Day Four
Bellevue Square to Puyallup, 38 miles
Today’s route took me down the east side of Lake Washington, then due south along the Interurban Trail through the Kent Valley to Sumner, and finally a right hook into Puyallup, to stay with my brother Paul and his wife Anita. Nice pavement, mostly not in traffic, under a sunny sky and (finally) something of a tailwind.
Today was my first ride ever towing a bike trailer. I loaded it maximally in order to learn how the system behaved fully loaded. Riding with a trailer has some advantages and some drawbacks. My hope was that the advantages would outweigh the drawbacks. A bit of background here: My bike is a Cannondale CAADX cyclocross bike. The design is optimized for on and off-road riding. Last spring, I demonstrated the mantra of “ride the bike you have” by crossing the 3,200 mile US southern tier on this bike. However, due to its design, I had a strange mashup racks and bags to carry all my touring gear. The rear of the bike was rigged like a standard road touring bike, with a rack and panniers. The front however, could not carry a rack because of the design of the front fork, so from the seat forward I was rigged like a trail-riding bikepacker. This setup was complicated and time consuming to manage, so while looking for a better setup for this ride, I landed on the idea of pulling a trailer and getting all that weight off the bike.
I’m going to ride this trailer set up to Oregon, and because of today’s experiences, I am abandoning the trailer. I hadn’t left Bellevue before I discovered the unresolvable issue—my cyclocross bike has a light, nimble build, of aluminum. In any turn, the trailer torques the chainstays out of alignment and when the bike is straightened out again they unspring and whiplash me in the opposite direction of my turn. Riding in a straight line, it’s fine. In turns, particularly whippy high speed turns, the whole rig quivers and oscillates. Also, the bike and trailer is SO LONG! It looks kind of ridiculous. If it was an appreciably better solution, I could put up with awkwardness of a 12 foot long bicycle. But it is categorically worse.
This is a very bad development. It’s too unstable for me to feel safe riding this bike with this trailer. I need a completely new solution. I believe I’ll have to limp my way to Oregon and end the ride there until I resolve this. As of now, I think the best approach is to return the trailer to REI (I love their return policy!), get a proper touring bike, and go back to a pure road touring racks-and-panniers setup.
Meanwhile, Paul has Manny’s Pale Ale on tap at his house, so the day ends well.
