Weeknotes 26-09

With temperatures reaching 17ºC and full sun, we are in the middle of Fool's Spring here in Berlin. Contrary to popular belief, the city has twelve seasons (according to a meme which circulates, well, every Fool's Spring), those are:

• Winter
  
• Fool's Spring
  
• Second Winter
  
• Spring of Deception
  
• Third Winter
  
• The Pollening
  
• Actual Spring
  
• Summer
  
• Hell's Front Porch
  
• False Autumn
  
• Second Summer
  
• Actual Autumn
  

Even if only temporary, the sub-zero freezing cold is behind us (remember, we're in Fool's Spring now), it was finally time to get the bikes out. The last time I was on a bike outside was when I had the accident. Nearly three months ago! Most of winter, and what a winter! On the bright (and oh the warm sun rays) side, not having been tempted to ride outside might have helped the healing process.

After the forced hibernation, with the exception of the adventure bike, the whole fleet had a ride at one point throughout the week: an impromptu lunch and bread run with the Brompton, a joyride on Tempelhofer Feld with the city cruiser / ATB build of the old Surly, and a full day of errands with the Yoonit mini cargo bike. That's what I call a good week!

We paid another visit to Nan Yi, the tea store, with the aim of getting Pu'er knife—a tool similar to either an awl or a letter opener—to produce less fine tea dust when breaking of parts of a tea cake. Of course we couldn't just go there and only get the tool. For once, the shop wasn't busy and we used the time to ask a bit about recommendations of getting to know the world of Pu'er tea. We ended up with two, small 100g tea cakes from the same tea garden in Yiwu, one processed in 2025 as a Sheng, and one processed a year earlier as a Shu, so that we can compare the two main processing styles with tea from the same region and terroir. And to try something a bit more special (oh how could I resist such temptation), we also got a smaller amount, 30g of broken-off pieces, of a 2006 Shu from Banzhang. There will be some tea tasting happening next weekend!

On Sunday, I finally got around cleaning said adventure bike. I crashed early in the ride back in December, so there wasn't too much dirt on it (...sort of patting on my own back with this one, now that the cast is gone). I replaced the chain, which had developed a bit of a rust film late last year. For what will undoubtedly be a very muddy spring season, I'm trying out the Vittoria Barzo tires, as their Mezcal ones do seem to be a tad bit slippery in wet conditions. Back in August I set those tires up tubeless, so it was about time to do something about it, but it turned out that there was still plenty of sealant in there. Luckily, similar to the Mezcals, these Barzo tires fit my DT Swiss rims perfectly, and setting them up tubeless was without much fuss. First proper ride outside should be the group ride on Wednesday night, exciting!

In the evening, by chance, I saw an email, right as it came in, mentioning that the last few tickets for this year's Hackenpedder bikepacking event would go on sale to the waiting list in a few minutes. Thinking it would be a sprint to get those tickets, I kept refreshing the page, typing in my details as if my life depended on it, and then, I couldn't believe that I managed to snag a ticket for the 1000 kilometre route in June. And with that, I am now busy setting up a training plan for the next three months until the event. While 1000 kilometres in a week is a fair bit of distance, given it's around the northwest of Germany with a small detour into Denmark, it's going to be very manageable in terms of elevation.

And because our Sunday evening wasn't eventful enough, we finally booked flights and hotels for our Japan trip later this year. This time, we're going to spend a good chunk of the time in Kyūshū, a first for us, specifically in Kumamoto (Bear City!) And because hopping on a seven-ish hour Shinkansen right after a long flight is probably not the best idea, we're giving Osaka another chance (we only visited it for a day back in 2018 and weren't particularly fond of it) for a few nights as it's situated more or less in the middle between Tokyo and Kyūshū. Not that we're collecting Blue Lug shop visits like eki stamps, but we're definitely heading out to their only shop outside of Tokyo which is Kagoshima at the southern tip of Kyūshū.