A mostly unfruitful day in Duluth. The mechanic I'd had recommended to me in Grand Forks appeared not to be working today -- the mechanic who was there refused to tell me, which was weird -- so I went with the guy on hand. He talked like he knew everything about everything, which is rarely a good sign. I heard him hammering on the freewheel like crazy, which wasn't a good sign either. When I suggested he call the mechanic in Grand Forks to hear how he did it, his response was, "I could, but really there's only one way to do these things." I could have said, and didn't, that each mechanic who'd worked on the freewheel went about it in a completely different way.
I had my doubts, but gut instinct said to give him the chance. He said to come back 1:30-2:00, so I retired to the coffee shop on the corner to do an urgent paper review. When I came back, he told me there was no way to get the freewheel off. The way he'd chiseled at it, attempting to create several new grooves to get the extraction tool into, absolutely no one else is going to get it off, either -- not any more! It is, however, still quite usable -- until such time as another spoke breaks. He charged me 15 bucks for labor. "I should have charged 80 for all the work I put in." Maybe, but one traditionally doesn't charge for unsuccessful work. And the mechanic in Cranbrook had put in a whole lot more time, and done various other useful things for me. but only charged me modestly more.
What really annoyed me though was that, cycling away, I felt some unusual resistance. Climbing the insanely steep hill overlooking Duluth to get to the camera shop (to buy a new charger), it really became noticeable. So I stopped and took a closer look at the wheel. Here, with all the pounding and chiseling, the ball races on the axle had tightened against the ball bearings so they were grinding. I think I caught it in time, but I could have done real damage. The mechanic totally should have noticed and fixed that before returning the wheel to me. Of course I hadn't thought to check before leaving the store.
The replacement charger works (what a crazy climb to get it though!) but is the trickiest damn thing to use. I had to get the sales clerk to show me half a dozen times how to put the battery in. Thankfully one charge lasts several weeks.
Reaching the Route 2 bridge -- which both the guy at the cycle shop and Google Maps had assured me was fine to cycle across -- I saw it was posted "no bicycles". So I backed up and called a different bike shop to get their advice, since the long way around was really the long way around. " Oh, it's fine. Just ignore that. I cycle it every day. There's actually a pedestrian walkway" -- I couldn't see it from where I was -- "but it's dangerous as hell. Just stay on the road." So I did.
After all this, I only left Duluth and entered Wisconsin maybe 5:30pm -- no time to go far before dark. Stopped at the first campground, which has a very strange self-registration system, yhough I finally got it sorted. Two neighbouring RVs offered me food; I must really look starving. (I haven't lost any weight!) The one was a crew of workers doing pipeline installation on 12-hour shifts. The youngest of the crew is a seventeen-year-old high school student.
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