Yesterday was the winter solstice, the official first day of winter. Actually we have winter here for a while. Today was very cold, with high winds and high wind chills. We also have about two feet of snow on the ground and the piles of snow beside our driveway are now five feet high. It is definitely winter here in Ottawa and may prove to be a record-breaking year for snowfall, too.
As I have mentioned before, winter is definitely not the time to quadracycle here in Ottawa. Some people do cycle all year round here, but the city's habit of pouring thousands of tons of salt on everything each time it snows means that bicycles, like cars, disappear in flakes of rust quickly. We just cover our quadracycle in oil and park it in the nice dry garage until the snow is gone, where it stays rust free.
2008 was an odd year for cycling, because it was an odd year for summer, at least in this part of the country. Without a doubt we are solidly in the grip of climate change now. Our winters seem to be suddenly colder and with a lot more snow. They also seem to arrive earlier and leave later than in the past. The summer of 2008 was cool and very, very wet. In looking back through our blog entries most of them seem to mention the endless rain we had to contend with. We don't like cycling in the rain so that meant that we didn't do as much quadracycling as we wanted to do. We had set a goal of trying to quadracycle 1000 km and only made it to 505.8 km for the year.
Of course it wasn't just our quadracycling trips that suffered, we didn't do as many hikes as we would have liked or other outdoor activities, either. We had to plan carefully and count on the weather forecasts to deliver a rain-free day now and then. Our infamous quadracycling camping trip was a complete wash-out.
But the wet summer wasn't all bad. The city stayed very green all year long, until it turned white, anyway. The flora was amazing, like living on the west coast!
Whenever we had a dry day we took advantage of it and got out cycling. We didn't get very far from home this year, getting downtown Ottawa on the Sunday bike days was about it for some 30 km rides. We love doing those - we always have a great time and meet lots of interesting people along the way, many of whom stop just to ask about our Rhoades Car.
2008 was also the year of the cracked dérailleurs. It was in mid-June that we discovered that both our rear dérailleurs had cracked. Our Rhoades Car was delivered with two rear SunRace derailleurs and two front Shimano derailleurs. The Shimanos have been great, the SunRace have not.
When we identified the two cracked units a quick call to Beth at Rhoades Car plus a couple of photos had new dérailleurs on the way to us, covered under warranty. We installed these and rode on them for a while, inspecting them regularly. And then on September 1st both rear SunRace replacement dérailleurs turned up cracked too. The factory were happy to send us a another set of SunRace derailleurs, but we decided to get our own Shimanos locally. It saved a bunch of time in shipping delays and we were quickly back on the road. The Shimanos have been great ever since.
The only other mechanical problem we had was a loose pedal on Hallowe'en, while we were out enjoying a rare dry spot on the calendar. This was quickly solved by replacing the factory lock-washer with some locktite blue instead and it has been fine ever since, as well.
I think the best cycling week of the year turned out to be the first week of November, when we had finished Indian summer, had a significant snowfall and then had another Indian summer again. It was week of dry and warm weather.
Of course 2008 was also a good year for participation in our little website adventure by our good friend and correspondent from Lethbridge, Gordon Koppang. He contributed many great articles on a variety of quadracycling subjects. We settled on him sending us completed items in PDF format and just posting the results whole. They are all still there, cataloged and linked from our home page.
Of course the nature of the future 2009 quadracycling season is currently a mystery. Will it be wetter than 2008? Hopefully not, but we have to get through the 2009 XC ski season first! We will continue to post quadracycling news here as we have it over the winter and then things will get busy again in the spring. We hope you will keep reading and perhaps add a comment or two to this blog!
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