Hakuna 5mm Allen Key

I assembled my bike and went for a ride. Google Map. Look at how flat the terrain is. Yes, I brought my GPS with me. Speaking of which, does a halfway decent set of topo maps exist for handheld GPS units for anywhere outside the developed world, or Kenya specifically? I have a Magellan Explorist 500 that I got in 2007, and it came with topo for the US that I can put on an SD card. I've got most of the Western US loaded on there, but if you don't have that, the default background map is pretty crummy in the US, and in Kenya it's horrible--all it shows is dots for the 5 or 6 largest cities in Kenya and the border with Uganda (which is actually helpful since I'm so close to it). Other than that it's a blank slate--no roads, features, nothing. Not even an outline of Lake Victoria, which is a huge bummer, since I'm definitely within a day's ride of that.

Anyway, the bike got a little dinged up in transit; I should've added a lot more padding. The disc brake discs maybe got bent a tiny bit, maybe even the large front sprocket, and the rear derailleur is a little wonky. I'm pretty sure none of the bike fundis around here have ever seen a derailleur, so I'm on my own. None of these problems are really major, it's just not perfect. I still managed to go around 20 miles pretty easily today, and right from the get-go, I realized that biking around here is going to be awesome. The first little bit was on back roads/trails through the shamba, which was pretty rad, then I went a long ways on the road to Malaba. On the way back, an older guy in a linen suit on a single speed threw down the unspoken gauntlet and we raced at full tilt for about 5 miles. I beat him to the paved road through town and stopped there, but he was just behind me and kept going, so maybe he won. The traffic on the road is totally unsafe, so I'm fine with that.

Most things are closed on Sunday, so tomorrow when the hardware stores are open I have to try and find a 5mm allen wrench. I brought my bike multi-tool, but its wrench isn't long enough to reach inside a part of my rear rack and tighten the bolt all the way, so I lost one early on in my ride today, making it a pretty noisy ride as the rack kept slapping against the frame.

Comments

  1. Are you using your touring bike? Any pictures yet? Enjoy the adventure!

    ReplyDelete
  2. An Allen key is very useful and this particular one that you used is satisfactory. If you wish to know more about Allen keys, you could visit this website: http://www.allenkey.org

    ReplyDelete

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