An introductory introductory post.

[sara]

Hi there! Nobody else seems to be running a cycling comm on DW, so I suppose I will.

I've been bicycling since my dad and I spent a Saturday morning skinning my knees at a parking lot when I was four, and bike commuting fairly regularly since I was eleven; I've had protracted love affairs with a little red Bianchi, an embarrassing number of Schwinns, and a Peugeot mixte. These days I ride a Trek 520 touring bike and my daughter and I ride a Bike Friday Family Traveler custom tandem, which we bought earlier this fall when she started school. There are little bits of bicycles all over my garage. After many years of bike commuting, I completed my first two half-centuries this past summer, and I'm hoping to do some bike camping next summer with my daughter on our tandem.

I'm a great believer in helmets and, having grown up riding hand-me-down family touring bikes, am old-school about things like steel frames and friction shifting (bar-end shifters still seem sort of radical and extreme!) That said, the tandem is an untraditional little beast and a great ride.

I switched over to a Brooks saddle this last summer and can't say enough good things about it. I don't worry much about weight versus comfort; I've always thought it was easier for me to lose weight than it is for me to lose equipment, which means that I go out on Saturday mornings with a pannier bag with a map, a toolkit, and a lot of snacks, and the speedy folks whiz past and I think, hmm, at the top of this hill I will stop and have a sandwich and maybe make a phone call and watch the alpacas. A speed demon I am not.

I encourage you to introduce yourself and share about what you do with and like about your self-powered machines, whatever they are! And I live in Eugene, capital of interesting bikes, so I particularly want to extend a welcome to folks riding nontraditional bikes. I love my old-fashioned touring bike, but I'm in awe of the guy I see each day who commutes in his hand-cranked Quickie tricycle.

Comments

[sinatra]

I didn't do a whole lot of bike riding until a few years ago, though I learned when I was a kid. I am not a particularly good, nor confidant bicyclist, but I'm really enthusiastic about it. I'm currently riding my mom's old Centurian Accordo 12-speed roadbike, which has had some of it's component parts replaced and probably needs more. The gearshifts either need work, or my gear shifting technique does. I do really like the fact that it has a mixte frame, for no other reason than I think it looks cool. I'm one of those people with the obnoxious, badly jurryrigged orange diary crates on the back.

My dream is to someday come across a decent, cheap utility bike so I can steampunk it up. :D

and also, yes, HELMETS. I wish there was some magical way to make helmets look less dorky, but I'd rather deal with dorkiness than possible severe head trauma, so helmets it is.

[sara]

Heh, I was forbidden to strap a milk crate to my bike any more after the bike I had before the Trek fell over three times in two weeks (well, I kept putting CSA veg and bottles of milk up on the back, and it was a hybrid bike with a really high center of gravity). Only bike I've ever come off of that much in that short a time in all my life. I rather gleefully stripped it for parts when we bought the tandem.

Mixtes are awesome. I really wanted a low bar on my touring bike but there just wasn't one on the market that year, and everyone told me it would be hard to find parts if I rebuilt a Peugeot because they're apparently non-standard.

Have you been over to CAT?