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Mountain Bikes and the School of Hard Knocks

It wouldn't be so bad -- really -- to come home one day and find that your wife ran off with an itinerant revival preacher, that your pickup truck was towed and impounded, and that your dawg was run over. At least they'd write a country/western sawng about you. But who is going to give any sympathy to a mountain biker with a broken heart and a cracked frame? It cracked some time last week, just fore of the seat post/top tube weld. Sigh. With a little bit of analysis I think I know who the culprit is. I had ridden with a rear rack that was cantilevered off of the seat post, because you can't mount a standard rack on a full suspension bike, which bends after all. The rack warns people to put no more than 25 pounds on it. I put on less than half that. With 20/20 hindsight I suspect that their number was pulled out of thin air (or the next most imaginary source, computer modelling.) It would be too expensive for the rack manufacturer to do real-world, destru

Mentors, Proteges, and the Sociological Spreadsheet

Silver City, NM. During the Vietnam War protest era, the educational establishment sprouted new fads, including the one that the students should decide which subjects get studied and which don't. A relatively well-known educator countered at the time that if a teacher has spent decades of his adult life at his job and has learned nothing more than inexperienced children, then that teacher has wasted his life. I agree with that argument and think that it applies just as well to professional travelers and full-time RVers. Ahh but there is a problem. None of us really likes to listen to free advice from anybody. The minute you start giving advice you are presuming a type of superiority over other people. This is the emotional appeal of nominating yourself as "world improver" and social reformer, a la Ralph Nader or Mayor Bloomberg. Onto these two counter-currents we can add a third: as we age we might feel a concern for our "legacy." We are forced to acknowl