Anyone who knows me knows that I love my Spaceliner, a bike I found rusting outside of a barn last fall and brought back to life. Since I fell in love with that bike, I have always been secretly lusting after a fabled “All Original” Spaceliner with every single original factory part still intact. They are hard to come by, as any all-original bike from the mid-60s would be. My chances of getting one for cheap weren’t good either. But somehow one showed up on a popular internet auction site listed simply as “collectors bike” and located in New Hampshire with no intention to ship. I happen to have a good friend who lives a half hour away and was coming to visit in a couple of weeks. So, long story short, I got the bike for a steal with free shipping, all I had to do was buy my friend dinner. Once I got it, all I had to do was pump up the original allstate whitewalls (!), spray a little lube on the chain and hubs, and take it for a ride! It felt like it just came out of the factory! I must have put a dozen or more miles on it in the first weekend, and a few days later commuted 10 miles round trip to work with a side trip to the LBS by way of the post office. Here are some pictures!

The day I got it, I put a bell on it and cruised the hood for a couple of hours.

At the post office. I had a 24″ rim to be laced with a Sturmey Archer hub at the LBS, my next stop.

Outside Renaissance Cyclery, a nice little LBS. They have a vintage pennyfarthing outside the front door, which I took a picture of, but my camera didn’t save.

At the bike rack outside my building at work. This past week has seen a lot of new bikes in there.

Down Low Glow, ACTIVATED!

on the way home

It’s definitely a head-turner. That’s my favorite way of livening up my commute, to ride a fun bike that will get noticed. And cars definitely see me, most often they are slowing down to check me out! I can’t do the single-speed-up-hills thing every day, but every once in a while it’s definitely worth the extra effort. It makes me smile :)

After an extra week of waiting while my DLG kits were shipped back to california because of a mix up at the fed ex office, they were kind enough to overnight them to me. I installed them in about 5 minutes before work, on my recently acquired and refurbished late 60’s Sears Spyder 5-speed 24″ muscle bike.

I had to wait until my dinner break (around 8PM) to fire them up, but it was worth the wait. I definitely got some weird looks riding around, cars slowing down as they pass to to figure out why my bike was glowing. I didn’t get a stream of comments from people like Jason did, but one lady in a car said, “That’s a good idea!” to which I replied, “It’s a great idea!”

I took pictures on the way home at the end of my shift.

My good camera still has a broken lens so I have been forced to use the little digital point and shoot the last couple of weeks. Best I can do for now. More pics after I get a new lens!

Riding the same route to work every can become dull, I like to spice it up every once in a while with a alternative route. From my apartment, there are really only a couple of roads that go to my company campus, but I have found a couple of off-road options that are pretty fun, and gives me a reason to ride the mountain bike to work. I found this one a while back (while there was still snow on the ground!):

I start off by going east down pine, past this park with this pond. Back in those trees there is an adventure trail complex that is accessible from Birch street.

I guess youth groups come here in the summer for team building exercises. There were things like wooden walls to climb and rails to walk across (I didn’t get pics of that stuff).

This bridge crosses a narrow point in the pond, and leads to more adventure (trails). The other side comes out on a soccer complex on the main road I normally go to work. I can go that way or back through the trails and get to work down birch.

Another route:

These power lines run along the crest of the hill behind campus. I tried riding there from this point near my house (after a healthy climb up the hill). This part of the trail is pretty rough, so I gave up and looked for a different point to jump on. I found it on Redstone Hill Road:

This isn’t some sort of public multi-use path or anything, it’s obviously a service path for the powerlines, but I could tell that people had brought bikes and atv’s through here before.

Eventually, I emerged from the trail, behind campus, next to the satellite farm. But there’s a fence there!

To keep me out or to keep the satellites in? I guess I could have assumed I couldn’t get through this way, but wanted to try. I ended up going around the satellite farm.

I found a weird little trail that cuts off from the powerline trail through the woods next to the satellite farm, with religious markers nailed to the trees, as well as a statue and big cross in a clearing…

The trail took me out to the main road, right next to campus. I couldn’t find anything there that marked it or gave any indication that there was a trail there. Weird.

on campus, the other side of the satellite farm, they look so little from down here. Campus is actually pretty nice to ride around.

I work on the 3rd floor of the building you can see over the parking lot. And here is a legless coyote:

They’ve installed a few of these around campus to help scare away the geese that take over campus every summer. I don’t think the geese are fooled though, there were definitely still some geese hanging around about 20 feet away.

A bike rack conveniently located right outside my building. The Univega road bike on the left and the Roadmaster mtb on the right have not moved since I started three months ago, and probably several months before that. The wheels are flat and the chains are rusty. But that Trek just started showing up in the last couple of weeks since it got nice. I am no longer the only bike commuter on campus! Hopefully more soon, with bike-to-work week coming up, I have a friend who is helping to push it as a company-wide initiative.

Anyway, I hope that if you ride to work every day, you can find at least one or two fun alternative routes to get there, and live it up!

So I work from 4PM to 12:30AM. I usually roll into my apartment around 1AM. I have been having a hard time actually getting to bed before sunrise most mornings. So sometimes I head out at sunrise for a “midnight snack”. Last week I did just that, riding to stop-and-shop for a few groceries at around 7AM. I brought along my little digital point-and-shoot camera.

Bob, my trusty hybrid commuter

no bike rack at the stop-and-shop. So I used their empty garden display rack.

It was turning out to be a beautiful morning so after I got some groceries I stopped at dunkin fatpills for some breakfast, then earned it by riding up the hill to Page Park to eat it.

there were ducks.

It’s amazing how nice weather can change a quick trip to the grocery store into a 2-hour bike adventure. After I finished breakfast I ended up going farther up the hill from the pond in the park…

Till I found probably one of the highest points within the park:

extreme commuter bike!

Now some people might cringe at the thought of big hills, and I admit I was spoiled in Rochester by the relative lack of them. But since coming to the hills of Connecticut, I am re-discovering the fundamental truth. If you go up, you get to go down :)

photo by Whittiker Owens.

Last sunday I was lucky enough to find myself in Rochester, with friends, a bicycle, and a boombox. Unfortunately I am back in another state now, but the cruise goes on in Rochester, check them out on wednesday nights:

www.flickr.com/photos/whittikerowens/2404142061

My girlfriend Caitlin drove down to Bristol from Rochester for the weekend to visit. The weather was nice so we decided to go for a cruise. She especially likes riding the Silver Bullet, my first bicycle, what I learned to ride on:

Cakeland ready to cruise

I was riding my Father’s first bicycle, what he learned to ride on, which I just finished refurbishing last week:

Me on my Dad’s ‘57 Schwinn

We cruised up the street to the schoolyard, quiet on a Saturday afternoon:

We went down the path from the schoolyard through the woods to a bridge over a creek:

My first bike with my Dad’s first bike. Like Father, like Son.

I went back up the path on the silver bullet and raced back down, to see how long of a skid mark I could leave on the bridge:

It was the perfect time of day for cruising:

Cake tried out my Dad’s bike, and liked it!

At the playground I practiced some of my zipline spy moves:

Getting late, heading home:

The next day we went cruising again because it was even warmer and Cakeland wanted to ride the SpaceLiner across America:

And I wanted to ride the Silver Bullet down a big hill:

I miss Rochester and all my friends and loved ones there, but as long as ROC keeps visiting me and I keep visiting ROC (like this upcoming weekend), I will keep it in my heart. And it’s always more fun to cruise with a buddy, so bring a friend or two, or seven :)

See y’all real soon. Till then, keep flyin’ the friendly skies

It has been cold and wet the last couple of days here in Bristol, but today was beautiful. Sunny and a little chilly, but still warm enough for me. I am down to single layers on my rides now, and can even leave my gloves at home. So today was a perfect day to ride, and I had just refurbished a dry, cracked Brooks saddle that I got a while back from the folks at R Community Bikes in Rochester. After a soaking in motor oil and being threaded with wire and wrapped in burlap (the Rat Rod way to do it), it was ready to ride.

I rode up the street to the nearby schoolyard, empty on a Sunday. I stopped for a cross-country tour.

I took off down the path through the woods from the schoolyard, as seen in the background of that photo. It leads to a bridge over a creek.

A good day for a cruise, and the neighborhood has some cruisable parts. There are still plenty of hills so I am thinking about an upgrade to a 3-speed. This one was fun to go down:

So I still miss the cruisable Rochester streets, but I am making the most of the streets around here. And as it gets nicer out I think I will be out more and more. I needs to cruise!

You really can’t have just one. I’ve got a big empty apartment out here so I’ve been compensating by filling it up with bikes. I keep coming across sweet vintage rides begging to be cleaned, lubed, and ridden. I do what the bikes tell me. They have taken over.

I am particularly proud of last weekend’s find, the red bike in the lower left foreground. It was my father’s first bicycle, a Schwinn that has been hanging in a garage for decades :)

soon to be ridable again, as well as a couple others. Now I just need to find people around here to ride them with me… :/

People often ask me “How do you do grocery shopping on your bike?” It’s as simple as this:

This is the way I do it, but you could always get racks, baskets, panniers, or even an xtracycle like Jason’s. But I can get a week’s worth of food in my backpack and I don’t have to get any bags at the store. How do you do your grocery shopping on your bike?

So, a lot has happened for the members of Team Rocbike in recent weeks. Jason has been laying down new tire tracks in another part of the state, I am soon to be doing the same, in another state altogether. I just received a job offer in the end of December to do animation work at a certain sports cable network based out of Bristol, CT. Although it was hard to say goodbye to Rochester and all my friends here, not to mention the smooth flat roads around my neighborhood (perfect for cruising), I couldn’t turn down the offer, as it is a huge kickstart for my real career. Part of the job offer included a relocation package, to ease the move to a new area. As part of the package, last week I was flown into nearby Hartford and given a rental car, and put up in a hotel right outside of Bristol for 4 nights. A relocation specialist named Joanne helped me pick out apartments to look at based on my needs, which above all had to be in a good location to bike commute to work. Joanne drove me around Bristol for a day to see the area and look at apartments. Some areas were nice but only accessible along busy narrow streets, others only accessible up long steep hills which I swear must have been almost a 45% grade. I ended up choosing a nice apartment 2 miles from where I will work along a quiet, relatively flat, wide back road. We took the commute road in the rental car and it seemed alright, but I needed the experience by bicycle. Since I had flown down and all my stuff was still in Rochester, I obviously didn’t have my own bike to ride. I went around and checked local bike shops right in Bristol to see if they had rentals and to generally get an idea about what the bicycling life was like around there. There are a couple nice shops right in Bristol, but I ended up down the road in nearby Milldale, at a place called Bobby Sprocket.

I had brought along my new little point-and-click automatic digital camera, but didn’t realize till later that the date-stamp was on, d’oh! Anyway, the folks at Bobby Sprocket were really friendly and wanted to help out a bike commuter new to the area, and they had a bike I could borrow:

Luckily I had packed my helmet and tail-light on the flight down. Without any further delay, I got the bike to my new apartment complex and hopped on.

They had insisted I borrow a headlight too, I didn’t argue. This is where I am going to live:

From there I rode to where I will work, this is what a lot of that road looks like:

And here is the bike across from where I will work:

This is on the opposite side of the campus from where I will actually ride my bike. Good thing too, the road that I am on the other side of is a scary four lane 40+mph road with a lot of traffic. I almost got hit getting over there to take the picture. From there I rode on (on back roads) to nearby Lake Compounce Amusement Park:

Apparently it’s the oldest theme park in the US. But it was closed for the season.

I still had the bike for another day so the next day I started off at the same location and took off in the other direction, loosely towards the main shopping centers of town, but by way of back roads.

I ended up at this pond in Page Park.

I returned the bike and then flew back to Rochester, and have spent the last week getting ready to go out there for good. The movers came and took all my stuff earlier and it’s on its way to my new home. I fly out tomorrow morning and I am there. I will still be posting here from CT as begin commuting and exploring on my bike. To all my friends here in ROC, farewell, and keep on riding!

We were a bare-bones group this week, but doesn’t mean it was any less fun. Some caliente music was keeping us warm as we made our way through our routines as rolling creatures of habit. Here’s the Breakdown: Dogtown, Monty’s Krown, Rolling Around Town, Snow Falling Down, Looking Like Clowns. Standard Wednesday Night Cruise. We even hit up our favorite Footbridge over 490. It was almost impassible, as we expected. We did however stop and do a bike lift for the evening 490 traffic. We did a little exploring for hidden routes through the Park Ave neighborhood. Then skipped LUX for a change and got a 6-pack of a beer with a dog biting a bicycle tire on the label. These frosty libations were enjoyed in my humble abode while we watched cartoons and played 2-player Tetris with the friendly neighbors.

As always, an open invitation to join us any Wednesday. We’re a fun group who likes riding bikes and listening to music, while visiting some of our favorite watering holes. No agenda, just cruising!

Pics by Adam, video by Joey

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Jason’s not the only one with Bicycle Insanity.
5am, 21°F, several inches of snow and rising, during the first snowstorm of the season. For some reason I am compelled to ride a cruiser down the street to the gas station to get some ice cream. Makes perfect sense to me! And I got to leave that sweet trail in the virgin snow with the fat balloon tires. Winter is fun!

On a Saturday afternoon in late October, in a ghetto area of Brooklyn, on a dead-end street blocked off by barricades, there was an unprecedented scene of madness and mayhem. The kind of thing you’d expect to see in some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland (think Bartertown), a wild untamed wilderness of bikes, beer, and giant foam skulls. This has happened every year for the past 5 years, amazingly without intervention from the NYPD.

Imagine a street filled with hundreds of people and their bikes, mostly mutant bikes formed from the discarded pieces of other bikes. Bikes that are almost un-rideable, therefore more fun to ride, tallbikes, longbikes, choppers, bikes with shoes for wheels. And there is non-stop activity of bikes moving, people throwing stuff at the bikes, olympic style events such as chariot races, six-pack relays, and the ultimate event, tallbike jousting.

It’s hard to judge whether this event is pro-bike or anti-bike with all the abuse they put some of the bikes through. And by the end of the day it was almost impossible to safely ride a bike down the street as it was completely covered in shards of glass from smashed 40oz bottles. One thing is for sure, everyone there is having a hell of a time. There are moments when the entire street just turns into a giant dance party and everyone is moving in unison to the beat coming from the live DJ. There are other times when you can’t even tell what is going on where because there are just too many people and too much noise around to process it all, then the crowd instantly parts and there is a surfbike coming your way with someone”hanging 10″ on the board mounted to the front, and you have to dive out of the way or get a gut full of plywood.

The best part for me was trying out some of the crazy contraptions lying around, such as a bouncy bike made out of two different full suspension mountain bikes welded together, or a crazy chopper with a 5 foot fork, or the shopping cart bike. I didn’t even attempt to ride a tall bike, but maybe next year. Killmore has some pics, I’ve got video. Enjoy!

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Jason’s note: This disturbing piece was contributed today by cycling photographer and rescuer of vintage bikes Joey Mac.

Wow, I seem to catch all the jerks on my lunch bike ride home. There is a narrow part of the road, where it is not safe for a car to pass a bicycle (a center island with a curb on the left, and a sidewalk with a curb on the right). I had an issue in the same spot last week, and had a driver yell at me for taking the full lane.

It happened again today where a car actually passed me in the narrow section of road, coming within inches of me. He of course had to stop soon after because of a car turning left, so as I passed him on the right, I said (this time without swearing or even really yelling) “More room, please.” I continued on his way, and he drove past me, yelled something, I said, “I need 3 feet for safety.” He pulled to a stop right up the road (in fact in front of my house), and got out. I stopped too, because I was at my house anyway. He must have thought I was ready to pick a fight with him. He was driving an Audi or something, and was wearing a golf shirt and some pressed khakis. Grade A douchebag all the way. He immediately came up to me and got in my face.

“what’s the issue here?!”

“you’re too close to me, I need more room if you are going to pass me,”

“YOU NEED TO GET OUT OF THE ****ING ROAD!”

“if you look up the traffic law, you’ll see that I have the right of way, and that you are required to yield or give me room,”

“WHAT YOU WANT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT?!” (he then tries to psych me out by pretending to headbutt me, or whatever you call that. I didn’t flinch).

“I am a vehicle on the road, I have the same rights as you.”

(he was saying something else, but around this point he decided to just spit in my face)

I was dumbfounded for a second. Did he actually just spit in my face?

“That’s really mature sir.”

“YEAH, YOU BETTER WATCH YOUR MOUTH BECAUSE YOU’RE GOING TO GET YOUR ASS KICKED!”

At this point he was walking back to his car, obviously realizing that I was not going to back down and that I was not intimidated (I am a 5′10″ 200 pound viking, I don’t scare easily).

“Have a nice day sir, drive carefully”

And I walked towards my house. Just as I got to my door, I realized that I should have gotten his license number, but I was still too amazed that I had just had that encounter. He had peeled out and disappeared. The whole moment lasted about 30 seconds. My heart is still beating fast from the adrenaline rush 20 minutes later. I hope he realized that the couple seconds he might have saved by passing me ended up costing him an extra minute or so by stopping to try to pick a fight with me. And I am glad that this time I was able to keep my cool and not just swear a lot like last time I had an angry motorist yell at me. Maybe next time I will actually take down a license plate number too.

Ride carefully, fellow commuters.