Every Day Adventurers

Several years ago we had this customer in San Francisco who kept calling to order another FreeRadical. We ourselves have the luxury of enjoying quite a fleet of longbikes for every forseeable fashion event, but a customer who orders more than two for himself (eventually five, I think) raises eyebrows. Turns out he was trying to live car-free in the City, with a family. He soon started fiddling with electric modifications to his SUBs. He seemed to try them all, having one or another problem with each, and eventually deciding that no one was making an electric bike or kit for a “serious” cyclist, i.e. one trying to carry cargo up hills while pedaling in the 60-90 rpm efficiency zone. So he, Todd, the Clever Chimp, started making his own kit. It’s called the Stokemonkey, and it’s been creating many a zealous afficionado out of “serious,” i.e. fun loving load and family haulers, cyclists for the past couple of years. Now he’s really gone off the deep end with this whole cargo bike thing and has opened a dedicated store in Portland, OR, home of much of the cool bike stuff happening in this country right now. (I was at a fancy dinner there last year and the local US Congressman tried to recruit Xtracycle: “We already have more than 50 bike manufacturers in town, why not come join us?”)

Maybe you’ve seen our old blog and wondered what Dick Cheney has to do with bicycles. We have! We wanted to create a new xtracycle-centric spot for talking about what’s going on in this world right now. And we also wanted a place to talk about the history of this company, to explore the evolution of the (our) bicycle lifestyle and our ideas about trying to create a sustainable, world-changing enterprise. It’s been more than 10 years since this journey began. It’s been so hard we’d never wish it on anybody and so eye-opening we’d wish it on everyone. We hope to give a glimpse, not so much for the sake of hubris, but more because we’ve always wanted our work to ripple and cascade. So we put this out there in hopes of helping catalyze other wannabe world fixers.

(the picture at top is me and Ross returning from our first Xtracycle overnight adventure, on the Bear River in the California Hills)