Going global

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Patrick, of Scoop fame, was in Japan for most of the month of December. He bought a bunch of used cycling magazines. Most of them are touring, pass hunting, and utility bike related magazines. I don't know what the hey they say, but the pictures are so good, that it makes me want to spend a year touring Japan. I've been to Tokyo for about a week years ago and I loved the city, but the rural/country touring potential kills me: many hot spring baths, great food, tidy/nice culture. I'm dying here.

Anyway. Patrick was leafing through a used magazine he had purchased down the street from his parents house, when he saw this Cat Eye light ad. Turns out we know that street. It Monroe. And we know that dude on the bike. It's Jake for f's sake! I'm pretty sure he's not running a Cat Eye. But whatever. That's flipping cool.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that it's a Tobin photo. And that it was taken with the same batch of pics that went into the Inlander for the cover photo of a Joel Smith bike article.
Cool.

Reminds me of this.

In another magazine that Patrick brought back was an article by and about a super rad dude on a super rad drop-bar knobbie bike that did a super rad tour of somewhere super cold. I want to find him and invite him over for a week of hanging in the local Nat'l Forests. I think he would find it super rad.

Here's the cover of the Jake-Cat-Eye-ad magazine. Dig that bike. The tires don't make sense to me, but the rest of it does. If you knobbified and fatified those tires it would be ready to rumble. Seriously, the bike scene in Japan, at least as reflected by these magazines, is really refined. It's like they take the best of the French constucteurs and munge it with a Surly sensibility and finish it with a bit of Rivendellesque attention to detail and turn out a lot of cool and weird bikes.

For example, here's Liza's dream machine:

Seriously. Liza loves this bike. And she wants it. I can see that.