Every Day Adventurers

With all the stories we’re seeing and hearing (both in the online and offline worlds), it’s clear that bike camping season has officially begun. Thanks to Matt McCambridge, we’ve got a great photo that says it all:

Here’s to good weather, great friends, bike rides and outdoor adventures! Hopefully the long weekend will allow you to get time outside on your bike.

Writing from another squat. This one is in Bilbao, Spain. 10 years old and aging gracefully. Kukutza, they call it. Squats really lubricate the Pleasant Revolution. This one has good vibes and confirms a big trend among squats: acrobatic arts facilities. Seems there’s some kind of latent need for modern Western humans to explore limits of human motion. Squats have come to the rescue. Just before we left, I assembled apparati for human flight: sprung gymnastics runway leading to large landing pads and a lovely high-performance springboard dividing the two. I saved this event for the morning of departure to keep the exposure to injurous flight short and to avoid the drinking end of the day. I invited Amanda Mora Jones (amandamora.com) and Paul Freedman (FossilFool.com).

Again: strategy to avoid injury: only those deemed to posses smarts about self-preservation and good coordination were invited. We helped Paul confront his fears about back-flips. Amanda called up some fantastic tumbling skills from her preteen gymnast life. I simply performed long unadulterated “superman” flights, terminated by late somersaults. This session was totally parallel in sensation to moving around Europe by bike: the limits of human motion, thrill of speed, no motor to distract. Graceful exertion with carefully crafted tools begets elation.

Elation? Well, well – how much elation is involved with hauling 190 pounds of gear around Europe with 15 other people? There’s certainly elation at the end of the day. The uphills are a bit of trouble – but I tell ya, low gears (28 teeth in front, 32 in the back) and lots of time allows for any car-navigable hill to be managed by countless mincing pedal strokes. It’s easier than it looks and sounds. A little fitness and a lot of confidence required.

Some of my favorite road tools. (a hint of fetish, to be sure)

The flats are totally breezy. One of my missions in life is to convince people of the tiny difference between hauling no load and hauling a huge load on the flats. The magic of wheels and momentum and the incredible efficiency of the bicycle deliver dividends. The only stipulation is that a huge load requires slooowww acceleration from a stop – beginning with a low gear as described above, then advancing through gear steps, almost one by one, until up to speed. Then – inertia butters your bread! An object in motion tends to stay in motion, especially when wheels, good bearings, and a heavy payload are involved. Non-cyclists can’t seem to imagine how easy this is. Damn shame.

And what about elation on the downhills? For me, with such a load, and such consequential frame-flex, elation is in short supply. I think I’m too spoiled by fine-tuned unburdened Italian racing machines – the kind of equipment that seems to just about react to your thoughts – blurring division between man and machine. My Pleasant Revolution rig is different. Gear must be symmetrically loaded and lashed tight. Headset must be smooth-spinning with NO play. Tires must be round in profile and properly inflated. With these measures, control is retained, but downhills are never approached with wide-eyed abandon. More like wide-eyed caution. The speed wobble demons are always ready to pounce on the disrespectful. Indeed, two of our Revolutionaries have been pounced upon. One, seemingly for a loose load violation, and another for a loose headset. Broken bodies resulted.

Speed wobbles (AKA shimmies) are terrifying and often rapidly escalating. Smooth, soft braking and clenching the frame’s top tube with inner thighs seem to be the only remedies.

So elation comes from cargobike touring indeed, but sometimes it’s subtle or drawn out or simply resultant from reflection. Reflection on life-affirming sustainability. Taken to the next level. This kind of elation leaves stains on the fabric of your soul. Stubborn stains.

{pictures by Paul Freedman}

These are Mike Cobb’s words and wisdom from his Xtracycle tour around Europe as part of the Pleasant Revolution. Enjoy!

Wifi is precious and rare for this mechanic… just performed field surgery on my iPhone to replace the battery. Disabled the camera in the process! So- I can only send old pictures + hopefully a few that tourmates e-mail to me. But let’s start this off right!

Tower Bridge, London - World Naked Bike Ride

Had a one week vacation from our working vacation. Ljubljana, Slovania, the city of love, is where it started.

Ljubljana: Soooo full of grafitti. Seems as though civic concerns lie elsewhere. I like it – street level culture staining the walls. Saturation of personality. Sweet, mellow.

The squat in Ljubljana – the 5th squat or so. Always a somewhat creepy adventure. Squats attract creative people, anti-establishment people, rebel-rousers, sick people, poor people, drug adicts. This one had no electricity, lit by candles stolen from the local cemetary. One morning I watched a young man conspicuously trying to act casual outside the main building in the courtyard. It was a tough role to play as he kept puking in the storm drain. You can’t puke quietly. Or casually. After finishing, he quickly stood erect and wiped his whiskers. I just can’t stop assuming he was a junky who’s junk stream dried up – at the squat looking for a solution. William Burroughs has filled my head with diagnosis details…

Spent the night last night on a rugby field inside an Aix de Provence, France sports complex. I slept in my bivi sack on the field’s grass. Woke up to cloud bursts that delivered regular intervals of rain – 15 seconds of hard rain, 50 second break, 15 seconds of hard rain…kinda like a sprinkler…After about 4 or 5 rounds of this onslaught, it dawned on me that it WAS a sprinkler. Moved 30 meters away to the dry zone while Kipchoge first attempted to thwart the rain-makers with heavy rocks, then successfully with cooking pots AND heavy rocks. The tent-testing ended.

I’m finding a lot of “raw sienna, reduced red” (color of my room) all over provincial France. Often the main road through villages is canyon-walled with solid shop/residential walls, buffered by minimalist one meter sidewalks. These walls are often awash in subtle variations of “raw sienna, reduced red”. It’s a faded earthy yellow, familiar like memory from dreams. Truly soothing and pleasant. The feeling of ancestral habitat.

Skateboard for a snapdeck, a soccer ball, running shoes: my tools of diversion.

Riding the Spine’s Goat talks about their epic, three year+ journey from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego and the bikes that got them from A to T.

Watch on YouTube

In the spirit of adventure and following the lead of other Xtracycle bikestars, Pebble Pedalers Seth and Parker Berling are riding from Prudhoe Bay to Tierra del Fuego. Their purpose?

raise awareness of and garner support for protecting the Bristol Bay Watershed from the largest proposed open pit mine in North America. Riding through 15 countries—from Prudhoe Bay, the northernmost point accessible by road in Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of Argentina—we work towards preservation, protection and the restoration of watersheds throughout the Americas in partnership with Trout Unlimited. Please join our fight by educating yourselves on this critical issue and taking action with both pen and pocketbook.

Check out their photos of the trip thus far.

Pebble Pedaler Website