Silver Comet Trail: Cedartown, GA (Day 1)

Our plan for yesterday (April 25) was to drive down from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Cedartown, Georgia, (about ten miles from the Alabama/Georgia line at same latitude as Atlanta) in the morning and ride the Silver Comet trail around Cedartown in the afternoon.

You've heard the saying, "Life is what happens while you're making other plans"? Well, we experienced Life yesterday. :)

Karen's trike and my bike seemed to ride fine in the bed of the truck all the way from home to Cedartown. However, when I unloaded the trike and Karen got on and tried to ride across the parking lot, the drive mechanism wouldn't pull the trike. The chain kept slipping. Looking at it, something didn't seem right but I couldn't have said what was wrong. The chain seemed loose and some of the parts seemed out of place, but I didn't know where they belonged well enough to diagnose or correct the problem. I did find a silver colored pin on the ground where I had set the trike down when I lifted it out of the truck, but I couldn't prove it had come off the trike -- we thought it might've been there from before.

After fiddling for a while trying to fix it, we gave up, loaded both bikes back in the truck and drove for an hour across Atlantan suburbs to the bike shop where we bought the trike. There, we were able to look at the rental trikes which are the same model as the one Karen bought and figured out that the silver colored pin I picked up was indeed a part of Karen's trike that had fallen off when I set the trike down beside the truck.

The pin was supposed to hold the chain tensioner in place. The chain tensioner was supposed to keep the chain taut. Without the pin, the tension on the chain pulled the tensioner up into an incorrect position, allowing the chain to be loose and not stay engaged on the sprockets.

The bike shop kept the trike. They will order the part that the pin fell off of on Monday morning and have it fixed in a week or two.

I can't imagine what I might have done to cause the problem. I'm hoping that we just got a trike with a weak pin and replacing the part will clear up the problem and it won't happen again. Obviously, in the future I will be mindful of that potential weakness and be careful not to bang the tensioner when I'm moving the trike.

In the meantime, so we don't lose the next two days of riding, the shop rented us the trike they have available for rent. So in a few minutes, we hope to get out on the trail and get some riding in after all.

Yesterday evening, after it cooled off a bit, we took a long walk through downtown Cedartown and saw some interesting things:

• A bus with "The Free Enterprise System" painted on the side. I thought it would be funny to be able to say that I've seen the free enterprise system sitting in a parking lot in Cedartown, Georgia.

Now you have, too. :) The gentleman driving the bus stayed in the same hotel as us last night and we ran into as we were leaving the hotel this morning. He told me that "The Free Enterprise System" is a bus charter company. I was thinking it was some kind of political something-or-other.

• A one way cross walk. Seriously, in downtown Cedartown, there is a crosswalk painted on the street with a sign at one end showing a pedestrian inside the international "NOT" symbol (tbe red circle with the slash through it), meaning "DON'T CROSS STREET HERE!" Under that sign is another with an arrow pointing to the right and the label "Use other crosswalk". I interpret that to mean, "Don't cross here -- go over there to cross the street." There's no matching sign on this side of the street, so you're welcome to use this crosswalk going from north to south, just not from south to north. As best I can tell.
  

The staff at the Holiday Inn Express in Cedartown are extremely helpful and accommodating. They let us check in early, they helped us move our luggage up to our room (refusing a tip when I offered it), and they provided goodies (which we dropped in a trash can during our walk last night -- although we didn't want to eat the goodies, I appreciate the thought).