Charlotte was perfect.

I took no pictures, because I was too busy having the best day of my year.

I spent the afternoon pedaling between a handful of Charlotte bike shops, looking for some sort of SRAM 8-speed shifter to replace the hated low-end gripshift on the Dahon.  I failed at finding anything suitable, but got to meet a few of Charlotte's bike mechanics, and talk about how cool Paul Thumbies and barend shifters are.  I found the first shop, and he sent me down the hill to the second shop, that has been open longer, and has some older parts on hand.  They had 5, 6, and 7 speed shifters, but nothing in the way of 8 speed that would work.  The man there thought for a minute, and then suggested another shop, that might have more SRAM components in stock, and off I went.
It was the most corporate of the day's shops, but not an extremely large chain store, where we briefly considered a Shimano Alivio shifter set, but the left hand would have gone unused, and there was no real guarantee that the Shimano shifter would work properly with the no name derailleur that has been controlled by a SRAM shifter so far.
I talked to this last guy for the longest, including about building up bikes with barend shifters and Paul Thumbies, and then bought a set of Crank Brother's cleats from him, so that I'd have a spare set, and then I took off back towards the hotel.

First day of spring, hilly southwest Charlotte neighborhood streets, getting passed on asphalt by lycra clad men on suspiciously clean dual-suspension mountain bikes, and just the perfect amount of sunshine made the ride back to the hotel quite possibly the best ride that I've had in years.  I wouldn't mind staying here longer, but not downtown.

Reading the last few paragraphs, it doesn't really sound that fantastic, but the entire afternoon somehow granted me a perma-smile that hasn't quite gone away yet.

St. Louis Bicycle Misadventure

St. Louis, I'm not a fan.

I've been to this city on two occasions, and both times I spent a day sick as all get out from some sort of food related bullshit, and was warned about shitty areas of town.

I recently had three days off before a quick two days of shows in the city, and after the requisite day puking my guts out, I decided that I should ride the bike that I spent so much time and trouble getting out here and hauling around in the bay of the bus.

I brought my lovely Dahon Mu P8:

And by lovely, I mean that if I surfed down hills on the Goruck backpack in that photo, it would probably ride better, and be in better condition at the bottom than the bike would be after the same ordeal.  I would recommend that anyone looking for a folding bike buy anything other than a Dahon.  Half of the bolts are SAE, half are metric, and it generally seems inferior to the Dahon offshoot/domestic dispute that is Tern Bicycles in every way.  Sadly, Tern did not exist when I bought this bike, and I knew that if I'd ponied up double the money of that Dahon for a Brompton or a Bike Friday Tikit, my lady-friend at the time would have sold my testicles to recoup the extra cost.

Honestly, the bike isn't that bad, I've just not ridden it in about a year, and have been riding my Surly Disc Trucker, which although it's not a high end bike, has drivetrain components miles and miles better than this dorky chunk of aluminum, and much stabler steering.  The only real complaint I have about the bike, other than the bolts not all being metric, is the gripshifter.  I need to spend some time tuning the shifting I suppose, but I'd just rather have some sort of thumbie-ish friction shifter, and some new grips with bar ends.

But back to the misadventure!

I set out from my hotel near downtown and headed over to the Arch.  My objective was to cross both the Mississippi River, and a state line via bicycle, because I've never done either of those things (via bicycle).

This picture is cheating, this was actually taken from the first day I arrived in St. Louis.  The weather was much worse on the day I rode down here.

I was looking for the Riverfront Bike Path, which I found, next to a lovely abandoned factory of some sort.

I had been pedaling along next to what I thought was the path, underwater, according to Google Maps, but I guess in reality was not yet the path, because I had travelled almost a half a mile from the Arch before I found any signage.  I did however find this nice aquatic sculpture.

The St. Louis Riverfront Trail starts from that nice parking lot behind the sign, where I'm certain that no one ever buys hookers or blow, and then heads off into the nicest part of St. Louis that I've ever visited.  I rode along a fantastic bike lane paved with crushed glass, surrounded by empty lots and industrial buildings in various states of abandonment.  If I had punctured a tire, my plan was to just run the fuck away and try to file an insurance claim for the bike.  I was already super sketched out by the random car with Illinois plates that slowed down to check me out at the trailhead parking lot while I was taking pictures, speeding off after I'm sure that he decided that I was neither a prostitute nor a drug dealer, so I was ready to find the trail itself, where presumably I would only be accosted by bums.  The faded bike lane lines eventually directed me off the street and onto the trail itself.  The start of the actual trail evoked a sort of zany St. Louis City Museum sense of architecture that I'm sure is well utilized as shelter by homeless people in inclement weather.

I rode down the trail for a few minutes, until I came across a "trail closed" sign, a chain link fence, and no signs for a detour going my direction.  I didn't particularly want to rejoin the unbelievably poorly maintained road through post-apocalyptic St. Louis and try to find the next place to join the trail because it had started sleeting, and I didn't think that my softshell would hold out the moisture long enough for me to make it to the end of the trail bridge and state line, so I turned around.  Joining the road back towards the Arch, I encountered some more fantastic bike lanes, and then what I can only assume is perhaps the finest bike infrastructure that could exist in any American city.  It appears that the traffic engineers in St. Louis have decided to fill the potholes in some sections of the city by painting sharrows directly over them, and then allowing the touristy horse-drawn carriages to fill the rest of the holes with shit.

Thank heaven for fenders.

And fuck you too, St. Louis.

On a seriously positive note,  Urban Shark, the downtown location of St. Louis's Big Shark Bicycle Company was a pretty cool store, and has some super helpful employees.  I bought some arm and knee warmers from them, as well as some grip tape because one of their sales associates took the time to produce a St. Louis bike map and direct me towards some nice places to ride to find alcohol, food, and gentrification.  If I hadn't gotten sick, I would have checked out a few more of the areas he suggested, but I was too generally disgusted with the weather, and the piss poor state of the places I did ride to do anything other than head back to the hotel and look at cat pictures online.

They had a Surly Big Dummy in the window, so they also get cool points for that.