Summer mode.

With apologies to Stine.

This bike wants drops.

Sent from my phone.

Past bikes: Bike #5

I just have to figure out a way to live with the fact that I am not going to spend a bunch of time digging for old bike pictures. Which sucks in a way. Because I know I have pictures of Bikes #4 and #5 somewhere. But freg it.

Bike #5 I bought in my senior year of high school. I got it from Two-Wheel Transit back when it was up on 29th Ave (next to where Miller's Hardware is now). I'd like to think I bought it from Paul Main, but I don't know that for sure. But I'm going with it.

It was a Giant ATX 760. Yellow (second only to white as the perfect mountain bike color). Shimano STX 7 speed.  I think it was about $500. Which was big money. By this time, I was working at Patsy Clark's restaurant and making big money... about $4/hour? Five-hunred bucks is a lot of prep-cooking, salad-making, and Sunday-brunching.

My buddies dropped me off at the bike shop to pick up the bike. They were driving down 29th while I attempted to keep up with them. I don't remember exactly what the hey I was doing, but I'm pretty sure I tried to bunny hop the median in front of (what is now) 5 guys burger place. I totally shit the bed and flopped over my bars. I don't remember much, except that as I opened my eyes, the back wheel of my buddy's car was rolling by about 4 inches from my face.

A buddy at school (Lucus) had also just gotten a mountain bike. We were both taking PE as seniors because we didn't take it when we were supposed to when we were sophomores. I think that was slightly demoralizing. We started skipping PE on a regular basis and riding the river trail instead. Back then, the river trail cut up into a cement factory, then dropped down a wonderful old bit of lush double-track to where the mega-church housing development is today. By the end of the year, we were both looking at failing grades in PE, which would've blocked our graduation. We fessed up to our PE teacher that we were skipping to ride, so it should count. He sort of bought it. He said if we could run for two hours straight in the gym, he'd pass us. Running sucks. But we both passed.

I ended up taking that bike to Germany. I went there to live with my sister in Bavaria during my first year of college. College had turned out to be kind of a bummer. I couldn't find a lot of "mountain biking" per se in the general area, but I enjoyed tooling around the country side and visiting other little villages. This was especially fruitful in the summer months, when just about every little village I rode through had some kind of beer-related festival happening. The area we were in was around Nuremburg, which, aside from beer, is also known for it's super amazing bad-ass bratwursts, unlike ANY bratwursts I've ever found here. What a great country.

I sold the ATX 760 to an American Army dude for about what I paid for it. I needed the money for a plane ticket home.

Watch this

This is good in so many ways.
Thanks to JimG for passing this along.

SFO

This dude has a rad job. He rolls up on his double top tube cruiser right before takeoff, delivers the papers in his basket to the pilots, then holds forth on some wing inspections on the ground.
The only thing he could do to rule more would be to enter with a rolling dismount.

Past bikes: Bike #4

Dang it. I kept putting this post off in the hopes that I'd go dig through a bunch of pictures to find an old photo of Bike #4. Then I would scan it and then this would be such a better post.

But there are a lot of bikes to cover and if I don't just keep plowing ahead, I'll never get them done.

Bike #4 was a light-weight Nishiki. I don't remember what model it was, but I can tell you for 100% certianitudity that it was not volume import. And here's how I know that.

The family two doors down from my childhood home were bike commuters. Bonafide. This is the 80's in Spokane. The dad (Mr. N) taught chemistry at GU. Maybe it was math. I think his wife taught there too. Man I don't know. But they were all stinking geniuses and still are. In fact the folks across the street from them were also geniuses (the S's). I mean this -- I could go on with a bunch of examples but I'll choose one. Mr and Mrs N's youngest boy (Mike) was a friend to me. He loved to shoot hoops in his driveway. One time I sat there with my fancy new calculator watch and called out huge sums which he instantly provided the answers for. Long division with huge numbers took him longer, but he'd do them. So, apparently, my family didn't get the "your kids have to be geniuses to live on this block" memo when they bought the house.

Ok. Mike also commuted. He basically went straight from grade school, spend like 1/2 a year in high school, then went to college. I think he was a grad student at Yale by the time he was about 18. He rode everywhere too. His dad was always tinkering with fancy Japanese bikes. In fact, the first real mountain bike I ever saw was Mike's dad's bike that he built up in about 1983 or so.

I was whinging one day about not having a rad bike. I was in about 7th grade by this time and I wanted a 10-speed. He mentioned that his dad had a Nishiki he'd sell me for $135.

That was a lot of money and my parents couldn't swing it. In fact, I wouldn't even think of asking them. So I got a paper route for exactly 9 months. Every month, I gave a chunk of money to Mike.

That Nishiki rocked. It had toe-clips, down tube shifters, and was crazy light and fast. I'm sure it was all Suntour (mix of cyclone and superbe?) Man it ruled. I took my first ride on the Hangman loop with bike. I explored West Plains. And I generally got around a lot faster on that bike. I learned that taking the Nishiki off the jumps I'd taken on my BMX was a whole different ball game. One of my favorite parts of the day was riding home from junior high (Sac) to hit a fast little trail with a drop in Manito Park.

I also started dreaming about a cross country tour while flipping through the pages of Nashbar, when it was a rad little printed magazine.

I had that bike through high school and into college. Lame ending for that one. I'm sort of ashamed to say -- when I moved out of an apartment in Browns Addition, I stashed the disassembled bike into the back of a crawlspace so I wouldn't have to deal with it. By this point, I was all mountain bike and the old childish ten speed didn't hold much interest for me. Lame.

Summer mode?

Maybe.

Past bikes: Bike #3

Bike #3, I'm pretty sure was my unicycle. I don't remember where I got it. But I rode it for about a year.

I could get around fine on it, but I never got to the point where I could jump curbs or do tricky stuff, or even consider some of the mountain bike unicycling the youngin's are doing today.

At this point, I was riding my BMX everywhere: to school, to friends' houses. My parents worked and they never drove me anywhere, so the BMX was a great thing.

Liza hauled my arse up the vertical route from downtown again today.
I don't care much for that route.

I also enjoyed skateboarding down big hills. My neighbors had a restless dog, of the type, vizsla, who was all muscle and couldn't run enough. He loved to pull me on the skateboard. He made that funny hacky sound until we upgraded his collar to one of those harness deals. That worked well. Until I couldn't avoid a squished pine cone in the road. That was not a nose-impact event, but it was some good skin loss on my right arm and shoulder, and one of my calves. Verily.


My unicycle was ripped off. Who steals a unicycle?