Coffee At Peet's Populaire... Recovery Special

Cleaned-up right brifter that caused me trouble on the SB-400

I packed the Brifters, a few spokes and then went to the garage to replace the wheel skewers on the SOMA. After fumbling around for a bit, I finally got to the 7-Eleven start around 8:30 AM. Thought I might as well get in a rando ride and stop by and see Joe at Nytro for some Brifter "project" work. Weather was overcast and temp in the mid 50's. Arm warmers and woolie cap was it for me, in addition to a T-shirt underlayer over the aged yellow/red NCCC cycling jersey.

Street sweeper on Old Hwy. 395 up toward Deer Springs Road. Good. I did a double wave and sort of thanked him. This road is rough and full of trash. Not a lot of traffic along Camino Del Rey at this time of day. I did greet rider Joe from the North County Cycling Group just before Bonsall. Joe lives off Circle R, is a good rider, has the latest fast stuff and is a long time employee for AT&T. I got a yogurt at Mickie D's and sat around a while.

Slight headwind along Hwy. 76, and it increased on the SLR Bike Path to Oceanside. Stopped at Carlsbad 7-Eleven after riding around the Coast Hwy. detour. They are still building a "traffic circle"  between Carlsbad and Oceanside. A stocky guy on a new Bianchi was playing "tag" with me along coast hwy. southbound. I would cook him on the small rollers and we would join up on the flats. That is until a red light appeared. Then he would run them and I would stop. I would always catch up to him later and he would say he "didn't see the red light because his head was down". I'm sure the police would agree too!

Stopped at Nytro, where Joe worked over the Brifters to no avail. On Sunday, I had pulled the unit from the SL-1, did a heavy degrease and relubed it. It was shiny and worked better, but still got stuck on the downshift. Joe used canned Tri-Flow with a air compressor. Same result. Guess they had a good life from 2003 on different bikes. He is looking for some alternate options... including going to a 10 speed. He didn't like my suggestion to put down-tube shifters on the carbon frame. With a $0 budget for this, we'll see what happens.

The good news is that the G'skin Hardshells came in to the warehouse and I could pick them up later in the week. These are tough to come by... 28mm and foldable. A couple sets of those should keep me riding this year. Also picked up a few 2.0/1.5 Swiss Revolution spokes for the rear wheel project...again.

I checked out of there into sunny skies and an ocean breeze. Nice push inland where I rode over to Del Dios and did some climbing on the way to Escondido instead of the usual route down to the SR-56 Bike Path. Sometimes I add on miles or do a different option to this route. Massive headwind on the loop over to San Marcos. My legs weren't feeling all that great by now anyhow. At least it was sunny inland.!

-randorides