Girtong and I planned out a lovely morning of bicycling today. We would meet up at the Elizabethtown trail head of the Conewego Trail, ride out to Colebrook for some ice cream, and ride back.

Girtong texted me at some ungodly hour of the morning to report that his bike had a flat tire, and he didn’t know how to fix it.

I threw some patches and the floor pump in the back of the car, drove down to the trail head and taught him how to mount a tire.

So, off we rode into the wilds of Lancaster and Lebanon Counties, and arrived at the ice cream shop around 10:30, only to find that they didn’t open until 11:00. Calamity. We decided that sitting in the parking lot for 30 minutes would be silly, and so we kept riding a few miles past the ice cream shop to kill some time.

We made our way back to the ice cream shop, got our confections, and headed back to the car.

Around this time, my butt started to hurt pretty bad. In fact, on just about every ride I’ve been on since my accident, my butt has been hurting something fierce. The accident led to my spending two months off the bike, and so maybe my butt isn’t “broken in” enough yet, and I should just tough it out. Maybe the accident screwed something up down there. I know that the two months off the bike have added several pounds to my belly, and now there is more weight pressing me into the saddle when I ride.

Whatever the cause, the situation is not acceptable. The Brooks B.17, for all its strengths, no longer works for me. I have been toying with the idea of getting rid of the B.17 and noodle bars on my Trek, and going with a B.67 and some Albatross bars. I have that configuration on the Roadster, and it’s pretty comfy, but I really don’t want two bikes setup in more or less the same configuration.

So, I’m going to try something maybe a bit nutty. I’m going to try moving the B.72 from the Roadster to the Trek, and keeping the noodles on it, to see how that works out.

But, that leaves the Roadster without a saddle.

So, I ordered one of these:

This is the great and mighty Brooks B.190. It’s the biggest, springiest saddle Brooks makes. It’s ludicrous. It weighs four pounds. It’s about the size of an 8.5×11″ sheet of paper. But, I think it will make my butt very happy.

The UPS man should be dropping it off on Wednesday, so I will have make another ice cream run Thursday night, and see if my butt makes out any better.