About Rob

Bike trail and long distance cyclist and publisher of about-bicycles.com

Fall Colors and Bike Trails ~ Des Plaines River and North Branch Trails

Although I haven’t been on any new bike trails recently, I just had to get out and enjoy the fall colors on some of the more wooded bike trails that I knew about and had already ridden and to get some autumn bike trail photos for this site. Fall Colors on the North Branch Trail

We are pretty close to peak fall color season here in the Chicagoland area ~ I’m not sure if we are a little past the peak or if it is going to get even better but it was definitely nice enough for some beautiful trail rides.

I had quite a few choices for wooded trails and I initially chose The Des Plaines River Trail (near Euclid / Lake Street) and the North Branch Trail (south of Lake Street). My other runner-ups were Busse Woods Millennium Trail (south end) , the Moraine Hills trails and the Fox River Trail. I’m sure there are others too but there is only so much time for trail riding (even in peak fall color season)! 🙂

Most of the time when I ride a new bike trail ~ or parts of a trail that I had not been on ~ and bring my camera my goal is to photograph and document as much of the trail as I can (and try to get get quality photos).

My goal for the bike trail photos that I just took was to capture the fall colors and maybe even get some creative shots. So these photos do not cover a specific route as much as just give you the feel of riding these trails in the fall. It’s all about the colors!

Creative Fall Colors from Des Plaines River TrailThe photo on the right is one of my more creative fall color photos. This one is one of the mushroom photos in the Des Plaines River Trail photo pages (you’ll know what that means if you check out the photo pages).

So without further yaking here are the new Fall Color Bike Trail Photo Pages: See the Des Plaines River Trail Fall Photos here (3 pages) and see the North Branch Trail Fall Photos here (2 pages).

A little bad news for me and other small businesses on the Internet…

It was really nice to be able to get out and enjoy some scenic fall bike rides and I needed that after the bashing that my websites (including about-bicycles.com) took from Google recently.

Google does updates quite often to try to improve their search results. A lot of the time they succeed and their search results improve. Other times they get worse.

The about-bicycles.com bike site took a big hit with the last round of Google updates and the traffic to this site has dropped significantly. We used to get over 3,000 visitors per day in peak cycling season. It is much less now but fortunately we still show up in the search results fairly well (unlike some other small businesses that were basically ruined by this update).

Google used to state that they supported small businesses and individual website owners but it appears that they are now favoring big business. Just check out the search results and see how many times you only get the largest internet sites and little if any smaller sites (often low quality too).

OK, sorry about rambling on about this but I do have a reason for mentioning it here.

If you like any of the pages on this website, like the new fall photo pages that I just posted, please “Like”, “Tweet” or use one of the other social media buttons at the bottom of each webpage on this website. This will not fix all of the damage that the Google update did to this website but it will help a little and every little bit helps.

At least a lot of our pages that got dropped still show up on Bing and Yahoo! (just an FYI if you want to help break Googles Big Business Monopoly) :-).

The Illinois Great River Trail Description, Info and Photos

Although I have not personally been out on any new bike trails recently (to report on) one our our website visitors had just ridden the Illinois Great River Trail ~ from Moline to Savanna, Illinois ~ and was nice enough to share his detailed (57 mile) ride information with us.

I was actually just looking into riding this trail a little while back so I was very interested in hearing what this trail was like. Our website visitor, Carlos of Chicago, initially sent a brief email telling me of his recent ride on the Great River Trail. I asked for a little more detail (just to see if it was a trail that I may want to ride sometime) and I was quite surprised at the detailed ride report that I received!

I received a well written and very detailed description of his ride(s) on the GRT and even a few photos taken from the trail and surrounding area. I asked Carlos if it was OK to post his article and photos and he agreed that it would be OK.

Here is a link to the NEW Illinois Great River Trail Ride Report and Photos that we just received and posted.

I often see this trail refereed to as simply “The Great River Trail” but I remember posting another bike trail article on the Great River Trail, in Wisconsin, some years back, that also runs along the Mississippi from the Onalaska to Marshland in Wisconsin, which is why I usually specify that this is the Illinois Great River Trail.

I hope you enjoy the new Great River Trail article and thank you Carlos for sharing this information with us!

Unusual Rear Derailleur Problem and Bike Break Down

I have had some bad bike luck lately. I had a flat tire a few days ago which was not that bad although I do not usually get a lot of flat tires. Then yesterday I had a very unusual bike break down at the end of my ride.

I wasn’t doing anything out of the ordinary. I was just riding down a hill on a neighborhood street and all of a sudden I heard a terrible noise and my pedals would not work. I kind of thought that my chain just got hung up but there was some noise from the back wheel too. I stopped (I didn’t really have a choice about that) and took a look and my rear derailleur was bent and hitting the spokes on my back wheel.Bike derailleur break down

I also noticed that one spoke was completely ripped out of the wheel and wrapped around the cassette on the back wheel. The pedals were locked and would not move. I tried to bend the derailleur back but could not get the pedals to work although I did get it so the back wheel would turn freely so I could walk the bike home. You can see the mangled spoke and where it was ripped out of the wheel in the photo.

One little side note. It was starting to rain so I wanted to get back home a little faster and discovered that I was able to use my bike as a scooter (by standing on one pedal and pushing with the other foot). This is actually a lot faster than just walking if you get stranded and if the bike will still roll.

My best guess at what happened is that maybe my rear derailleur was too close to the wheel and somehow got hung up on a spoke that might have been sticking out or something. Then when the derailleur caught the spoke it ripped the spoke out and pulled the derailleur into the wheel.

Why did this happen? I have no idea. It was a weird thing to just happen randomly after everything was working just fine for the last 12 miles.

I’ll be bringing my bike in to my LBS later today to see how much this repair is going to cost me. I suspect that this will be an expensive repair.

Day at the Races, 2013 Bikes, Hybrid and Misc.

It’s been a while since my last post here and there have been a lot of little things that I wanted to mention or write about that were not really enough for a full blog post by themselves so I decided to include them in this multi-topic blog post.

Bike and Horse RaceI’ll start off with my Day at the Races. My wife and I went to Arlington Park race track this weekend for something fun to do and, in my case, to get some photos too. This is not really a bike related topic but when I was there I noticed a lot of similarities in the racing scene between the horse race and the bike races that I was at this summer (the Tour of Elk Grove specifically).

OK, well the horse race scene is much more about gambling and there are plenty of other differences too but for some reason there seemed to be a lot of similarities too. They are both colorful events that draw large crowds (and are good photo ops 🙂 ). Both events share the anticipation of the race itself, a similar speed/pace, and the excitement of the race and competition are similar.

Well, this is a stretch but I had some Photoshop fun merging one of my photos from the horse race this weekend with one of my TOEG photos (the photo shown here). I also just looked up the average speed for horse races and it is very close to the speed of professional bike races at times so the photo may not be as obscure as it appears at first (well, maybe if the cyclist had a paved track).

2013 Bikes Available Online

In other actual cycling news, I wanted to mention that I have discovered that there are now some 2013 bikes for sale online. Specifically, there are some 2013 versions of the popular Cannondale bikes for sale at REI like the Cannondale Quick, CAAD10 and CR1 for starters.

Hybrid Elliptical and Recumbent Bike

As we start falling into a little more of the indoor fitness season, I have been looking into the latest fitness products out there and found an interesting new product from Proform. It is a hybrid elliptical trainer and recumbent exercise bike. This is not going to be for everyone but since hybrids do typically meet the needs of some people that are looking for a combination of two (or more) products in one, this may be perfect for some of you. You can see my review on this fitness product at the Proform Hybrid Trainer Review on this site.

Helpful Information about your Social Security Statements

And finally I want to mention one more topic that is not even bike related but I have found this information to be very valuable and since this blog has a large number of readers and subscribers I wanted to post it here (as well as on some of my other sites). If you are here only for the Bike Info and/or if this does not apply to you then please feel free to skip this one.

This is not real new but many of you may have noticed that the government does not send out the hardcopy Social Security Statements that show your entire working history, earnings and potential retirement benefits from Social Security anymore.

What you may not know is that you can now get the exact same Social Security Statement online at: www.ssa.gov/mystatement. You will need to setup a login  account which will require your SSN (of course) and additional personal tax information that only you should have. It looks like the security is pretty good and I am glad about that. You may need to look some stuff up in order to setup the login account.

Anyway, once you set this up, you will have access to all the SS Statement info that you used to get in the mail.

About-Bicycles has been Mobilized!

For those of you who have been looking for new bike trail updates (photos, videos), info on bike events or fitness products here is why I haven’t had a chance to add a lot of new content to the about-bicycles.com site or the Bike Blog recently.

I have just spent over a month doing a major conversion on this website to make it much more mobile-friendly. This website is well over 500 pages and I just installed the mobile changes yesterday.

about-bicycles new responsive design, mobile format

about-bicycles new mobile format

As we all know, mobile devices (smart phones, tablet computers, etc.) are everywhere now and I know that over 1/3 of the visitors to this website get here via mobile devices so I thought it was important to make the site more mobile-friendly (which it now is – the blog and the website).

For the more technical readers out there I have converted the site to a Responsive Design format (liquid) using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I may post a page on this site with more of the technical details at some point but I am a little burned out on it now and actually want to get back to the bike, bike trails and fitness stuff on the site again.

Just for a summary, the text and photos on the about-bicycles.com website will now adjust to fit whatever screen/view port/device that is accessing the website. This will be most noticeable on smaller devices such as smart phones although the display will also be a little nicer on tablet computers too.

When viewing this site on a typical desktop or laptop computer you will not notice much of a difference other than the links at the top of the page are now in boxes with rounded edges. If you re-size the width of your browser window, however, you can see how the content adjusts to the size of the screen. Once the screen is around 500 pixels or less it will convert to a one-column format which is how it will be displayed on smart phones and smaller devices.

Generally, when you access a website, that is not mobile-friendly, on a smartphone the device will try to display the entire page and it will be very small (mostly unreadable). You then need to pinch the screen to make the display larger and you will also need to scroll back and forth as well as up and down to view the content.

Old and New Responsive Design smartphone display

The Old (left) and New (right) smart phone website display

Mobile-friendly sites (such as about-bicycles.com now) will display at a more readable size and most will display in one column on a smart phone so you only need to scroll up and down to read the page. The photo on the right shows how this site looked on an iphone before and after the mobile conversion.

Although the liquid, responsive design approach is widely accepted and I believe it is a much better way to accommodate mobile website visitors, many of the biggest sites on the internet maintain separate web pages for mobile and desktop visitors. They also have larger IT resources to handle the additional maintenance and are not usually as responsive as smaller sites such as about-bicycles.com.

I need to make one note on the conversions. This site has quite a few bike trail pages, photos and videos and some of the older bike trail pages and photo pages have not yet been converted (it will be obvious when you land on one of those pages). I will be working on these pages next so they will all be converted very soon. Also the bike trail videos may not work on all mobile devices.

OK, sorry if that got a little long. It was a big project and difficult to summarize in a few sentences so I just did the longer version.

Anyway, like I said, I really hope to be able to get out and get some new bike trail photos and updates soon (fall can be a great time for bike trail photos) so stay tuned for some more actual cycling updates.

P.S.

I also saw the Tour of Elk Grove show on Comcast a week or so ago and the show was done very well and it was really nice to actually see everything that was going on during the 3 day event.

The show will be aired 3 more times this month and you can see the schedule on this post HERE . You can also see our update, photos and video of the TOEG here

Same About-Bicycles Blog ~ New Liquid Format for Mobile

Old About-Bicycles Blog Format

Old About-Bicycles Blog Format

This is really just a technical note to let you know that I am converting the About-Bicycles Bike Blog to a new Responsive (or liquid) design format so that this blog will display much nicer on mobile devices such as smart phones, iPods, iPads and tablet computers.  So feel free to visit this blog on your smart phones and tablets!

Starting today you will be seeing a new theme for this blog (and there may be some minor changes during the update process) but don’t worry all of the existing content and information on this blog will still be here as it has been for so many years.

Since there are thousands of visitors to this blog each year (a little over 13,000 at last count (and I am humbled and grateful for your responses)) I wanted to be sure to post a notification that this is still the same About-Bicycles Bike Blog.

The photo that I have included above is how this site used to look with the previous (non-responsive, fixed width) WordPress theme (iNove).  The new WordPress theme that I will be using is just called Twenty Eleven. I have tested and implemented this new theme on one of my other (less popular) sites and it has most of what I need for a decent blog theme (although there are still some trade offs and other things that I would like to see).

This new WordPress Theme allows a banner photo on top and I searched for quite a while to find a good bike blog type of photo that works well in a long banner-like size and decided to just go with a background design for now.

Photo used for new WordPress theme

Photo used for new WordPress theme

I actually just started with a photo of a sunset with some high grasses in the foreground since I liked the colors. Then I blurred it out so I could include text in the foreground and re-sized it to fit the banner proportions. If you do not see the new banner yet then I have not completed the conversion just yet (it will be coming soon).

This is actually just Step One in the process of converting the entire About-Bicycles.com website to a more mobile friendly format. I have already completed most of the work necessary to convert this website to a Responsive Design (via CSS) but have not yet implemented the changes. This will be happening soon but there is only so much time in the day.

OK, I’ll be backing up this blog now before the conversion. After that you should see the new format. I hope you like it ~ on your Desktops, Laptops, Smart Phones, Tablets or any other device that you may use to access this blog. Later.

REI Labor Day Sale and Clearance

REI Labor Day Sale ~ REI Card

My own REI card ~ outdoors by a tree, of course...

If you are a card carrying REI member (like I am) and if you get the REI notifications via email (like I do) then you probably already know about the upcoming REI Labor Day Sale and the End of Season Clearance that they have going on right now. If you are not a member or if you just missed or ignored the email, here is your notification and/or reminder.

Although the Labor Day Sale does not officially start until tomorrow (it runs from 8/24-9/3). I believe that they have already started the End of Season Clearance because they have dropped the prices on many of their bikes (and other cycling accessories) significantly.

I have to go out to the REI site all the time to check the prices that I have posted for their bikes on this website and I can tell you that when I did my latest price checks I found that many of the quality bikes that REI carries are marked down from $100 to $300.

REI is one of the companies that actually drop their prices significantly when they have sales (a few times a year) and that is usually the best time to shop there.  So when you are ready for a new bike or need some new cycling gear (or any of the outdoor stuff that they carry) this is the time to do your REI shopping.

As for the Bikes that I found on sale ($100 to $300 drop in prices) there were Cannondale, Scott, GT, Raleigh and the REI brand Novara (which are actually pretty nice bikes). I know that these bikes were on sale but these are just the brands that I have reviewed on this website. There may be other popular bike brands on sale also.

I have included the sale information, links to the bikes that I know have significant price decreases and links to the other cycling products on sale on our August Deals and Discounts page here.

On top of the current deals that REI has going on, if you are an REI member (which is a good deal) then you also get an annual dividend (usually 10% of your REI purchases throughout the year) in March. What can I say? I’m a big REI fan (and now is a good time to be one).

Schedule for 2012 Tour of Elk Grove on CSN Chicago

I did some digging and found out when the 2012 Tour of Elk Grove show will be televised on Comcast Sports Network (CSN Chicago). The TV listings online only go out a week or two and I could not find a schedule for the airing on the tourofelkgrove.com website or in a general Google search.

2012 Tour of Elk Grove on Comcast Sports Net Chicago

2012 Tour of Elk Grove to air on CSN Chicago

Since I wanted to know when this would be on, and mentioned that I would post the schedule here once I knew the dates, I called one of the organizers in charge of the TOEG and he was very helpful and gave me the full schedule.

The 2012 Tour of Elk Grove will be televised on CSN Chicago in September as follows:

  • Sun 9/2/12 at 4pm
  • Mon 9/3/12 at 3pm
  • Sat 9/15/12 at 4pm
  • Sun 9/23/12 at 1pm
  • Sat 9/29/12 at 4pm

All times specified are Central Time Zone.

Obviously, I believe these dates and times to be completely accurate at this time but if I find that there have been any scheduling changes or if I find any errors in the schedule above I will make the change here as soon as I become aware of any changes.

The organizers of the TOEG are hoping to get the event televised nationally in the future but this has not been arranged yet.

For those of us who were at this year’s TOEG,  some of the scenes should look familiar (and maybe we will show up as an extra in the crowd). For those who did not make this year’s event, maybe this will help inspire you to make it to next year’s Tour of Elk Grove ~ as a spectator or even as a participant!

Note: The photo above is not from the actual CSN show but a composite of one of my own photos of the TOEG pasted on to a blank TV screen to convey the message of this post.

 

2012 Tour of Elk Grove Review, Photos and Video

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Tour of Elk Grove (TOEG) bike races were held last weekend and I did end up going to the event all 3 days (Fri, Sat, Sun). We did not get to the Tour until later in the afternoon on Saturday which was just before a big thunderstorm hit so I did not get to see anything on Saturday. Fortunately a friend of mine was there earlier in the day and contributed many of his photos, of  Saturday’s events to the about-bicycles.com website. The photo below was contributed by Dale Kiffel.

2012 Tour of Elk Grove, TOEG

2012 Tour of Elk Grove Race

I ended up taking a ton of photos at the TOEG and even a few short video clips on my camera. Between all of my photos and all the photos that my friend contributed it has taken me quite a while to filter through them, select the best ones and format and post them on the website but I am finally finished.

You can read the Tour of Elk Grove recap and see the photos and video on this site at the Tour of Elk Grove page. There are links to all of the photo pages and the short video at the bottom of the page.

As for the Tour of Elk Grove itself, this is a big event with professional cyclists from around the world as well as races for entry level riders. There’s even a Big Wheel Race for the Real Entry Level riders! I’ve included a few photos of this big event too :-).

This is a 3-day event with time trials on Friday, multiple stage Mens and Womens professional and amateur races on Saturday and Sunday and prize money somewhere around $75,000.

The start and finish line and main stage is located on Elk Grove Blvd at Audubon Park. The event is free and parking is where ever you can find a place (mostly in the neighborhoods on one side of the street)). The races take place on the residential and commercial roads in Elk Grove Village.

If you are into bike riding (you don’t even have to be into racing) I would think that you would find the TOEG interesting and a lot of fun. I sure did. You can get background on this event and all of the race details at the Tour of Elk Grove website at www.tourofelkgrove.com.

As for the article on this website, I have summarized the event on the main Tour of Elk Grove page and tried to capture the feel of the event, from a visitors perspective, with the photos (and short video).

The races are a lot of fun to watch even though I was not always at the finish line to see who actually won many of the races that I saw. Although there is a lot of excitement at the finish line, it is also nice to view different events in other locations (like by some of the sharp turns).

There were a number of Comcast people (with professional video equipment) at this event and I believe that it will be televised in the Chicagoland area soon. I am still working of getting the details on when and where it will be aired. Stay tuned. I’ll post an update here when I find out when it will be on.

So for those of us who were not able to fly off to France to see that little race that they have over there (le Tour de France, of course) :-), at least we have a UCI Category 2.1 international bike race of our own that we can go to right in the suburbs of Chicago!

The 2012 Tour of Elk Grove Race is on!

Here’s another quick update to let you know that the Tour of Elk Grove (a little closer to home than the TDF for a lot of us) has just started this afternoon. I will do a more complete update on the race and activities after the entire event is over but I wanted to post an update now for anyone that may be interested in this event and that lives in (or is visiting) the Chicagoland area.

2012 Tour of Elk Grove Cyclist

2012 Tour of Elk Grove

Personally, I was disappointed that I only found out about the race after it was over last year and when I saw it televised on Comcast ~ which they will be doing again this year ~ so that is really the main reason for this blog post at this time. See our Cycling Events Page for a brief description of the TOEG and a link to the site with all the official information.

Anyway, I did go to the TOEG today (Friday) and it was very professional, a nice friendly environment and lot of fun to see.  I also learned quite a bit this afternoon. First of all, the main event area (Start and Finish Line) is at Audubon Park off of Elk Grove Blvd. There is directions to this on the TOEG website but they don’t tell you that Elk Grove Blvd is closed to automotive traffic and there is really no main parking area.

So basically what you need to do is to park in the neighborhood somewhere close to the park. This worked fine for me, and since I brought my bike with me ~ which I would recommend if possible ~ it was easy to get around. The other thing that I found out about from talking to a guy who had been going to the TOEG for 8 years now is that they close off different roads for events at different times and if your car is close to the main event area you may get locked in (until about 8pm) when they close off the roads for the main event.

I also brought my camera, since these events make pretty good photo-ops and took the photo above. I hope to get a lot more over the weekend.

So if you are into biking and looking for something fun to do this weekend, stop on by the Tour of Elk Grove.