bike to work week

So I have been biking to work. So far (cross fingers, knock on wood) the weather has cooperated by not actually raining, and not being too hot for comfortable bicycling.

Registrations have opened up for the 3-Day Novel Contest, so I will be getting mine in. I wish I had any sort of idea for this year, whether plotline, conceit, opening scene or character. The last few mornings I haven't even been able to remember my dreams.

The weekend before last I cut about 4 inches off my hair, by the expedient of braiding it tight to the end, and cutting across the braid. Now my brushed-out hair is only to my waist, and braided hangs to the middle of my back. It is even across the bottom, which it has never been, creating the illusion that my hair is unexpectedly thicker.
I find myself fiddling with the tail of it, and having odd tactile memories of my mother's hair. She had the most gorgeous thick auburn hair, shoulder-length and wavy. The very tail-end of my hair verges on her colour, but mostly mine is duller and browner.
My mother was the last person to cut my hair, in September of 1974, shortly before she died. I wondered if I would have a massive spasm of regret after hacking off the bottom part, but so far I haven't.

In other news, I still haven't finished The Cost of Silver. It is the book that never ends.

really just more photos

Because I found this one while looking back & deleting, and thought it was better than the daylight one of the same spot - Northgate in Lincoln, the Roman wall.

And this is Lincoln's Eastbridge, viewed from the water walk. If you walk up the High Street, you may not even realise that there's a bridge - that timber-frame building there is a cafe, and you can't see the water at all, on either side.

Just above Steep Hill, which is the road to the left. Just here is where, at night, with a light rain, I saw a young man, unhelmeted and with his legs swung out to the side for balance, careen down the cobbles on his bike. I just stared.

And here is the sight that you meet just after getting off the train in Cambridge. Bicycles are locked everywhere--every set of iron railings has at least one layer of bikes chained to it, sometimes stacked vertically, sometimes horizontally.

shouty sign guy

He stands at the intersection just before Ring Road, which runs about the campus. Every day he has a different sign, and a different thing to shout. Mostly it's about who and what will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven, which so far includes scientists, the United Nations, environmentalists, lesbians, sodomites, and chemicals.
Clearly his logic circuits aren't connected in the usual ways and there's no point attempting to engage him in discussion, or even ask him what his aims are--does he really think he'll change anyone's mind or heart by shouting at them that they're damned? He shouted at me two days ago about women who hated men but copied them by cutting their hair short, and I was tempted to whip my braid out from under my rainjacket, but then he probably would have gone on to my wearing men's clothing or something (rainjacket is made from chemicals?).

But I remembered the advice I'd been given for walking the picket line (these many years ago) of responding to hostility or abuse by saying "Have a nice day!" So this morning I smiled at him and shouted "God loves you! Be happy!"
And he smiled and waved, and blessedly shut up.

tea and painted walls

UK 08, the never-ending ....

And on we pedalled, as mentioned, to South Elmham Hall. To be accurate, we walked the bicycles through fields until we found a paved road, muddled about with the OS maps, then pedalled on.
Circuitously, we found the entrance, with a little wooden sign saying OPEN. This was a relief, as we'd not managed to make contact with the Hall by phone or email, but were chancing it since we were close by.
Hm, no vehicles in the gravelled parking lot. Hm, no bustling staff. There was Bateman's Barn, though, and the door open. We poked our heads in. A fellow with a short haircut and squared-off build that suggested ex-military was mopping out the hallway.
"We're closed," he said.
We explained that the gate and sign said otherwise. He took pity on our windblown state and offered tea and sweets, which we accepted gratefully. I had a brownie, which was very good, even discounting for exercise & hunger.
You can see more about Bateman's Barn here, where it's ready to receive guests, but I couldn't resist a few pictures of the beams OMG the BEAMS! they are huuge. Even if it is 16th century, and therefore late by my standards.
My cunning husband explained that we'd hoped to see the wall-paintings, because I was an enthusiast of wall-paintings, and mentioned our visits to Hoxne and Thornham Parva for the sake of their wall-paintings, all said in the best-buttered 'no pressure, mind' way.
And because the owners of South Elmham Hall are terribly kind people, and have their own enthusiasm for their home (and no wonder!) by the time I'd finished the brownie, we had an invitation to see inside.

John gave us a brief background as we walked across. The Hall is a 13th century hunting lodge for the Bishops of Norwich, and the surrounding land was a deer park, set in a moated enclosure that's older still. Ruins of a gatehouse remain, and parts of the chapel and cloister were incorporated into later farm buildings. The 13th century hall was swallowed by a 16th century farmhouse, which is itself a listed building.
The remaining wall paintings are foliate and floriate repeat patterns, nothing figural, but done with some skill and grace, considerably pricier-looking than those at Thornham Parva. John was concerned that they were fading slowly, exposed to the daylight, and indeed the section painted in (what was now) the loo did seem deeper in colour.
Mark took many more pictures--he has a steadier hand--and John mentioned that he didn't have that many photos, so we promised to email ours when we got back home.

Less impressive to the eye, perhaps, but hugely interesting to me, were rows of what looked very much like the sinoper (the sketch or underdrawing usually done in charcoal or lead and fixed with a mix of red & yellow ochres) left unpainted. Because process is more interesting to me than product, especially in medieval painting, where there's often no description of process, and it must be guessed at.
I didn't want to go sticking my face into the wall to check for pinpricks that might be compass marks, though. It seemed more polite to stick my face into the enlarged photos, afterwards.
After many thanks, we bicycled away, and turned the OPEN sign around to CLOSED as we left, just in time to forestall a small tourist party.

So, past the Church Farm moat, past where St. Nicholas used to be, on through St. Margaret Green, up Wash Lane and to St. Peter's Hall, an extensively moated site with a 13th century building (renovated extensively in the 16th century, using bits probably looted from the nearby priory and church).

You can see a bit of the moat here. There's a good deal more of it, though some has been filled or lost over the years.
Presently St. Peter's is a brewery (you can buy the ale at our local liquor store) and restaurant. A good thing, since however impressive the moat complex (and it is) one needs sustenance. The day was clear, bright, and windy, and we'd been cycling rather a lot. Also my rear tire was deflating slowly, and the pump didn't seem to affect it one way or the other.
Here's the front entrance. Nice porch, isn't it?
Some very thorough restoration work has gone on here, and given the hodgepodgey nature of many older English houses, restored and reworked and gutted and recovered over generations and wildly variant theories of architectural style, the looted ecclesiastical bits don't look out of place. It's a good idea to have done your looting a few centuries ago, and let the mellow aging settle things down in the meantime.


This is not the part we ate in, because we weren't there for dinner. We ate in the bar, which has booths and comfier benchs, having what my notes describe as a 'sumptuous lunch'. Mark had steak & ale pie, and in the interests of research I had smoked eel salad & potatoes. Smoked eel tastes like a mild white fish. The flesh is white and flakes apart easily. The skin was very slightly scaly, a little shiny. It was tasty, but not really distinctive.


Despite the sun, no one was eating outside. I found out why when I went to take photos. The Saints being on a sort of plateau (to strain the word a bit, since East Anglia isn't all that tall to start with) there isn't anything more to stop the wind than there is on Salisbury Plain.
I had my jacket tied around my waist, and very nearly lost it into the moat, tugged off by the wind.
Standing by the wall overlooking the moat was rather like standing abovedecks on the BC Ferry, the wind banging at you from all around and the sun slapping off the water. So I stayed out for a while, because I like that sensation.
Afterwards we had a walk around the brewery and the shop. Unfortunately what we'd really have liked to buy would have been difficult to bring home safely on the plane. But it was still interesting. Not often one sees a brewery with a thatched roof, after all.

Because of the troublesome rear tire, we decided against continuing on to St. Andrew's Ilketshall, even though it has wall-paintings. One mustn't be greedy.

Yes, we did see more churches, about half of the Saints that day, but this post is long enough already, so I'll leave that for another. Because I know you want to read more about moats.

wheeling around Suffolk

Suffolk and Norfolk (well, East Anglia generally) used to be fenland. Marsh, swamp, wetlands, or whatever term you prefer. Eye means 'island', and Diss may have meant 'lake', so you can tell that water defined the landscape. While the fens were drained over the course of centuries, and made over into farmland, water is still easy to reach--dig a hole and you have a moat or a fishpond.
The roddens (lost rivers) can still be seen in aerial photos, and there's a terrific picture here. That photo is from Cambridgeshire, probably the flattest of the former fens. Suffolk and Norfolk have some hills, and as Mark and I cycled back and forth across the Waveney (the little river that marks the boundary between Suffolk and Norfolk) I did have some work to keep up with him.

We'd done a bit of online research into hiring bicycles, without much success, but luckily Mike and Sue, our wonderful hosts at Gables Farm, had bikes they weren't using and were willing to lend to us, no charge. Even better, Michael was close to Mark's height and Sue to mine, so no fiddly adjustments were needed.
Here's my faithful blue steed, resting in a typical bit of local landscape. You'll notice that it's overcast, and this pic was taken on one of the very few overcast days we had. Mostly we had astonishingly pleasant weather, sun and occasional cloud. I even got a bit of sunburn, the day we went out to the Saints.

I should mention that for most of this trip I had a cold. It stopped at all the stations: dry cough, catarrh, losing voice, streaming nose, hacking cough, and so on. Also palindromic rheumatism bouncing about the body; one day my ankle stiffened up so that I couldn't walk without limping, but fortunately could still pedal.
But it didn't touch my mood; I was still pretty close to blissful. I kept thinking how fortunate it was that we could do this now, that we had the time and the funds to be here and that I was able, physically, to bicycle around and really see. Having to stop and blow my nose every couple of klicks wasn't much of a price to pay for that.

I mentioned before the necessity of OS maps, didn't I? Here you see one of the perils of navigating in the English countryside: the shortage of distinctive names.
The road signs, met at every tangle of lanes, are fairly helpful, except for two little quirks.
1) the default distance for any locality is 5. Once we went from 5 to 6 to 5 again for the distance to Syleham, while aiming (as) straight (as possible) for it.
2) when you get within a certain distance from a locality, it disappears from the signs. So you know you're almost at Syleham when you lose it. This is why you need the OS maps.

I'm not really sure why East Anglia appeals to me. Perhaps my childhood reading of the Green Knowe books, with Tolly's arrival in the midst of a flood at night, and Green Knowe seeming as much ship as house. Perhaps three childhood years in Richmond (aka Ditchmond) before it was completely subdivisioned, when there were flat fields behind the houses, and deep ditches scoring the fields and roads, ditches easily as deep as a Suffolk river--deeper than some.
I'm fairly sure I have no ancestral ties to this part of the UK, so it can't be the deep call of the ancient blood or whatever overwrought phrase is wanted.

This last pic is my view for most of this part of the trip. I do find it an attractive view.
And look - visible shadow! The sun is shining.

commitment to Sparkle Motion

Because it is now dark when I leave work, and because my bike is a beautiful matte black, and because I don't wish to disrupt its beautiful matte blackness with peel'n'stick reflective patches, I must take other measures to be visible on the streets.
Reflective jacket, yes, reflective strip on backpack, yes, reflectors on spokes, yes. A front light which has only three settings and is thus more expensive. A rear light with something like seven settings which is extremely cheap.
Under which circumstances would one need seven different types of blinking? Answers on a postcard to this address.
But what else can I do to be visible? This is the exciting part. At Capitol Iron, the ship's chandlery, I found an assortment of strange blinky-lights to attach to spokes, all of them motion-activated.
One is an oval the size of a child's hand, looking much like a reflector. Two catches to slip over spokes horizontally. It has 4 bulbs? in it, and glows in a range from pink to blue.
Two are narrow plastic tubes with bubbles inside and a flat disk at one end. A screw-down and a snap to fit over the spokes. The tubes light up in the blue-green range.
Two screw into the tire-valve. They are plastic bulbs with a protruding tube, looking very much like those invaluable Mad Scientist accessories that show that Science! is going on. They flash pink, green and blue.

I can't see the full glory of this display while I'm in motion, unless I twist around and fall off. But I'm quite sure it's glorious and that I'm visible not only to other vehicles, but to the mothership when it arrives.
Why weren't these sparkling things around when I was a child? All we had was plastic tassels to hang from the handlebar grips, and a folded playing-card to jam between the spokes.

Interior journeys: awful damn scenic

Two trips into the interior of BC, one in July to Castlegar, the second in October to Oliver (and also to Nelson). Attempts to drag along travelling companions failed, which meant at least that I could sing in the van, because I don't sing where people can hear me.
Castlegar is in the Kootenays, and would like you to know it's the Greatest Dam City in the World, being right close to a large dam (the Hugh Keenleyside Dam, sorry no tours) with a mildly alarming array of bridges and on/off ramps (not as scary as Portland, but Castlegar is much smaller than Portland).
If I were a much hardier cyclist than I am, more in JH-R's league, I'd probably want to cycle the railbed trail between Midway and Castlegar, which looks even more scenic than the drive, but I'm a feeble old lady, so I'll just look at the pictures, and look out the car windows.
Oliver, which I've written of before, is the Wine Capital of Canada, with a classy wine shop in the town, and any number of wineries (even a fruit-winery) on the way, plus the fruit markets in the Okanagan. I'm told that while it's dead easy to find work, it's nearly impossible to live there because of the cost of housing.
Nelson is where Roxanne was filmed, with Steve Martin, and it is picturesque like anything. It had an influx of new people after the film, because it was so clearly an ideal small town, with the result that it too became an expensive place to live.

The Castlegar trip was to attend Troll Stomp, and to spend some time with my apprentice Lucy and others of the Wild Women. The Oliver trip was for the last Tournament of the Golden Swan to be held at the Skunk Hollow site, so there was a valedictory feel to the weekend, even while I was visiting with Lucy and Evangeline, and with Nan Compton and her family, and others I don't see often.
(Even before online nicknames, much of my acquaintance used pseudonyms and aliases--please note also that my acquaintance includes a number of people who are willing to camp in the Interior of BC in October.)
Castlegar is about 7 hours drive from the ferry terminal (how I measure every trip off-island--no point counting the ferry wait and so on), Oliver only about 5 hours. Nelson 8 or 9 hours. So it's fortunate that the view is not only attractive but variable. There's more than one ecosystem on the way.

On the first trip I remembered to borrow a camera(!) and take some photos of the places I look for and stop at, so here you are, a little visual relief from the usual wall of text this blog provides.

The Hope Slide. This happened when I was a small child, so it has a different sort of meaning for me than most historic sites. An avalanche that covered cars on a BC highway, the very sort of highway my family travelled every summer, and that my dad travelled every weekend to get back to us when he was teaching somewhere else. A couple of the cars were never recovered. Here's a shot of the mountain, and you can still see how it fell away.


The Manning Park cabin. The first time I saw this, I was driving with my friend Kellii as navigator, and she'd brought a book of West Coast ghost stories to enliven (endeaden?) the trip. So we were primed to see this as a haunted cabin. It's fairly close to the western end of the park, right after an eerie stretch of bog (lots of that in Manning Park) separated from the road by a rushing bit of river. Just out of this photo is what looks like a boathouse, though it's rather too far from the water, and might be a summer kitchen or other outbuilding. I don't know its history, but it should have one. Maybe I'll make one up sometime.



Bromley Rock Provincial Park, where I care little for the striking rock bluff or tiny white sand beach (okay, I do, but I didn't take pictures), and instead am drawn to the scrap of former road that the rest area and parking was built on, which remains behind the outhouses. Even when the park is busy, this spot remains quiet and set apart, as if it's waiting for something to come along it.




On the July trip return, I stopped just outside Castlegar and picked up two hitch-hikers, a young dreadlocked guy and girl who were heading to Vancouver, to be supportive for the trial of their friend, an American deserter who'd been hiding out in Nelson. They were good company, though I will offer this piece of advice for hitching: when your ride stops to fill up, it's a nice gesture to offer to clean the windshields, especially if you're too broke to put in for fuel.

On the October trip, no hitch-hikers, though I did drive into Nelson and back with Lucy and Evangeline to save them from having to hitch-hike with all their camping gear. And going to my van on the ferry, I met two young women who needed a ride into Victoria, one of them with a guitar. Pleased to hear both of them talking over the coming election and preparing to vote, and glad I wasn't a slacker myself in that way, while Lucy and her sister were planning to be helping with the vote in Nelson. Yay for the engaged citizenry!

big gnashy teeth

Evidently I wasn't getting enough sleep last week, or was confused by the construction (neverending construction) at UVic which moved the entrance of the library over to what was once solid glass walls. At any rate, I forgot to lock my bike helmet up with my bike (my extremely cool matte-black bike) and left it hanging on the handlebar instead.
No, it was not stolen. It was ...(Lovecraftian ellipsis)... devoured!

You must understand, o Best Beloved, that the university, like the general hospital, is beset and beleaguered by rabbits. Spotty rabbits, white rabbits, black rabbits, lops and so on. Everything but native rabbits. This is because Bleddy Irresponsible Pet Owners who probably got Cute Bunnies for Easter, let their rabbits loose at the hospital, then at the university, when they got tired of taking care of them. And they bred, like, like, okay, you know what I mean.
It's the Victoria equivalent of alligators in the sewers.
The hospital has a more difficult time with the infestation. Bunnies get into the furnace rooms and leave little bunny pellets everywhere, they undermine foundations, and so on. The administration tried to bring in a sharpshooter to reduce the numbers, but there was a huge outcry, and volunteers rounded up hundreds of rabbits so that the people who had pleaded for the bunny-lives could adopt the cute little critters and save them from a dreadful fate.
You can guess, yes? About a dozen were actually adopted. There's a great difference between getting all sentimental about the fluffy bunnies and actually being willing to do something oneself.
A later attempt to bring in a falconer was also shouted down, even though it was the natural process and all that. It seems to me that even Disney nature films let the predator do the job once in a while.

So there are many cute bunnies on campus. And students feed them, but perhaps not enough. I returned to my bike in the dusk, to find my helmet some distance from the bicycle, with its foam pads torn from the velcro and scattered all about. Deep fang-marks were torn into the styrofoam, as of flocks of miniature vampires. I imagined them squabbling over it like seagulls, one snatching it from another, a little soccer play, the victor carrying it off (or climbing into it, which might have been easier), the others grouping and plotting their next foray.
It's Watership Down out there.

Vainly published, and I have proof.

The sample copy of my self-published book arrived yesterday. Lulu's done a good job. The cover looks better than it did as a pdf, the paper is good quality and the binding seems sturdy--at least for a perfect-bound book.
The not-so-good things are those I already knew about. The pic on the back cover is squished, and I'm going to ask Mark if he can fix it to the required size. If he can (which I expect he can, because it's me who's the techno-peasant), I think I can just reload the picture and leave the rest of the cover as is.
The table of contents looks untidy, because I couldn't get Word (this was on someone else's computer, because I lost Word on my own) to do the ToC in the way it's supposed to, so I did it by hand, and the edges are ragged. Plus, I should have put the page numbers elsewhere on the page, because Mirror Margins didn't fix the gutters, and the verso page numbers are somewhat swallowed.
None of which adds up to a particularly big deal, especially as this is a souvenir of my folly rather than a Real Book.
But I still snagged the 3-Day Novel published winners that I own (Day-shift Werewolf, Wastefall, Body Making Words) to compare them against my minim opus. Which stood up pretty well, for production quality.
So I can go ahead with ordering more, to give as presents to the people who would actually appreciate such a gift (my ego only carries me so far into self-delusion).
I flat-out don't know whether to give one to M--. I told her on the phone that I'd gone to Lulu and would be printing out a few for souvenirs, and she said something vague about 'tell me when they arrive', or 'tell me how it goes' but she didn't ask for a copy, and she didn't ask for the url so she could download it for free. It's not that she doesn't know about downloading or e-publishing, because Irene's been e-published several times. I'm reluctant to ask her directly, 'so, do you want a copy of Fold?' because then she'd feel put on the spot, and I know from past experience she's easily made to feel pressured. Or pressurized, as they say in the UK.
Not a big issue, it's just slightly awkward not to know whether she's making polite congratulatory noises for a friend's sake or is interested in the book itself. Other friends have said, in so many words, that they want to buy a copy, or want to read it. Or have made congratulatory noises that indicate they're happy for me but not interested in the book, which is cool too, because it's an odd story, and I don't expect it to be to everyone's taste.

Eventually I'll expand it, probably by expanding Cami's storyline, perhaps by adding more episodes of Palev's wanderings. The great thing about picaresque narrative is the loose structure. But I've no idea still of which publishers to send it to. I'd have a bit of a leg up for small Canadian presses, being Canadian, but since the story itself isn't set in Canada, neither in the depressed rural parts nor the gritty inner city parts, it has a strike against it.

Anyway, I am now totally a self-published author. Expect to see me harrassing bookshop managers and writing sockpuppet posts to message boards. I'll have to do a better job than my first attempt, though. I'll plagiarise Zolah and Emil's versions, those are way better.

In other news, I decided on the Miele Umbria City bike, with coaster brake and Nexus 8 internal gears. I've been biking to work, and after raising the seat twice I think I've got the correct angle. I'm still not sure where the bumps on the handlebars are supposed to be to properly fit my hands, but I'm supposed to take the bike in after two weeks, to make any adjustments, so I'll ask about it then.
The arthritis is subdued by medication. So far no notable side effects, though the promised 'loss of appetite' has failed to kick in, alas. Instead I'm ravenous in the evenings, even after dinner. I'm hoping that's due to the time change and will settle down. My doctor says if the Hydroxyquin does its job, I'll be able to drop the Neproxene and the associated risk of it eating my stomach lining, so good news abounds, really.
And my bike is very black and very cool. I'm refusing to leave it outside overnight until I have something to lock it to that's out of the rain. I bring it in, as if I were living in a city apartment.

arthritis and bicycles

I have a diagnosis. Last week I had my rheumatologist appointment, at the Victoria Arthritis Centre, a small but rambling shingle-walled structure near the Jubilee Hospital, with a cute dove? graphic on the sign. The significance of a small scribbly bird to arthritis is not immediately clear to me, though I remember that a pigeon sliced in half and applied to the soles of the feet was a folk remedy for the plague. Probably not what they had in mind.
The rheumatologist suggests, largely because of the rapid onset and departure of symptoms, sometimes only a day and a half, never more than a week, that I don't have rheumatoid arthritis. What I likely have is a type of arthritis so unusual it has no official medical website, even. It does have a fairly good amateur website by a young man in the UK, and passing mentions on various arthritis sites.
Palindromic rheumatism. Which is a terrific name, but unfortunately doesn't mean 'arthritis that reads the same forwards and backwards, which would be more entertaining. No, in medical terminology it reportedly means 'coming and going' (as in 'will get you coming and going', perhaps). It may be a type of rheumatoid arthritis, it may be something different. It is an autoimmune ailment, and about 1/3 to 1/2 of cases develop into RA, which is the bad news. The good news is that unless it does develop into RA, there's no permanent joint damage, just pain, inconvenience and annoyance.
This is rather good news, aside from the pain part.
I have a renewed prescription for Naproxen, and a new prescription for Panaquil, the latter being an immunosuppressant and antirheumatic, originally developed as an antimalarial. So I probably won't get malaria, even if global warming sends infected mosquitoes up this way. More good news all the time.

My recent experience with biking in Victoria without using handbrakes (conclusion: it would work much better in Regina) made it clear that it's time for a new bike. One that doesn't put pressure on my wrists and shoulders, and where shifting and braking are very easy indeed, or don't use the hands.
Mind you, the info on palindromic suggests that the knees may become a problem, in which case biking is probably right out until the flare-up is past. So far it's been hands, wrists, and shoulders, with problems only in one knee after the no-brakes ride.
Over the weekend we went and looked at bikes. My current bike is a Norco that was my son's until he outgrew it, and I think the only adjustments made for me have been raising the seat and handlebars as high as they'll go (which was pretty much where he left them). I started riding his after my old Raleigh was stolen--given its habit of slipping the chain off when I was going uphill, I didn't search all that thoroughly, nor mourn all that inconsolably. The Raleigh cost about $30, and I don't remember what the Norco cost, but probably more than that. Fortunately I'd braced myself for the order of magnitude of new bike prices.
Shopping, the silver lining to the arthritic cloud.

This is what it's come down to:
Specialized Crossroads Sport, women's model: upright position, twist shifter, three-finger braking, cheapest.
Miele Umbria City: coaster brake, Nexus 8 internal drive train, longer-lasting.
I tried out the Electra (no link because of annoying Flash-y site) Townie, and it was okay, but nothing I didn't get with the Crossroads, and more expensive.
The upright position puts no weight on my wrists, but the guy at Performance Bikes, who also has arthritis (and carpal tunnel) says the regular setup works as well or better if the bike frame is the right size and is properly adjusted to the person (this was explained with much reference to geometry and ratio, and I didn't follow very well). Since I've never had a bike adjusted to me as far as I know, this could well be true. I'll be trying out an Umbria that's the right size for me tonight, so perhaps I'll find out.
The internal hub thing is very cool, my husband assures me, and the coaster brake feels safer, but the upright position may be easier to adapt to than trying to keep my wrists straight and elbows bent all the time.
The key thing is going to be how they each handle steep hills, because that's what I have on my route to work.