Have you ever received a bicycle as a Holiday gift? One of my fondest memories from childhood was receiving a Schwinn Sting Ray that my older brother and our friend refurbished with help from my Dad. They painted it purple sparkle and it was something to behold. The fact that my big brother built it for me made it even that much more special. I rode the purple beast all over the countryside surrounding our small town and it brought me endless joy. Now, as an adult, I appreciate more than ever the effort and sentiment that went into that special gift.

[This is part of 2 of a story by EcoVelo guest writer Perry Bessas. If you haven't done so already, follow the link below and read Part 1 before reading this installment. —Alan]

Go to Part 1 →

By Perry Bessas

Andy Hampsten killed my inner roadie. Here’s how it happened. I’m watching TV one day (must have been the early 1990s) and I see him riding a practical-looking MTB in a beautiful setting in Colorado. There he is, moseying along and you know, this guy has street cred because, HELLO! He won the Giro d’Italia and conquered Alpe d’Huez. That’s not exactly chopped liver. So we know he can fly, but he is taking his sweet time instead. He stops at a nice cafe and has himself a cup of coffee…and he sips it slowly. No rush. Cool! So I think to myself, “If a roadie icon can ride a bike for fun and have time to stop for a leisurely cup of java, so can I.” And that’s how that bug got ahold of me.

From then on, I gave myself full license to think seriously about bikes that could carry stuff and look at home parked outside a store. They had to be comfortable, practical, and fun. Weight didn’t matter much. It was a paradigm shift in my thinking. So in 1995, when Jo and I moved to a New England town that was perfect for such riding, I tried it and I really liked it.

The thing about riding around town is that it’s a real social experience. People come up to you when you are parking your bike outside a store and they ask you questions. Is it dangerous to ride in traffic? Do you ride in the winter? Where did you get your bike and how much did it cost? The questions and answers are not really the point. It’s just another way to become more visible to others and become more connected with your neighbors. You’re putting yourself out there and you become more approachable. You are not going to achieve that blasting through town on your way to somewhere else.

Another thing about this sort of riding is that just about anybody can do it. So I started to think, “Why can’t I convince my honey to join me?” No reason at all. So Jo and I rode our bikes to explore and to have fun. We rode to get groceries and return library books. When we visited Block Island, we brought our bikes or rented fat tire cruisers to explore the island. Still, I wanted to share the wealth and compare notes but I was not connecting with other similar-minded cyclists.

But things started to change as this little thing called the Internet started becoming ubiquitous. In particular, there was this unique little group of cyclists I came upon who called themselves the internet-BOBs. Here, I learned about Brooks saddles and Carradice bags. I learned that it’s no shame to have your handlebars higher than your saddle and what’s more, there are people that will sell you the stuff you need to make it happen. Most importantly, the i-BOBs showed me that you do not have to throw out your 7-speed freewheel the minute Shimano announces their new, 25-speed cassette, even if this new cassette is made of super-terrific special materials and is machined to the same tolerances as the space shuttle. You can pass on it and still keep cycling just fine. Maybe even better! Have you ever searched for something without really knowing what it was, but you knew you’d recognize “it” when you found it? Well, that’s what the internet-BOB list was for me. 

And so it went until 2004, when my body started talking to me and I didn’t like what it was saying. Mostly, it just complained and told me I was riding too much. So I looked around for answers to the pains and I discovered recumbents. Now, I suppose this seems like another paradigm shift in my cycling but to my mind, it is not. My Tour Easy has a definite utilitarian cycling/internet-BOB influence. It’s comfortable. Weight is not a consideration. It’s got fenders, bags, and lights. It is outfitted for practical cycling and that’s that. 

Fundamentally, I am still an i-BOB and ride my bike in that way. It’s just that I now prefer to ride reclined. My body told me to do it, and so I did. I find it more comfortable and it helps with some of the aches and pains. It’s a simple thing. I can ride a recumbent longer and with less pain than I can a DF. It’s not an ideological shift by any means.

So that’s my story. As for the future, I don’t know what I’ll be riding a year from now but I know it will have fenders and bags.

[This is the first contribution from my friend Perry Bessas of The Velvet Foghorn. Perry is a long-time utilitarian cyclist, iBOB regular, Easy Racers fanatic, and bike blogger. I'm absolutely thrilled to have him on-board as a guest writer, and I'm hoping that if I grovel and beg sufficiently, we'll be graced with more of his writing in the future. —Alan]

By Perry Bessas

My cycling days almost never got started. The Greek village where I spent the first eight years of my life had no bicycles or cars, only donkeys and mules. When my family migrated to the U.S., bicycles were the last thing on our minds. To make matters worse, we settled in a congested area of New Jersey where cars and buses were the preferred mode of transportation. From all indications, it seemed that a bicycle was a luxury I’d never experience.

But in my thirteenth year, my uncle gave me an “English Racer” bicycle for Christmas. It was a cheap 3-speed (Ross, I think) whose top tube eventually separated from the head tube (I tied it together with bailing wire and kept riding it). My father, not knowing how to ride, taught me to balance by running along side and holding on to the back of the saddle. The method worked remarkably well and I was off and riding before long.

That bike eventually found the scrap heap and I proceeded to go through a string of hardware store 10-speed bikes that were heavy and poorly assembled, but they had shiny paint jobs. The first one was bought with money I’d earned sweeping out a clothes factory. The bike was stolen right from under my nose two weeks later as I was playing basketball. I learned the first lesson of cycling right then and there: bicycles are thief magnets.

And so it went for a time. Sometimes I had a bike and rode, and at other times I didn’t. Then, in 1978, I spent the summer in Greece. I saw a different side of cycling there. Two of my cousins were into racing and I was fascinated by their bikes, training methods, and fancy riding duds. Right away, I noticed that their bikes were different from any bike I’d owned, or even seen. They let me borrow a Motobecane, and riding that bike changed my understanding of what bikes where. When I returned to the U.S., I started reading up on bikes and bike racing. I found the mechanical aspects of bikes fascinating. I would not however, have much opportunity to delve into “fine bikes” until some years later.

By 1983, I was out of college, in a secure job, and bored with the working life. I had some money in my pocket and I thought I’d look into those fancy racing bikes I’d read about. They were all pretty much Campy equipped back then and not cheap, but cheaper than a used Ferrari. New York City, where I worked, had many fine bicycle shops and a good bike culture. The messengers rode their fixed gear bikes and the weekend warriors came out to Central Park and points beyond the city on Saturdays and Sundays.

I decided that I wanted to get into the bike scene and meet some “real bike riders.” I found a really nice Italian road bike that a co-worker was selling. It was a perfect fit and ready to ride, so I picked it up in Brooklyn, got it back to New Jersey via the NYC subway and Path train, then rode it back to my apartment in Jersey City. I then converted half my kitchen into a bike workshop and began my biking education. I had a fever and the only cure was bikes.

The 1980s were years of bike refinement and nothing on my bike ever being quite good enough. My chain had to be spotless and my bike parts had to be the latest. I could take the bike apart and put it back together with no problem and I often did, if for no other reason than to practice my mechanical skills. I built up some tubular wheels because…well…I just had to. I had to have the first clipless pedals on the market. I wholeheartedly embraced every Bicycling Magazine marketing campaign. I rode with roadies on 9W, along the west side of the Hudson River, and I looked and talked the part.

We rode pretty fast and we rode pretty far. We blew through stop signs and red lights because that’s how the NYC messengers did it. We never used fenders and it got sloppy when it rained…really sloppy. After one especially wet ride, the grease had totally washed out of the headset and I repacked it and placed an old section of inner tube around the bottom cup to prevent it from happening again. But I would not consider fenders, which would have kept me and my bike much dryer. The best part: I could eat whatever I wanted and often did. Through it all, my patient soul mate put up with the insanity. She didn’t even complain about the bike workshop in the kitchen. If our relationship survived that, I reckoned it would survive anything, and so far it has.

By the very late 1980s, I was tired and burned out with that scene and having no fun. I took some time off from cycling and went on long walks with my honey instead. I began to discover that life is not something to rush through. I had a mountain bike by then, and I thought of using it around town and for shopping, but dragging it up and down stairs, fear of theft, and a car-centric culture dissuaded me. I also worried about my inner roadie. Could he survive on a bike with bags and fenders?

I thought of my high school French teacher. She rode a nice mixte with a basket on the handlebars and she looked cool and classy. Was there a masculine version of this sort of bike and bike rider? There was, but my inner roadie would have to die before I could find him. And as fate would have it, another roadie had to help me kill him.

Go to Part 2 →

Last night I was playing my guitar when my wife asked “Aren’t you glad you have that little guitar?”

The guitar she was referring to was my humble little Martin 00-15. The 00-15 is known for being a “Plain Jane”, no-frills, guitar that sits well in your lap and has a sweet, folksy tone. It’s about as plain as a guitar can be; the entire thing is made from mahongany—including the top—and it has zero cosmetic touches. I originally purchased it as a “beater” guitar to loan to friends and take on road trips, but for some reason I couldn’t help but pick it up and play it, and over time I found myself playing it more and more as my high-end “fancy” guitars sat in the closet, collecting dust. As I played it more, my wife and daughter—who often sit with me and read while I play in the evening—came to prefer the sound of the “little mahogany guitar” over my other, more extravagant guitars. And as they became enamored with the 00-15, so did I.

In the end, I ended up selling my other guitars for lack of use, and I’m now left with only my humble, but well-worn and much-loved Martin. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and yes, I’m glad I have it.

I’ve only had one bike over the years for which I felt a comparable affection - my early 80’s Specialized Rockhopper. Like my 00-15, it was humble and solid, with few frills and zero bling. It was one of the first production mountain bikes on the market and it wasn’t really up to the task of bombing singletrack, something that I did on a regular basis with a few other early-adopter mountain biking friends in the early 80’s.

Our group rode mostly on the motorcycle and hiking/horse trails that criss-cross the National Forest lands of the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, WA. There was no such thing as a mountain bike trail in those days; in over three years of riding those trails, I never once came across another mountain biker. The motorcyclists we ran across were always wide-eyed to see a group of 4-5 mud-covered crazies on strange looking bicycles, 10-15 miles up the trail from the nearest road. Many times we were asked “How the hell did you get here?”

My poor Rockhopper suffered terrible abuse on those trails. We rode year-round, and what passed for “sealed” bearings in those days would not come close to passing muster today. Just to keep everything from freezing solid, I had to disassemble the headset, bottom bracket, hubs, and pedals after nearly every outing. Often, mud and water completely flushed out the bearing grease well before we made it back to the trailhead. We’d squirt Phil’s Tenacious Oil into the bearings just to keep everything from seizing up in the middle of nowhere; we went through gallons of the stuff.

I eventually replaced every part on the bike, one at a time. The only thing that survived was the overbuilt CroMo frameset. It was that frame that forever made me a fan of steel bike frames. That poor frame had more scrapes and paint worn off of it than a demolition derby junker. I never bothered to touch it up; I’d hit the rust spots with a little steel wool and oil now and again and call it good. Before it finally went to its grave, it had nearly as much bare metal and rust as it had paint.

I rode that bike extremely hard for 4 years. During the week it served as a commuter and grocery getter, and on the weekends it took me deep into the forest, sometimes fully loaded with camping gear. With its high-rise stem, flared off-road drop bars, and ancient Brooks saddle, it was comfortable, practical, and versatile; truly an all-purpose bike. It was the catalyst that led to many great adventures, and it’s those adventures I remember the most - not the bike. That must be what makes an old favorite; not the thing itself, but the experiences and fond memories it creates.