So that’s what a road bike feels like.

I ride a sweet little cruiser (mine’s more like the men’s version at right), as you know if you’ve read here for a while. I love her; she’s so stylish and just the thing for commuting around town. But of course I knew there was more to be had from the cycling experience. I’m an avid watcher of pro cycling and I’ve seen those svelte featherweight machines that let you go cranking up the Alps or the Pyrenees like a goat. This week I finally got to try an honest-to-goodness road bike, my neighbor’s 1992 Serotta… which she just happens to be fixing up to sell. (It just happens to fit me, too.)

This bike has seen many, many tour miles, and she’s that particular shade of raspberry that was popular in 1992 (my mother has a ski parka of the same vintage that would totally match). It took me a few passes up and down the street to get comfortable changing her gears and getting my feet into the toe-clips (my neighbors know I don’t have special clippy shoes and were kind enough to change out the pedals for me). Then we were off and away on an Airport Loop (which is the 17- or 18-mile ride you do to blow off steam after work if you live in NE Portland), right up the ridge behind our houses, so smoothly I didn’t have to stand up on the pedals and wasn’t even breathing hard at the top.

Our neighbor gave me pointers to better position myself on the bike and had me practice dropping my hands and shifting my weight back to descend more safely. I learned how to trim the gears with the front derailleur. We took the speed bumps in the neighborhood streets like cavaletti. And wheeeeeee! we flew down the highway ramp to take the road to the river.

Today was beautiful, so Mr. G and I went out again, this time into a stiff headwind along the Columbia, so I got to practice “sucking his wheel,” which I swear is nothing dirty… especially when it’s consensual. Okay, I’ll stop now.

Knitting! Yes, I still do it. No updates of late because I’ve been finishing some gifties and slogging away with some garter stitch that wouldn’t make for very interesting pictures. But I’ve got a Tomten worked almost up to the shoulders, and it just might come out big enough to fit a kid who’s been outgrowing my efforts faster than I can finish them since he was born. And the nephew has been in his February jacket and drooled in approval, although it’s still pretty big for him, and his mother was kind enough to refer to it as “the best sweater in the world.” Awww.

I promise content more interesting to the knitterati soon, if I can just survive the combined pressure of Holy Week choir singing and the need to get the big project I’ve been writing-editing-designing all year for my school ready for the printers by next week.

July means several things to me: my birthday and the years’ worth of memories of elaborate treasure hunts, games on horseback, camping, and astronomy that go with it; the reliable start of halcyon summer in the Pacific Northwest; evenings outdoors enjoying the long light (though twilight comes much sooner in Portland than in my hometown) fresh produce from local farmers; and in recent years, the Tour de France.

When I probe for the origins of my obsession with the world’s greatest cycling race, I come up with the confluence of nostalgia for my first trip to France in 1998, a bleak city winter in New York, and my husband’s foray into triathlons. I think it was in 2005 that we discovered you could find video archives of previous Tours online, and I think I was the one to suggest teasingly to Adam that watching Lance Armstrong power up an Alp or two might bring his training sessions on the stationary bike to a new level. Before I knew it, I was ensconced on the couch (at an awkward angle; there was no room in our tiny apartment for the couch and the bike to face the computer at once) with my knitting, totally absorbed in the new world coming through the small grainy picture on the screen. The drama of the mountain stages, the cat-and-mouse in the peloton pulling back a breakaway or setting up a sprint finish, the beauty of the French landscape (my imagination ably filled in what the video quality left to be desired). The titanic rivalry of Armstrong and Ullrich, the death-defying descents, the colorful commentators and tifosi. I was hooked. When one year’s footage was over, we went back to the previous year. Soon I was watching the stages alone when Adam was working late. We didn’t have a television for that summer’s edition, but by 2006 we’d moved to Portland. We settled in our new house on July 4th, just in time to meet our cycling neighbors and learn that the bike store where they work would be showing the live Tour coverage at 6 a.m. each day. I got up extra early the first morning and made fresh ginger scones to share with the diehards who stopped in before work. Then I mesmerized them with my drop spindle while we all watched the race unfold.

To my dismay, the Bike Gallery stopped screening the Tour after that first year. But by 2007 we’d inherited a television, and I could stumble down in my pajamas, brew some coffee, and leave the door open for the neighbors to come join me. If the stage wasn’t over by the time I had to leave for work, I’d catch the end of the prime time coverage that evening. And always, knitting was bound up in the experience. Of course I joined the Tour knitalong as soon as Debby told me it was in the works. Last year, I translated a French pattern and set myself the task of completing a complicated cardigan during the three weeks of the race.

And this year? I have to keep the details of my project under wraps, as it’s for publication. But I’ll tell you this: it’s a vintage-inspired cropped cardigan in an unusual lace pattern, and it is every bit as yellow as the maillot jaune. It’s like buttercups, crocuses, daffodils, and Cheetos in a blender. I love it unreasonably. Maybe I’ll show you a little corner of it here and there, just to be a tease. It’s only five inches long and already I’m fantasizing about wearing it in Paris some spring with a voluminous skirt cut like it’s 1959, strolling the hidden gardens, reading on park benches, devouring daintily nibbling pastries at sidewalk cafés. Or maybe lurking in a slinky dress in a dark bar with a glass of absinthe, conjuring the ghosts of Degas, Picasso, Hemingway, and Toulouse-Lautrec, because it’s a versatile little number. (I’m not convinced absinthe would be all that pleasant to drink, but just say it aloud: “glass of absinthe” – what poetry.) Or best – and most realistically – of all, cycling the streets of Portland. If I can only find some wicker panniers for my Bianchi Milano, I’ll be able to pretend I’m a stylish French girl riding home from the market with produce and baguettes. And just think of all the knitting I could stash in the bottom.

Debby’s comment on the last post gave me the right analogy as I head into a weekend of insanity: Mr. G flies east on Sunday night to begin Best Manly duties for my brother, so there’s packing and cleaning and organization to do; an herb garden to plant with our neighbors; dog care to orchestrate; wedding gifts to plan and buy; absence from my job in the face of a huge looming project completion to prepare for; a fundraising run for Room to Read to participate in. Oh, and the Ivy stole to finish.

Four more rounds to knit on the edging, and then the beastly crochet chain to finish it all off. Debby and I share a love of knitting while watching professional cycling, so when she told me to dig into my suitcase, I knew exactly what she meant. Commentator Phil Liggett loves to say, when a rider hits the slopes of a tough climb at the end of a grueling day in the saddle, “He’s digging deep into his suitcase of courage now!” So into the suitcase I go, my friends. I should have some pictures of this life-sucking beauty for you by the end of the weekend.

Meanwhile, the weather couldn’t be less conducive to knitting. We’re taking aim at 97 degrees today (that’s 36 degrees for you Celsius folk, and much hotter than usual for May in Portland). The kids at school have been lobbying all week for their favorite hot-weather PE game, Drip-Drip-Drop. It’s like Duck-Duck-Goose, except that instead of tapping your friends on the head as you make the circle, you’re sprinkling – and then dumping – water on them. It sounds much more appealing than picking up the cashmere (thank goodness it’s laceweight – if Saxton and Marika lived in the southern hemisphere I could be knitting a Wedding Anorak or something). I got up extra early this morning to water the more tender plants and to sew the hem of my new sundress so I’d have appropriate garb to weather the stickiness while I knit like mad this evening.

So look out, world: I am turning a pedal in anger now! Bring on the mask of pain! I will not crack!

A week ago, Claudia threw down and announced a pledge to replace at least one car trip per week with a bicycle trip. That’s just the kind of challenge I can get excited about, since I have 1. a conscience, 2. a body that could use a little more exercise, and 3. a meager salary that doesn’t go far at the gas pump these days. She’s calling the effort Bicycles As Transportation / Knitters for Alternative Transportation: BAT/KAT. So Mondays are now BAT update days.

On Friday night, Mr. G and I pedaled down to our favorite theater for a $3 movie, pizza, and microbrew (we love Portland). Some Like It Hot was playing, and I’m happy to report that it’s still a delightful date movie 50 years after it was filmed. Saturday I rode to the yarn store to meet Katrin instead of driving, while Mr. G cycled to the annual giganticus tech-entrepreneur-geekfest known as Bar Camp. And yesterday we took the bikes when we went to meet Mr. G’s dad for dinner. That’s three BATs apiece: they’re all within two or three miles of home, exactly the range where we’d be most tempted to hop in the car, but the bike trip takes only a minute or two longer. We also walked for the groceries all week and took the MAX train when we went shopping for a purple tie for Mr. G to wear to my brother’s wedding. Since my job requires me to drive over 30 miles on weekdays (I carpool, but I still hold myself responsible for the environmental impact of the trip), I like to leave the car in the driveway all weekend whenever possible.

Now I feel like I need a marvy little sidebar BAT/KAT tally graphic. Too bad I don’t have skills like that.

And the knitting? The Ivy stole has crawled up to row 26 of the edge chart. I’m halfway there, except that the rounds are still getting longer. I don’t think I could conscionably use the word excruciating to describe knitting cashmere (hey, how has unconscionable survived in our lexicon but conscionable is obsolete? Add it to the list with words like wieldy and whelmed, I guess), but this edging is like the last 2.2 miles of a marathon. Why, Skacel, why can’t you make a #0 Addi LacePoint? What daft manager signed off on a plan to make #1s and #00s but nothing in between? I may have cast on an Indigo Ripples skirt for some much-needed stockinet on #5s.