So thanks to the colossal pile of orange garbage, $2.89/litre for diesel at the moment and I guess I missed my chance to fill up my jerry cans, which means I’m not driving the Land Rover any time soon, especially seeing how out of tune it is. I’ve taken to using the Koleos to run errands, seeing as it’s way more efficient as a baseline and petrol is a tiny bit cheaper. Anyway, I thought, I have a bike in the garage, why not use the bike?
We are only about a kilometre from the shopping centre and I don’t often need to travel down there for much more than groceries. I’ll use the car for the shopping, but to pick up a few essentials like milk or whatever, I reckon I can take the bike.
I needed to pump up the tyres and I took the opportunity to give it a good wipe down to get rid of all the sawdust. The trip computer wasn’t working so I put a new battery in that. I thought the gears weren’t working and sat down to recalibrate them but then they started working well enough that I didn’t bothered. Truth be told I haven’t played around with Shimano Index System gears before and need to read up before I do so.
The tyres have a bad habit of going sown slowly so I dragged out the old Land Rover battery and hooked it up to Chris’ air compressor. The battery is in poor shape but it pumps the bike tyres no problems. I also got the battery charger and arranged them all on one of the shelves so I have a little air setup ready to go. The compressor will run off the battery and then I can charge it up.
The snag in my genius plan is the fact that we live on top of a hill. Getting down to the shops is easy, but coming back up with a load of groceries is, well, there are sections that I find a little hard. Only a couple. A lot of the route is easy enough but there are two stretches that are a bit taxing. Burning legs, that sort of thing.
Okay, I’ll admit that I’m probably not in the best aerobic condition and if I were a kid, the hill wouldn’t be an issue, but I suspect that it’ll be a few trips before I’m feeling comfortable with the ride up.
Come to think of it, maybe I could make a point of doing the exercise on the regular. I’ve often thought that it’s a shame I have this reasonably nice bike going rusty in the garage. Perhaps this will be the catalyst for me to start using it a bit more.