to the last minute never helps things, so I had two gremlins to bear here.  My tire seemed to not have enough tread on it and the chain had some frozen links in it.  The tire seemed to be the easy part.  I’d just ride it until I needed to get a new one.  I called around and found a few shops in So Cal that could help in various locales.  This was much easier than when I had to do the same in Atlanta.  The chain seemed a bit more problematic.  I cleaned it with WD-40 twice and it seemed to loosen up a bit.  I then put chain oil on the next morning.  A good friend of mine told me it wasn’t that big of a deal and the places that had tires also had chains.  Fortunately, once on the road things loosened up nicely.