4th of July Failure...

We were on the road by 10:00 AM this morning, pedaling toward the coast with the idea in our heads to turn left at Carlsbad and head into San Diego. We wanted to have a “mega-mileage” day, going as far as we could knowing that we'd meet up with our friend at some point in the late afternoon or early evening.

Did we achieve our goal? Sort of... we rode 60 miles. But we rode the last 15 or so with some very limited gear selections. As we pedaled into La Jolla our chain started riding up between the middle and outer (larger) chainring whenever I shifted to any cog (gears on the rear wheel) other than the largest two. That left eight other cogs we couldn't use (actually 6 that I would actually use) because the chain was “floating” instead of engaging on the chainrings.

If I shifted up to the large chainring, I could use all the gears in the rear (except the largest cog in the rear) – but climbing hill in this gear doesn't work for us. As we got into San Diego, the need for hill climbing gears would have intensified any time we wanted to head inland.

So... I guess I'll have to find a good bike shop tomorrow and see if we can figure out what's going on, or else just pack everything up and head back home. We came here to ride... and if we can't ride, we might as well go home and whine to our regular mechanic.

Do you like today's picture of the beautiful Pacific Coast? Yeah... we were so busy riding that I didn't even think of pulling out the camera. After the bike started acting up, I was fuming too much to even remember that we should get a picture or two. Next time???