Sidi shoes vs Shimano cleats

Tricia wore out her beloved Sidi shoes. Too many miles and too many days just did them in. She's replaced the cleats several times, and even the wonderfully replaceable heal piece. But her ruby-red slippers at last came to their end.

We'd looked for perfectly matching ruby-shaded replacements, but I don't think they make them any more.  Tricia, a woman with white bar tape and a white saddle, decided she'd give white shoes a chance.  Sidi, of course. And they do indeed look marvelous.

It would be silly to get new shoes and not get new cleats, so she bought a pair of Shimano SPD-SL road cleats as well. I installed them to match the placement of her old cleats and figured we were good to go.

Nope.

They wouldn't clip in to her Ultegra pedals. I thought at first maybe they were new and just stiff, so I tried it. No deal. After much frustration, fussing about and looking hard it turned out the problem was the interface between the shoe and cleat. The bottoms of these shoes are more curved than her old shoes. Enough that the cleat bent when I tightened it down, making it impossible to click in.

As far as I know there isn't a custom titanium shim for $189.00 to solve this, so I used a couple of old zinc washers I had, installing them under the front bolt. It took two for each shoe. But it worked well enough that Tricia was able to wear her new shiny white shoes today.

Amgen Tour of California 2015

I think I've hit almost every Tour of California. This year Tricia and I went to the opening day in Sacramento. It was a tough call; whether to try and catch the peloton crossing the Rio Vista bridge and hope for a great photo op, or go to the festivities in Sacramento and see the women's race too. Sacramento won.

 We took our bikes and met our friend Kellie a few miles away, then rode to the start. It turns out I didn't need 80 pounds of locks after all; there was free valet bike parking.

We also tried to ride through the finish line, which is kind of like throwing a football around on the field just before the Super Bowl. We were politely shooed away.

We had fun looking at all the stuff to buy. Tricia was bike jersey shopping for her son's one-year-old. 

Kellie fell in love with a Bianchi.

After the men left for their large loop and we finished watching the women race the city circuit we went to lunch. We rode back to downtown just as the men flew in. We were able to watch the race finish from a delightful beer bar where we could see the actual race go by and watch the TV finish at the same time. The only thing that was less than wonderful: I brought the wrong camera, so I don't have the cool photos I'd hoped to have.

Bike Friendly Brentwood

A Bike Friendly Community sign in Brentwood. You won't see any of these in Antioch where we need a "bike hostile" sign.

A photo posted by curtis corlew (@cccorlew) on May 3, 2015 at 12:15pm PDT