the Practical Pedal Blog

Go here to see some photos from our ride of a portion of the Great Divide Route. I’ll have a writeup soon, but we just got back and there’s much to do still.Cheers.

This just in. The Practical Pedal World Headquarters in Bozeman, Montana have been evacuated due to a sudden onset of adventurous activity.

Sources close to the organization say that, for reasons they were unable to comment on, that most of the Practical Pedal staff is en route to Atlantic City, Wyoming to ride bicycles from said location to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, along a portion of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route.

Those left behind say they are stricken with overbearing feelings of jealousy and resentment and as such, will be unable to perform their required duties…. had there been any required duties, that is.

As such, this blog, and all associated Practical Pedal emails and telephone numbers will go unanswered until June 25.

Tags: outof office, GDMBR, bicycle, practical pedal

The Practical Pedal mailbox (the atom mailbox, not the bitbox) is often a lonely place. We don’t even get much junkmail. But every now and then the postman puts something in it that makes our day.

This week, we got a donation from Kelly Hogaboom, the publisher of Sure Nail and Fire, a magazine about intentional living in Hoquiam, Washington.

So thank you.

Tags: surenail and fire, donations, magazines

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Originally uploaded by practicalpedal

Spring is here in Bozeman and that means everyone has yard sales and leaves free stuff laying on the sidewalks. The perfect time of year to have a Big Dummy on hand.

Just an update. The next issue prints on Monday, June 9. We know it’s the Spring issue and all. And that most folks don’t consider June to be Spring. And even though it only just stopped snowing here a few days ago, we don’t really either. But another issue is a comin’ and we’re calling it the Spring issue. Expect a Summer issue mid-Summer.

You may have heard of the S240 (the sub-24-hours camping trip) but what about the S240E? You’ve probably never heard of it because I just made up the term. But before we get to definitions, you’ll have to read through a bit of background involving automobiles.My first car was practical only in that it forced me to learn roadside repair skills. It was red, had two seats, and for the first few months I owned it, had no top to speak of. If you want to guess at the country of origin, I’ll give you a hint: the people who made the car enjoyed warm beer and produced a vehicle that absolutely brimmed with soul, as long as soul can in no way be interpreted to mean reliable.

The car was a Triumph TR6… a little British roadster. I loved that car. But after demolishing two transmissions, and after buying a motocross bike, I sold the little red machine and bought an old truck. The truck led to the discovery of the Anza Borrego Desert, just an hour or so east of San Diego. I’d hrow a sleeping bag and some food scrounged from the kitchen into the bed of the truck and set out after school on a Friday night for parts unknown.

Now at this point you might be wondering why I’m doing so much carrying on about cars on a site dedicated to bikes. The simple answer is: the Big Dummy. This long, cargo-carrying bike from Surly (and Xtracycle) is as close a thing to a crossover vehicle the biking world has. Crossover between what? Between the car world and the bicycle world. In the same way it’s versatile carrying capacity is useful for trips to the grocery store or to yard sales, the Big Dummy can be used like my old pickup truck to receive semi-random bits of camping gear for a quick trip out of town and into the hills.

Sure there are faster bikes that can be used for the same purpose, but with the Big Dummy, you don’t have to spend too much time figuring out how to pack everything into those little panniers. Just toss stuff in and go. In the same way that a pair of waxless XC skis are always at the ready for a quick slide through the woods (though not as efficient as waxables) the Big Dummy is always ready.

So while the S240 is applicable to any bike, the Big Dummy or a stout Xtracycle-equipped bike (or a bob or extrawheel trailer) are what you need for the spur-of-the-moment S240E… that is, the sub-24-hour-expedition. More on what makes an S240E in the next post.

One of our fine advertisers, the Biketrailershop.com, is hiring. Like a lot of other purveyors of practical cycling we’ve talked to, business is booming this Spring and they need some help. They’re located in beautiful Flagstaff, Arizona and the whole company is comprised of great people who are committed to this whole bikes-as-transportation thing.

So if you’re interested, stop by their web site or contact Josh Lipton with the information below.

Josh Lipton
http://BikeTrailerShop.com
http://BikeTrailerBlog.com/
1-928-226-0294
1-800-717-2596

Surly Big Dummy Camping

Originally uploaded by practicalpedal

A couple of quick shots. A writeup to come.

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Originally uploaded by practicalpedal

We were just a bit inland, my friends and I. Just far enough from the ocean that on weekends, if we’d managed to scrounge enough cash to buy gasoline, we’d load up our trucks and head east, toward the desert. Our trucks were ratty on the inside, dented on the outside, and each of them required a unique collection of trivia to keep running. My old Ford Ranger had a short in the wires that gave the fuel pump electricity. It would cut out, sometimes on the freeway, and demand that I wiggle it vigorously before it would pump its volatile cargo to the spark plugs. Growing up in San Diego we were not surf bums, we were desert rats (the surfing would come years later.)

San Diego sits in the lower left corner of the United States. It’s a unique position because not only is it graced with vast ocean to the west, and beautiful desert to the east, but just south is the best thing a landscape can offer a pack of exceptionally-mobile teenaged boys… a foreign country with large swaths of undeveloped desert.

Baja California was, for us, a fabulous adventure. The place scared us, broke us, got us lost, and fed us tacos. We’d throw our old sleeping bags and camp stoves into our trucks and jeeps and drive south on a Friday night, past the throngs of drunken partying on Ave. Revolucion, and into the winding trail carved into the desert by the seasonal fishing crews that plied the coast in small aluminum Pangas.

We got lost. We spent ours in one spot, trying to figure out ways to extract our stuck machines. We grew up, so to speak, in Baja and in the deserts and woods of the U.S.. We grew up with our gasoline-fueled rigs. These machines were so much a part of our lives that some of us even went on to document these activities professionally. You can see a small snippet of that work in the video below.

But how does this connect with bicycles? How do we go from fuel sold from a pump to fuel sold in the grocery store? That’s an easy question to answer. Our machines were, for us at least, not ends in themselves, but rather a tool for finding adventure. They allowed us to throw our gear into the back and set off for places that had things in store for us we could barely imagine.

Bicycles offer a similar romance. For me, it’s been a number of years since I’ve ventured off-road with some ratty camping gear and a vehicle that I’d have to learn to trust. So with the Big Dummy, Surly’s new gear-hauling mountain-bike frame, that call to adventure will once again be answered. And this time, i’ll be able to work on it in my apartment, no garage required.