South East Cyclist

Lee and i have been grinding away getting this thing set up ( not really we just set a date and made some phone calls and sent a few e-mails)

it;ll be a blast though i promise 

So all day Friday a few of us played with the idea of hauling to Philly and going to the North American Cycle Courier Championship. Friday night at about 10 we were finally set on going having secured Melissa’s car for us to take so I had to end my drinking for the night and be ready to leave at midnight.
so at 12:15 am Myself, Mike Garzon, Lee Flythe, and Jason Bailey are officially on the highway and we have to make it to Philly by 10am for registration.
The drive hadn’t been bad except for the fact that we met up with tropical storm Ernesto somewhere around DC or Baltimore and we made it to the general vicinity that registration was at about 9:30am.
being that its raining so hard, we couldn’t see a pothole on 5th street which is cobble stone as it is. The pothole would have tripped up a hummer, so our little Toyota Echo we’d borrowed from Melissa went THUD and we found we had a flat. no big deal though, we set Jason and Mike to find registration while lee and I got to jacking the car up to put on the donut. It didn’t take long to fix, but half a block later we hear another tire burping air and parallel parking the car to figure out what was up took one of the front tires too.
Three flats from one fucking pothole, does it get any worse? (yes but were not to those parts of the story yet). We found a friendly bike shop, and the guy pointed us in the right direction for registration and to get fix a flat for the two tires that weren’t punctured that only had burped and dis-beaded. we called Jason and Mike to meet us were registration was to be, but the place wasn’t open, and later found out that registration was closed due to rain except at the race site. Got the fix-a-flat and it worked, I just didn’t get enough air, so we went back to the bike shop to borrow a pump and dry off.
Now we have 3 properly inflated tires and a spare so were mobile again, we head to the race site.
As we pull on to the 676 on ramp we hear an awful clicking sound coming from the right front indicating that the CV joint is fucked. Realizing that there isn’t much chance of getting that fixed until we get back to CLT we push on driving carefully. Arriving at the race site cold, wet, and broken spirited we check out what’s going on (which wasn’t much of shit) and who was there (which wasn’t many) we all mull around wondering who if any of us will muster up the courage to qualify. None of us did nor were as some goof ball skids up on a fancy Colnago track bike advertising loudly that he’d woken up at 8:30 this morning with “cocaine and shit” still running out of his nose.
With the mood set Mike caught up with a pal of his from Jersey named Joe, so we head there to dry our clothes and relax and figure out were a tire place is. Got dry, watched MTV and hung out until about 4 at which i figured we’d better get to the tire shop by 5 in fear that they ‘d close then.
The tire place quoted me 76 bucks and gave me an hour wait which we used to walk around a shopping mall in the shopping mall capital of the US. While leaving the mall i got in touch with my good ole buddy Fruitcakes who lives about half between DC and Richmond setting up a place to crash if we were to head back (i hadn’t slept in 33 hours when we picked up the car) We Fueled up, ate at Chilis and got the fuck back on our side of the mason dixon line. We got to Fruitcakes place (that happens to be right next to the creepiest old abandoned church ever) about 11, Lee and I had beers, caught up on times with fruitcakes and went to sleep for the first time in 40 hours, got up and made it back to CLT.

the car’s CV joints held up - Any one know a good place in town i can get them replaced at?

Thanks to the dude at Bicycle Revolutions in Philly, Joe in NJ and fruitcakes for helping us keep our sanity.

Damn spontaneous road trips are expensive.