Biking in the Snow

After biking pretty much daily to work in the balmy fall weather, frost and snow hit us like a brick in the latter part of November and nobody has stepped forward to remove the brick yet.  I was all ready to keep biking, but for some reason my schedule became such that I’ve been car-ridden now for two weeks straight.  A big part was Finnur taking off for the US, since I feel like I need to have a car at work in case of an emergency, but there was other stuff too.

So, having reclaimed Finnur yesterday as well as my new winter biking gloves, I decided to bike into work this morning.  I must say that it went surprisingly well.  It did take me 55 minutes to go all the way to my office, but it was mostly a lot of fun.  And by ‘fun’ I mean ‘heavy on the adrenaline’. 🙂

Yes, the studded tires do really well on hard ice, and compacted snow, but they don’t do very much in loose snow, or when going through snowbanks.  So going downhill was exciting in places.  I did hit a 100-200 meter stretch where so much snow had blown onto the track that it was impassable on a bike so I had to walk…  but all in all it went relatively well and I stayed upright.

The way back was slightly less fabulous.  I didn’t go straight home (had a quick tea with a friend) so I ended up taking an unusual route home.  Due to general tiredness, I basically walked up the two big hills on the way home.  The upshot was that I swung by Bjarki’s daycare to pick him up earlier than usual and he got the royal treatment – sitting on my bike as I walked us home. 🙂