I received a phone call from my youngest sister in England this January. We don’t talk all that much, especially now we live on different continents. But she was calling because she had met someone special. His name was “Pedro.” Pedro, she assured me was handsome, fast, and blue. And she wanted us to go…
“So I forgot to clip out of my clipless pedals and fell over.” A well-worn pedal. To anyone who isn’t serious about cycling, the above phrase is nonsensical. In the minds of snobibsh cyclists, nothing distinguishes them more from their casual brethren on wheels than their clipless pedals. Switching to clipless pedals is as momentous to an…
I’m sitting in Bites on Broadway in Skagway, Alaska, a hundred-year-old saloon-cum-coffee house, watching tourists walk down the wooden boardwalks. For every dozen tourists, there’s a local guide biking past. The guides look lean compared to the typically tubby cruise ship passengers. They ride up to the post office mailbox across Broadway to drop off…
Riding The Route of the Condor was one of those reckless bar-talk ideas that wouldn’t normally have got traction beyond the hangover. Like most beer-charged plans, it should have been added quickly to the graveyard of other wonderful yet fantastical ambitions such as unicycling the Pan American Highway, or cycle touring the Kamchatka Peninsula. Yet somehow…
It has taken me thirteen previous posts before I got round to writing this one. So far I’ve mainly described some of the rides I’ve been lucky enough to take through the wilds of Patagonia, the smoking volcanoes of the Atacama Desert or the bear country of the Great Divide. The bike itself has been…
It’s cute, but is it practical? That’s the question many folding bikes elicit. Sure, it looks neat, but how well does it actually function? Form follows function. Ergo, the form of a folding bike should follow its function. Folding bikes are designed to be compactly carried and stored in other vehicles, but still provide reliable…
Last month I wrote about my bikepacking expectations. We were about to head down towards Chilean Patagonia on our retro-fitted 1980s Thorn touring tandem. In the weeks building up to the trip I had done away with the bulky Ortlieb panniers and kitted it out with slicker, lighter-weight, snugger fit and generally far more fancy…
Bicycles are almost as Swiss as Swiss Army knives, and the Swiss Army proudly maintained a front-line bicycle infantry regiment into the 21st Century. While it was disbanded in 2003, The Swiss Army continues to use bicycles for base transportation
For a long time it seemed that boiled-down living couldn’t get much simpler. Anytime I wanted to travel, all I had to do was clamp those brightly coloured, slightly unwieldy, boxes onto the side of my bicycle and I was away. I bought my shiny red panniers in 201o. Today they have dust and holes…
In the wake of World War II, the militaries of the West left bicycles behind for the automobile and the armored personnel carrier. Bicycle infantry units in the German army were disbanded alongside the rest of the defeated forces.
“You can laugh at them now, Wesley,” my biking buddy Liz had told me a decade ago on a group ride, “But someday youre going to be one of those old guys on a recumbent.” Well, that day has come. I’m a certifiably older, slightly goofy guy on a recumbent. On my first sandwich delivery…
A few months ago I got into a bit of a rut. Not an all consuming black cloud rut. Just your typical too much work, not enough sleep kind of overcast feeling. Normally when I start to feel like this I self medicate with a long run in the mountains, or put some uplifting energy…
Recumbents. You’ve seen those oddball, laid-back bikes being ridden by slightly goofy guys (yeah, it’s usually guys). They’re smiling. They’re waving. And they’re looking suspiciously comfortable. Recumbents are practically the opposite of everything that bicycling is supposed to be about. There’s no crying in baseball, and there’s blessedly little comfort in bicycling. Right? Well, maybe…
Joe Grant cycled away from his front door in Gold Hill, Colorado this July with everything needed for a month of mountain travel. He travelled in “self propelled” style by bicycle and foot, linking up and summiting all of Colorado’s 14,000′ peaks along the way. The bikepacking racer set a new record of 31 days…
‘Tis a pity that General Patton didn’t lead a column of bicycles into battle, but Field Marshall Montgomery led an army of foot soldiers and “foot cycles” in Normandy. When the British were bottled up in Normandy with their plentiful bicycle
Happy Small Business Saturday everyone! As the editor of this cycling blog and the owner of www.CampfireCycling.com, I generally find myself as deep in the weeds of small business as I am in immersed in the world of cycling. And I’m often tempted to write about my various small business trials and tribulations here at…
Think back to when you were a kid. Did you enjoy getting stuck in a car more than the riding your bike through the neighborhood? Then why do we default to cars as adults? Maybe we shouldn’t and a lot of us are taking that to heart and commuting by bike to work. There are…
In the weak afternoon sunshine of late September 2014, I fingered my British passport at the top of the Flathead Valley before rolling down towards the US border at Eureka, Montana. After three days alone in the only uninhabited valley of southern Canada, I was looking forward to some human interaction with the border guard….
Hey, I think I passed you on my way home last week, my trumpet master told me, You were riding up the bridge on the bike with all the lights on it, right? Boy, you’re trusting! I’d never ride in the city like that. Trusting? Ive been called many things on my bike, but never…
Are you a bikepacking aficionado with a penchant for hair raising story telling? Are you a dedicated bicycle commuter who wants to inspire others to bike to work? If you fit either of these bills, keep reading because we’re looking for two new writers to join the www.CampfireCycling.com blogging team. Around the start of this…
Fall is here! School has begun!!! The weather is cooling off and the mosquitoes are beginning to die off…and finally we can go outside again anytime of the day! But many of us are busier than ever too. Busy with chores, work, life and ready for the election to be over for some sanity. Some…
In May this year my friend Alan came to visit me in Chile. Our plan was to ride an enormous, ambitious loop through the land of volcanoes and monkey puzzle trees in the south of this long, thin country. The region is known as the Araucania. For over 300 years in this inhospitable terrain of…
This will be my last post in this forum, at least for a while. I’ve come to realize that caring for an infant full-time doesn’t leave a lot of extra wiggle room in my day to do much of anything else. The part-time work I’m doing these days from home is squeezed into the often-unpredictable…
Are cargo bikes practical? asked a denizen of Quora.com recently (a more polite version of Reddit). An interesting question, I thought, but whats a cargo bike, and whos to say whats practical? If cargo is defined as anything in excess of the human engine, then any bike that can carry a water bottle is a…
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