It’s finally warmed up and the ice ruts have melted away. This means the training Steve had delayed must now be in earnest. Why training, you may ask? My occasional riding partner for thirty-some years, Steve, and I are planning to leave on a bike tour from Ventiane, Laos to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in three weeks. You may say that it’s too late to train, but I won’t comment. As anyone long married […]

tl;dr version: No, they haven’t found my two stolen bikes. And it’s not likely that they will. It’s a surreal moment, that moment when you pull up Lincoln Nebraska Stolen/Missing Bikes or Nebraska Stolen Bike Alert and start to type “STOLEN!” You’ve read too many of these posts. You know the exact format: make, model, color, distinguishing characteristics, location of theft, type of lock breached (because we all want to know). You’ve simmered with rage […]

Grades were submitted early last week, so I had visions of long, happy rides through the countryside to celebrate. Mother Nature had other ideas however, in the form of the biggest snowfall in about 10 years for Zhoukou. Sure, we get more snow and lower temperatures in Lincoln, but they’re not set up for it here. There is no snow removal equipment other than people with regular shovels, and a few excavators borrowed from some […]

Most weeks I can manage two good rides of at least 50 miles each on my two days off, with some other shorter rides in between. This past week was the third week of my class’s finals, so with finishing up my 491 students’ individual oral exams, grading work, and compiling grades, that was not possible. Finally, yesterday I managed a fifty mile New Year’s Eve ride, and talked Steve into coming along. I promised […]

I managed to take a break from finals this week to explore new territory beyond Xihua to the northwest. Fugou is the largest small city in that direction that is a day’s ride out and back. (About 90 miles round trip) It rates a 1 1/2 Dicos according to my criteria using the fast-food chain as an indicator of the size of the city. Usually my internal coffee homing beacon takes me directly to the […]

It’s been tough getting away to ride much during final exams, so I’m going to share some of the variety of transportation I’ve seen here. Cars simply are not the best choice. Most people get around on electric scooters and three-wheelers. There is also quite a variety of electric micro vehicles that don’t seem to know what they are. They even pass through the bike and pedestrian gates at the campus entrances. Bicycles here are […]

I had so many unanswered questions from last week I decided to ride back to Taikang to learn more. Also, there are some better county roads up that way, in good condition and not too busy. I found a nice little piece of single track to connect some pieces together, too. There was some dusty double track that claimed to be county road, but to call it that was a stretch. I took a little […]

This week I’ve been focusing on the northeast, the area above Huaiyang. Thursday’s shorter 52 mile loop introduced a little new territory, but it was chilly and my feet are always what suffer most. Wool socks and thinner outer socks with a plastic bag layer between mostly worked, but I need to find my toe covers. I took some new county roads, and one “T”ed in a village with a lively winter market going on […]

I’ve gotten into a pattern of riding to smaller cities in the out-and-back-in-a-day range. This week it was Dancheng on Thursday and Shenqiu on Sunday, both to the south-east. I have students from both of those cities. It’s interesting for me to see if I can sense a regional difference to a locale, and the route used to get there. I have a couple of indicators. What do they make their pita sandwiches with, and […]

I’ve been watching the Hellobike bike shares filter throughout Zhoukou this past week. I wish I had access to a web page that would track their gps chips because it would be interesting to see how they’ve spread out. From a few masses totaling maybe a thousand bikes in the area surrounding campus, I’ve seen them spread to the edges of the city. They’ve reached almost into the countryside east, and on the industrial ring […]