Just getting started with bike touring? Wondering what bike and gear to buy? Find out in Bike Touring Basics with this free 66-page eBook from my friends at Travellingtwo.com. I read this and thought it was a great how-to bicycle tour introduction, with fantastic pictures. In fact, I can’t believe they are giving it away for free! I even have the honor of being quoted. Of course, if you’d rather relive the adventure from the comfort of your armchair, I recommend Falling Uphill, a coming-of-age story, which happens to take place on a bicycle.
Here is a bizarre evolution of the bicycle industry. We can now print a 3D bicycle much like we print a photograph. See this video min 01:45 for the bicycle print out. And someday we may able to just download the bike from the manufacturer’s website and print it out at home, though I wouldn’t try riding that bicycle around the world.
Here you see a quintuple bicycle. The Pendouin’s are the first family to cycle across North America on such a bike, which also suggest there are a lot of records still left to be broken/created/made. More info.
I had no idea it was going to be this cool. From the ground it looked like organized chaos. ~ Principal Gennerman.
This is quite probably the best photograph that I ever took, which after taking pictures of world wonders, like the sphinx and the Parthenon, means a lot.
Pictured here are the 507 illustrators of Falling Uphill at Poplar Creek Elementary School plus the staff. It took me an hour (plus planning) to illustrate the chalk outline of the bicycle (see below). I used a string and two bricks to help guide me. Luckily arranging the kids was no problem thanks to the principal and teachers. However, I still had to overcome some challenges like the partly cloudy sun and shadows. The kids constantly jumping up and down. Not falling off the roof while I took the picture, not too mention the change in perspective. Once on the roof I realized I had to move the seat up 8 feet. I found that funny, because when I was riding my real bike, I could tell if my seat was off by only 5 millimeters. And, surprisingly the image was too big for my camera, so not only did I have to tile the picture, but now I had to deal with the lens distortion and vignetting. Lastly, in the final composite, besides normal retouching, such as color correction and erasing the odd marks, I also deleted the cars in the parking lot. If only I could erase the cars in real life :)
I’m still surprised this turned out so well. Thanks again to the students, staff and parents of Poplar Creek Elementary for helping to arrange this, especially Associate Principal Larry Lueck for the brilliant idea for this photo, Principal Jane Gennerman for her support and arranging the kids from small to big (falling uphill) along with Kate Krzysik and for her idea of having the kids illustrate the book.
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Is bicycling bad for the environment? Some food for thought as to the consequences of our every-day actions.
1. Law of entropy. Everything is bad for the environment, because everything consumes more energy than it produces. The real question: Can humans live in harmony for the life of the planet and sun? 2. The infrastructure of today’s society is inherently non-sustainable. Perhaps if our societies were designed around bicycles or trolleys, I wouldn’t be writing this. However, our society’s are built around cars, which means re-building the roads, or subtracting lanes from the cars, or impeding traffic. What is the environmental cost of increased traffic jams (time driving) or reduced parking spots and circling vehicles. (This legal issue halted San Francisco’s bicycle progress for 4 years.) Indeed, whole communities would have to be rebuilt to a more medieval European scale. 3. Indirect use of petrol. Most cars that pass a bicycle will slow down, swerve and then accelerate. This constant indirect acceleration and decceleration of passing vehicles uses more gasoline than simply driving your own car slow and steady. Compound that by bad drivers, angry motorists and even overcautious motorists creating a mini-traffic jam as they wait to pass the bicyclist. 4. Increased food consumption. Cost of food is approximately 1/2 gallon of oil per 1000 food calories, or about 17 times (up to 54x*) more energy is used to grow the food than is gained by eating the food. In other words, every time we eat we are indirectly consuming petrochemicals (and sometimes we are actually eating the petrochemicals). More info. 5. Increased lifespan. The active lifestyle of a bicyclist is estimated to add at least 2 years to your life, which indirectly increases the population and energy consumption.** 6. Increased chance of serious bodily injury to the bicyclist due to accidents (and on a lesser scale simple wear and tear, such as worn out joints, smog-damaged lungs, overexposure like sunburn and dehydration) and the related costs of medical care and equipment. (25% of the average American’s working life is devoted to paying for healthcare.) 7. Being cool. Environmental cost of bicycle, clothes, tools and high-tech gear, especially in addition to a car, or additional modes of transport, like trains, buses and cabs to support the car-less bicyclist. 8. Cold beer and hot showers. I think just about everyone loves a cold beer and hot shower after a day of cycling; however, some research studies have concluded there is not even enough energy (re-newable or not) to produce a hot shower or a cold beer every day for every citizen of the planet until time’s end, nevermind the cost of manufacturing and transporting these materials. 9. Angry bicyclists. Being a bicyclist myself I hate to admit it, but lots of us, particularly the gearheads and fanatics types, just plain have bad attitudes, and bad attitudes correlates not only into increased backlash in most of my points, but also if you are metaphysically inclined, the bad attitude is polluting the atmosphere with a bad vibe. 10. Lost time and energy. Bicycling takes time and can be exhausting, which could drain resources and passion away from all other endeavors, including saving the planet, and/or increase resources needed to recover.
Sources:
*”The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Michael Pollan. The Penguin Press.
**“The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling”, Karl Ulrich. University of Pennsylvania.
As a post world tour honor, me and my bike got to occupy first, second and third place on the podium at the Downer Classic race at the Tour of America’s Dairyland. I also had the chance to share my story with the crowd.
I’ve always been impressed that many world-class cyclists and teams that don’t qualify for the Tour de France come to Wisconsin for our excellent race series also including Super Week starting soon.
This is a worthwhile video if you like bicycles, engineering, or land speed records.
I have been personally trying to break 55 MPH. I came close a few times, but decided in my middle age, that it’s just not worth the risk anymore. One pothole and the game is over :)
Here’s an idea that will make your head spin. The Omnivore’s Dilemma says: “Unless you grew up on organic food, most of the kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch process.” The Haber-Bosch process is the method used to make ammonium nitrate fertilizer out of petroleum. Nitrogen is one of the body’s basic but essential building blocks like carbon. So, this means: if you are the average American, approximately two pounds of your body weight or about 1% is literally composed of petroleum by products, most likely Saudia Arabian oil.
So considering conservative estimates show it takes approximately 0.5-1 gallons of oil to grow 1 bushel of corn (not including processing this into other food stuffs and shipping them to your store), and corn is used to make sugar, starch, feed cows (accounting for beef and dairy products) and tens of thousands of other things, and considering when you are eating corn based products, you are essentially eating oil, it makes me wonder if riding a bicycle, burning more calories and thus eating more, and demanding more food be grown and shipped, is an environmentally friendly thing.
I met Stephen Regenold, the Gear Junkie, last summer in Minneapolis. I admire how he turned his love of gadgets into a profitable career, which is essentially the art of creating an adventure in your own backyard. In fact, he just returned from competing in the Wenger Patagonian Expedition Race, the “toughest and wildest race on Earth.”
Thanks to the Gear Junkie for featuring my bicycle in his nationally syndicated newspaper column. The story was great. So often journalists get it wrong. Also, it has had a very big impact, much more so than any other story in newspapers, TV or radio. So that’s a testament to the power of a passionate blogger.
One of the most popular questions asked these days: Is that the same bike?
It reminds me of a joke: I’ve had this axe my entire life. I’ve only replaced the handle 3 times and the head twice. Everything on my bike has been replaced but the frame, handlebars and surprisingly the aluminum rear rack. But those are almost ready to go.The frame is more or less okay, except for some potential corrosion, but if that gets replaced, will it still be the same bike? What about my body? Is that the same body I had when I started the trip?
So far this bike has about 31,000 miles and it’s still going. It’s a Gunnar mountain bike with a steel frame customized for the road. Made by Waterford Precision Cycles in Wisconsin. (I’m hoping that they’ll be able to make me a stainless steel bike next time.) I have a peculiar love for my bike as if it were a real person. In fact, I think it has a life of its own. It’s enormously popular. Everywhere I go people want me to bring my bike. They ooh and aah and run their hands down the frames, caressing the nicks and scratches. It’s been photographed thousands of times, and was even honored on the race podium without winning a race.
Recently it was rebuilt courtesy of Shelley and Forrest Smith. If being a bike mechanic is not an art form, it is certainly beautiful to watch a talented bike mechanic strip down a bike and rebuild it bolt by spoke.
You can view the above slideshow with some interesting descriptions of each slide. Among other things, you’ll see the box of worn out parts. It’s amazing the wear and tear a bike goes through. By brute determination and sheer human power, I’ve worn down steel, cracked aluminum, snapped titanium, and rubbed my handlebars smooth as glass with my hands, I feel like I left a trail of metal dust around the world.
Thanks to Forrest my steel horse has never been better. I think he must dirt from over 50 countries on the floor of his workshop. (Could you save that for me.)
Hey Forrest, can you build me some spare knees?
For some more on this bike and touring. Click here.
World Bicycle Tour
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