In Which I Find Where Cheap Beast Bikes Go To Die

Bike lock at apartment complex locking nothing to the rack.

I've noticed before that bike racks near dorms at Iowa State University are a bit, well, chaotic, with many abandoned bikes accumulating.

They seem to run to inexpensive mountain bikes, like The Beast. I suppose if you had a nice road bike, you’d be unlikely to be taking it to ISU or parking it outside, for that matter.

Friday, we moved Ben back to college. He’s in graduate school now at ISU and lives in an apartment complex near the campus. And it seems the such complexes have racks much like a dorm building.

So this is where beast bikes go to die.

A cluster of dying bikes at a rack near ISU in Ames. Crazy wheels.

Ben is near a shopping complex with both a HyVee and a Goodwill. One end of the complex featured a totally empty bike rack, but then again it is summer in Ames, maybe it will see more use later. And it was near a health clinic—perhaps the sick don’t pedal to their appointments. To be fair, there were some in-use bikes chained up at HyVee.

Empty shopping mall bike rack. Near an SUV. Sigh.

Goodwill featured many pink girls’ bicycles—seems to be a glut on the market for those.

Bikes for sale at Goodwill. All the small girl pink bikes you can possibly want.

The empty bike rack was a bit discouraging, sort of like an empty park on a beautiful day. Oh, wait. Ben’s apartment is next to a nice city park. With an empty playground on a nice summer day. Parents, turn off the electricity in your house and chase the kids outdoors. Even if the kids are in their 20s. Bike racks and playgrounds are only good if they are used.

Empty city park on a nice summer day. And only person we saw recreating outside was a comply lass in a tiny bikini working on her skin cancer. It's a crazy world.

In Which I Try Some New Biking Fashion

What all the cool kids wear to bike in winter. Actually, it's the warm kids. They look silly and feel ridiculous, but on a truly cold day, this is what you want on your feet.

Pretty cool, huh?

My winter boots are falling apart—where the rubber lower meets the leather upper, the right boot is split all the way along the left side and the insulation is sticking out like milkweed fluff about to fly away. So my wife suggested I borrow my son’s boots, since he’s a student at ISU, has cleared walkways to transit on and does not use his boots. Plus, we both have the same size ginormous feet.

At the same time, my regular biking shoes are suffering from snapped hickeys—the nice rubber closers that Eldon Rocca so kindly got me on RAGBRAI are wearing out. I need to find some new ones.

So this morning, when I was headed out on my icy slide to work, I donned Ben’s snow boots. I felt ridiculous mounting the bike with those huge clumpy Frankenstein monster things on my feet.

And I also felt divine. I wear more than one pear of socks, including an insulated one, when I bike in cold, but usually my feet are the least comfortable part of my body.

Not today. Despite bitter morning winds that chilled my face and made me wish I had chosen warmer mittens than my thin biking gloves, my feet were fine, happy, toasty and warm.

Indeed, both the ride in the morning and in the afternoon were, from a did Joe freeze or not point of view, pretty successful. I stuck my paws in my pockets when stopped, and my fingers got a bit chilly, but not painfully so. And even if the chill breeze froze my cheeks a bit—well, the rest of me was so covered that it did not seem to matter much.

The boots were good for riding downhill. In the summer, when you go down a little incline, you shift into 7 and pump and see if you can get up to 20 mph. In winter, you stop pedaling, deploy your landing gear, and hope that you don’t slip on the way down. Today was a landing gear day.

I’m happy to report I’m home safe and sound. And despite my morning qualms, I biked home while it was still light out, and the streets were probably slightly better than they had been. Still slick, still icy, but what melting there had been turned some formerly dangerous stretched a bit mushy.

So, I’m proud to say I made it. And that I biked this very cold winter week. I probably won’t get a lot of miles in next week either, but I’ve got 54 for the year so far. Given the weather we’ve been having, that’s not too shabby.

And now I have warm feet on cold biking days.