Well, THAT sucked. I had my mountain bike out of commission to get a new rear shifter. It's a SRAM X-9, and some part in the shift control snapped inside. So it was gone for a couple of weeks, and I just got it back on Tuesday. Went for a ride with a couple of friends to a new course -- the Groton Town Forest, which is quite nice, except for the bugs.

On some sweeping right hand turn, I cut the corner a bit on the inside and hit the end of a log about as big around as a Coke can, and about 3 feet long. It had a Y sort of stick pointing out.

I don't really know exactly what happened, but when I managed to stop without splattering my brains onto the rock just to the left of the trail, I had broken three spokes, and the derraileur pulleys were now ABOVE the cassette, having been bent up there. The chain was now a figure 8. Clearly this bike was not going to be hammered back into semi-working condition with a local rock.

It didn't help that my riding partners had gone wheeling merrily off into the distance without hearing my colorful Anglo-Saxon commentary as I contemplated my degenerate derrailleur. After a few minutes of fruitless waiting for them to notice I wasn't with them, I checked the GPS, figured out which way was the car, and threw the bike over my shoulders much like shepherds in the days of yore might have picked up a lost sheep for carting back to the herd. Except less comfortable.

After about a quarter mile of that, I decided that maybe my little lamb could use a bit more work. So I bent the derraileur out of the way some more, and twisted the spokes around each other so they'd stay out of the way. The rim wasn't TOO bent, so after that, I was able to get the wheel to roll, and I made like a velocipede and pushed along the ground with my feet for the rest of the half mile it took to get back to the car.

I don't know, really, what I'm going to do now. If I fix it at all, this will now be the third wheel and second derraileur on this bike, not to mention the shifter I just replaced. The bike (an old Mongoose) doesn't seem good enough to justify all this expense. But I can't afford to get a new one either.