Interbike 2013: Welcome to Watsonville

September 17, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Sunflowers just off a bike path in south Flagstaff.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (MDM) — OK, so it’s Flagstaff. But whenever I see sunflowers, I think Graham Watson. So sue me.

I’m at the Hampton Inn & Suites this year. It’s a nice upgrade from the nearby Motel 6, which last year had devolved into some class of a Superfund site for the storage of toxic humans. I have a small kitchen, a living room and two TVs that I have yet to turn on. Fat city.

Still, there are downsides. At breakfast this morning my fellow travelers were all performing sun salutations over their smartphones with their third eyes glued to Al Roker. How fortunate for us all that I no longer travel armed, as I was sorely tempted to chlorinate the gene pool until I got a couple cups of java down me.

Now, the good news: En route I saw a touring cyclist just east of San Fidel on Interstate 40. He was enjoying a brisk tailwind and 75-degree temps as he rolled along this giant ATM for the highway-construction industry. Like the Golden Gate Bridge, I-40 is always being worked on, and the work will never be finished.

And over dinner at Beaver Street Brewery, I read in The Lumberjack, the newspaper of Northern Arizona University, about a student who rode his bike from Canada to Mexico this summer. Sophomore forestry major Matthew Riggens had never cycled more than a couple dozen miles in a day, but he made it all the way to Mexico, and plans to tackle a trip from Washingon state to Maine next year.

So don’t give up hope. Not everyone is trading their eyesight for a giant pair of thumbs. Still, you should probably leave the guns at home when you travel.

Interbike 2013: Swimming to Santa Fe

September 16, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

The scene outside the passenger window near Wagon Mound, N.M.

SANTA FE, N.M. (MDM) — I arose this morning to partly cloudy skies and images of my old friend Jennifer Buntz on the TV, discussing some bikey issue on KOB-TV out of Albuquerque.

I chose to regard both of these developments as good omens, having left Bibleburg under threatening skies and surfed a couple of gully-washers en route to The City Different, the traditional first stop on the Road To Mandalay (Bay). It’s still raining back home, Herself confirmed this morning.

I expected more of the same in Santa Fe, but managed to sneak in a quick soak and steam under the clouds at Ten Thousand Waves, poaching the editorial kinks out of my moth-eaten carcass.

All my usual dinner haunts are closed on Sundays, so I grabbed some disgustingly healthy grub from Whole Paycheck and took a brief assay of what was on the electrical babble box. Not much. I can’t believe people pay American money to watch this shit. I likewise gave myself a day away from the Innertubes, being weary of that particular monsoon, too.

This morning it’s an overdue dose of green chile at Tia Sophia’s and then off to Flagstaff. See you along the road.

Back from the shadows again

April 24, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

Did I miss anything? I was feeling beat, pissy and unfunny and decided to toddle off for a high cranial colonic, the mental equivalent of a radiator flush. Lord, how that corrosion does build up.

While at large I ignored the news, the Innertubes and pretty much everything else save steering the old two-wheeler around, eating, and watching lots of TV like reg’lar folks. I can recommend the new Louis C.K. standup, “Oh My God.” “Prometheus,” not so much.

In short, I spent the week not being me, which can be curiously refreshing. Tomorrow I’ll put on a freshly reddened rubber nose. Now, please, everyone, lock your wigs, let the air out of your shoes and prepare yourselves for a period of simulated exhilaration. Welcome to … The Future!

What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?

February 27, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 33 Comments

One of the downsides of spending 22 years working solo in a home office, besides not being able to get a gig at Yahoo!, is that one tends to take on attributes of those lost tribes National Geographic is forever un-losing, or the Japanese soldiers jungled up on various Pacific islands who never got the word about the emperor’s surrender.

Outsiders are suspicious characters, their fabulous tales not to be given credence. And should they drag you from your village or spider hole toward what they deem “civilization,” you may expect to contract smallpox, TB or the clap. Better to make pincushions of the foreigners with blowgun darts and shrink their heads, or fillet them with a katana and get back about your business.

The Boo Glissando is a concept townie that marries a bamboo laminate with titanium.

Which is the long way around to saying, yes, I was compelled to attend the North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Denver, where I was put on display by the white devils, and all I came away with was a massive tab for docking my Subaru Outrigger and a medium-heavy case of Snotlocker Surprise.

In all fairness, I wasn’t exactly dragged. Having missed last year’s NAHBS, I was determined to take in the Denver edition, if only because I wouldn’t have to depend on United Airlines to get me there.

But I was planning to attend mostly for kicks. I didn’t count on being shanghaied into helping judge the 2013 NAHBS Awards, filling in for the absent Patrick Brady of Red Kite Prayer. This was not unlike inviting a Jivaro headhunter to stand in for Len Goodman on “Dancing With the Stars.”

So I had to get there way too early for a daylong refresher course on how little I know about the velocipede, and if you were one of the losers who came away empty-handed, award-wise, well, I can only say that it wasn’t my fault. It was those other guys. My judicial pronouncements were limited to the usual half-witticisms, like “I’d ride the shit out of that one if someone gave it to me,” “That belongs on a wall with a frame around it,” or “I can see taking that thing into your average shop for a tuneup and finding out afterward that the mechanics all hanged themselves.”

Being simpleminded, I gravitated toward simplicity, as exemplified by the Level keirin bike, the Boo Glissando and the English Cycles time-trial bike, which we named best in show shortly after noon on Saturday.

This last really has to be seen up close to be believed, as photos don’t do it justice. Rob English is a time trialist, a two-time winner of the Oregon state championship, and his considerable talent and ingenuity were clearly focused by his love for the discipline.

Once we’d wrapped up the awards, I took another refresher course, this one in bullshitting. It’s easy to bullshit over the Innertubes or in a magazine column, but improvising chin music on the fly takes practice, which I was out of. So I spent the rest of the show chatting up a number of old friends and colleagues, and that’s probably how I contracted the Snotlocker Surprise.

Damn the white man anyway.

Take it to the bridge

November 16, 2012May 13, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments

Old Pueblo Road, just south of Hanover Road.

BIBLEBURG, Colorado (MDM) — Meanwhile, back at the ranch … Herself and I went out to dinner at Nosh to celebrate the return of the prodigal. (The prodigal was hungry after 144.6 miles of cycling in three days and there was nothing to eat at the ranch.)

My old Cateye computer developed a partial paralysis somewhere between Pueblo and home, but the mileage is right; I just lost elapsed time and average speed, neither of which were worth bragging about.

That final leg from the Pueblo Hampton north is a real hodgepodge of terrain. It starts with a couple of streets that have no business existing, were it not for a couple of underused strip malls, then segues into a few miles of Interstate 25 before veering east at the defunct Piñon Truck Stop onto a stretch of what the old hands would call “heavy road” — a rough, rolling chip-seal frontage road that may be the remnants of the old Highway 85/87.

After the rest area another short run on I-25 takes you underneath and across to the west side of the interstate, and that’s the last you see of the sonofabitch — before you know it you’re on Old Pueblo Road, which leads to Fountain, the Front Range Trail, and blessed freedom from infernal combustion until just a half-dozen blocks from Chez Dog.

Now I’m typing with the right hand while the Turk’ sprawls across my lap and onto my left hand. You may recall the tale of the wise man who cut off the sleeve of his garment rather than disturb a sleeping kitten — well, the Turk’ is no kitten, and better to surrender aspects of one’s keyboard than to lose one’s left hand.

I may not be wise, but I’m not exactly stupid, either.