In the past few weeks I've had some serious problems with my WindowFarm in the form of bugs. Little wee tiny bugs that like to eat Basil leaves. At first I didn't even notice them because they were so small,....all I knew was that my Basil was dying and I couldn't figure out why. I could see tiny spots on the leaves but it wasn't until I dug out a magnifying glass that I realized the little black spots were hundreds of tiny insects. I tried flushing them off with alternating blasts of a "green" insecticide and water but unfortunately I either missed some or the plants were too far gone to save.

Up again before the sun rise but this time it was so I could catch the 6AM bus from M’Hamid north back to Ouarzazate where I’d then catch another bus east to Tinghir. I would rather have stayed in bed a few more hours but rising early did allow me to catch one last desert sunrise and I tried to sear the image of the sun appearing over the rolling sand dunes into my memory. The bus ride north was uneventful and I spent the time watching the Moroccan countryside slide by my window. One of my few regrets on this trip was not writing down the names of all the little towns I stopped into along the way. And like all my drives during the previous days, this bus stopped into a small nameless town for an hour or so somewhere along the way.

It was time for a new commuter bike and I wanted a change from the mountain bike (Rocky) I had been riding for the previous few years. Rocky was and still is a good bike but winter riding had been hard on it. I planned to keep it for pulling Burley the trailer but needed something new to get to work and back.

I had heard about the Alfine internal geared hub and was intrigued with the concept, in particular it’s lower maintenance requirements. My thinking was that I wanted a bike with a lower overall cost of maintenance and the internal hub would help by cutting down on dérailleur repairs. I also wanted hydraulic disk brakes on any new bike I got which was another closed system. This category of bikes doesn’t have much to choose from and all I could buy locally were the Rocky Mountain Metropolis NRT, the MEC Hold Steady and the Giant Seek 0. After checking out all the bikes in person, I settled on the Giant and pulled the trigger on buying the 2011 model.