In San Diego, The Bikes are Ready…

We made it to San Diego California and we will stay until just after Christmas. We have spent a lot of time here over the years so we will re-visit a lot of favorite places we have been to before. We also have some things to repair and items to order now that we have an address to send things to.

When we settle in for longer stays we take our bikes off the bike rack and then take our bike rack off too. We love our car’s 3-bike rack but it kind of gets in the way when we want to access the back of the car.

With our bikes off the first order of business was to get our bicycles back in shape. Since we keep them on our bike rack with no protection they have gotten quite weathered. We don’t have high quality bikes for just that reason but we still need them to get around smoothly especially at our site here in San Diego. From our park we can easily bike to beaches or we have miles of trails all around the bayfront.

Our first repair was to replace some of the sticking/rusted cables on the bikes for the shifter and the brakes. There is a big difference between shifter cables and brake cables but a simple way to tell the difference is to simply look at the size of the “bead” on the end of the cable. Large beaded cables are brake cables and small beaded cables are shifter cables.

I used a little Finish Line DRY Teflon Bicycle Chain Lube on the new cables and reinserted them in their appropriate sleeves. Next up was to lube the chain. I decided against taking the chains and soaking them in oil even though I know that that is really just what they needed. Instead I opted for the same Teflon based lubricant spray and got the chains and gears all lubed up.

Perfect… now all we needed was a good test ride. Our park here at Mission Bay RV park is the perfect park to bike from so our first ride was over to Mission Beach to enjoy the boardwalk and ocean views. Now that our bikes are all  prepped up we look forward to using them everyday on the Mission Bay Trails during our stay here…

NOTE: We are currently in San Diego CA until Dec. 28th before spending the rest of the winter in Arizona…