Category Archives: Everything Else

Leaving the Good Life to Hit The Road


Gregg Bleakney crossing into Argentina from Chile. Photo by Gregg Bleakney.

The latest episode of Patagonia’s Dirtbag Diaries podcast is about a young man who left a high paying, white collar career to ride his bike from Alaska to Argentina. Gregg Bleakney had a successful and lucrative job at a Seattle software company. By the time he was in his mid-20s he owned a big house, fancy car, and all the other luxuries one might associate with a rich young guy. He also felt a deep dissatisfaction with the work he was doing and spent many sleepless nights pacing around his house stressing about it.

His solution: set off on a year long, 19,000+ mile bike tour with a friend. Bleakney figured the trip would be just the experience he needed to return to his software career with a renewed sense of vigor and satisfaction. Instead, he wound up spending almost two years on the road, discovered a new passion for photography, and realized he would never find satisfaction in his old life.

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Elly Blue Wants to Show You Portland by Bike


Elly Blue traveling Portland by Bike.

Bike activist, writer, and previous Bicycle Story interviewee Elly Blue has a new project in the works called PDX by BIKE. She and business partner Meghan Sinnott are working to create a bicycle travel website and publish a companion guide book that helps bicycle tourists rent bikes, see the best sights, find the best way to get to said sights on bike, and attend the best bike events around Portland, Oregon. In their own words:

It’s a travel guidebook, but with a twist. You know all the good stuff at the front of most guide books about local history, catching the bus, which bridges you can bike over, and tips for doin’ it like a local? That’s what’s in our printed guide–but geared towards bikers.

Meanwhile, all our specific listings—like where to rent a bike and what awesome events are going on while you’re in town—will be on the web where they’ll never be out of date. Don’t worry, the printed version tells you the places you can go to use the web.

If you want even more tips for your trip, we’ll send you a custom itinerary based on your interests, complete with bike routes to get there.

The guidebook will be locally printed and full of gorgeous images by local “drawist” Matt Gauck. It will be bursting with our years of observations and collected tips. It is our hope that with this book on hand anybody on any budget can hop off the train in Portland and immediately be biking like a local.

Elly and Meghan are currently crowdsourcing funding for the publication of the companion travel guide. Check out their Kickstarter page, watch their pitch video, and see if this is the sort of bikey project you want to support.

The Slower Side of Paris-Roubaix

Paris-Roubaix has come and gone again. Sharper racing analysts than I have written smart recaps of Sunday’s cobblestone sufferfest (this one from Cycle Sport is particularly good), so I’ll spare you my take. Instead, I’ll share with you this amazing video from the race. It’s been making the rounds in the cycling Internet world, but it’s too good not to repost.

Shot at 4,000 frames per second, the video has nearly the same quality as still photography. It does a brilliant job of showing the pain and hardship the riders face on their 260km journey to the Roubaix velodrome. Watch it:

File Under Bad-Ass Women In History


Alfonsina Strada

Though today’s major European stage races like the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France are about as difficult as any form of bike racing, their early incarnations were brutal beasts in ways the modern races are not. Racers would set out for 300km stages over unpaved roads on single speed bikes with little if any organized support along the way. Winning was as much about surviving as anything and the winner would often finish hours ahead of the lanterne rouge. Simply completing these races was an impressive feat. To do so as the only woman in history to race in any of the three Grand Tours elevates Alfonsina Strada to “serious bad ass” status.

Adventure Journal posted a link to the Wikipedia entry on Strada last week. She was a dedicated racer in early 20th-century Italy known for winning nearly every race she entered against women and many of those against men. Her reputation once earned her an invitation to race the Russian Grand Prix. Thanks to some clerical slight-of-hand, Strada was able to enter to enter the 1924 Giro d’Italia.

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Maya Pedal: Progress Through Pedal Power


Pedal-driven water pump. Photo from Maya Pedal

Utility bikes have seen a surge in popularity in North America in the last few years. Seeing a long-tail cargo bike or a Dutch Bakfiets go rolling by is no longer cause for a head-snapping, slack-jawed stare—for bicyclists at least; the general population might feel otherwise.  I recently learned of an NGO, however, that puts bikes to work in such remarkable and utilitarian fashions that it puts even the finest smugness flotilla (see BikeSnobNYC for that reference) to shame.

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