Tag: Interbike 2011

Space Horse-in’ around

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
The All-City Space Horse, ready to ride. I went for a 58cm this time, following a run of mostly too-short bikes, just to see what’s what.

There’s another new cayuse in the stable, albeit temporarily — an All-City Cycles Space Horse. I only have the one short ride on it so far, for all the usual reasons, but I hope to enjoy some extended saddle time next week before toddling off to Interbike to slobber over all the rest of the new toys.

All-City is one of the brands clustered under the umbrella of Quality Bicycle Products, which also covers Surly, Salsa, Foundry and Civia, among others. I stumbled across the outfit at last year’s Interbike, after a four-year absence from the show, and I liked the retro look of the Space Horse. Hey, who doesn’t pause to glance at a bike called “Space Horse?”

The bike is another one of those sturdy utilitarian steel machines I’ve grown to appreciate, like the Soma Double Cross or Surly Cross-Check. With eyelets for racks and fenders fore and aft and clearance for 700×42 rubber, it can serve as a commuter, a grocery-getter or a lightly loaded touring bike. You can also just ride the damn’ thing for the pure pleasure of riding, if that’s what blows your skirt up. But don’t expect to see any dopers riding it, penitent or otherwise, because it’s made of 4130 chromoly and a 58cm model weighs nearly 25 pounds without pedals.

The Space Horse can be had as either a complete bike or a frameset, for those of us who, like Your Humble Narrator, always seem to have at least one bike’s worth of parts cluttering up the garage, where the car wants to be. Mine arrived as a ready-to-ride bike, and beyond noting that Shimano is making the ugliest friggin’ cranksets in this universe or any other, I’ll keep my big yap shut until it’s review time.

Anybody else riding new machinery? Let us know about it in comments.

Pip pip, cheerio, wot?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

One of my reasons for going to Sin City this year was to ID bicycles that want reviewing in the pages of Adventure Cyclist, and did I come home with a beauty — a Pashley Clubman.

The folks at Pashley have been making bikes for the better part of quite some time — since 1926, to be precise — and they seem to have it more or less dialed in at this point. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a bike draw as many eyeballs as this one has in the short time we’ve spent together. Everybody notices it, even people who couldn’t care less about bicycles. It’s that sharp.

The Clubman reminds me of the bikes I bought when I got back into cycling in the early Eighties: steel frameset, non-aero brake levers, quill stem, eight-speed downtube shifting, 36-spoke wheels, toeclips and straps; a real blast from the past, and clad all in shiny black and silver, too.

I have to swap out the stem before I can put any serious miles on it — I need to get up and out quite a piece to accommodate my geriatric spinal column — and frankly, I can’t wait.

Meanwhile, at least we can gaze fondly upon it. Here are a few pix.

Return of the Interbiker: The last good breakfast

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
Sausage and cheese enchiladas
Sausage and cheese enchiladas at the Guadalupe Cafe in Santa Fe. The wait for a table was hitting 45 minutes when I got there, and worth every second.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Well, the last one that I didn’t have to cook, anyway.

I swung through Santa Fe post-Interbike and noshed at the Guadalupe Cafe, which frankly was batshit crazy at 11 a.m. Sunday, with the sort of line one associates with banks giving away free money.

And small wonder, because the food is always stellar.

I had my usual, the sausage and cheese enchiladas with a side of papas smothered in brick-red chile, and two cups of coffee.

As I ate, I thought briefly about putting a condo on the credit card and never going home. But then I realized that the cats would miss me terribly (yeah, right) and Herself would be eating out of cans while her kin hunted me with baseball bats, and I ain’t talkin’ catch-and-release here. Plus I’d already had a week of waking up without her around and that’s about six days too many.

So I gassed up and beat it for Bibleburg, arriving right around dinnertime.

To atone for my sins, per Herself’s request, I grilled a flatiron steak from Ranch Foods Direct and mashed up some spuds with heavy cream, butter, chives and parsley; she assembled a massive salad and we enjoyed a couple drams while I regaled her with tales from the bike show.

This morning it was what we call “smooshy eggs,” which is basically eggs boiled medium-hard, peeled and mashed with butter, salt and pepper, with spelt toast, java and juice on the side. Lunch was leftover dinner.

And tomorrow? Man. I’ll be lucky to slap together some toast and cold cereal. Someone around here needs to hit the grocery. Guess who? Home again, home again, dancing a jig.

Adios, Vuelta; hola, Interbike

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Outdoor Demo 2005
Your Humble Narrator, courting sunburn at the 2005 Outdoor Demo.

The Vuelta a España wraps up this weekend, and come Sunday I’m off to The Big Show in Vegas for the first time since 2006.

This will be my 14th Interbike, and my first under the aegis of anyone other than Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. I started out doing medium-heavy lifting for BRAIN, first in Anaheim and then in Vegas, pitching in on straight news coverage for the Show Daily. But as the years passed I gradually scaled back to compiling the Grapevine column and drawing a special Mud Stud strip for the Daily; I also lent a hand with headlines, photo captions and page-proofing, having done plenty of all three in 12 years as a copy editor for various newspapers.

When money got tight my annual trip to Sin City got nixed. It didn’t help that my post-show column was usually a variation on the theme “Interbike sucks,” which must have become tiresome to the publisher, editor, Interbike and the readership. I contributed Show Daily cartoons from a distance for a year or two, and then bean-counting saw the plug pulled on that, too. In a trade magazine comedy is an option, and occasionally more bug than feature.

No worries. I wasn’t enjoying myself, and it was time to take a break.

Now I have the chance to visit the show as a tourist, thanks to the fine folks at Adventure Cyclist magazine, who have yet to see the worst of me. Editor Mike Deme and I will wander the floor of the Sands Expo and Convention Center, looking for bikes to test-ride in 2012, and I should have plenty of spare time to unearth interesting bits of this and that, not being tethered to a Show Daily deadline.

So stay tuned — that low rumbling sound you hear in the distance is the DogMobile warming up for another high-speed run across the desert to Bugsy Siegal’s Fun House.

It’s a small world after all

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments
My SOPWAMTOS Golden Toiddy from Interbike Anaheim, circa 1996 or thereabouts. It is my sole award in a long and checkered career as a "cycling journalist."
My SOPWAMTOS Golden Toiddy from Interbike Anaheim, circa 1996 or thereabouts. It is my sole award in a long and checkered career as a "cycling journalist."

Well, well, well. Interbike is moving back to Anaheim after all these years. That means a shorter drive for the BRAINiacs — about 22 miles, seeing as how the present-day Bicycle Retailer & Industry News is based in Laguna Hills instead of Santa Fe, New Mexico — and an even shorter drive for me, since the show and I lost interest in each other more or less simultaneously about four years ago.

I vaguely recall enjoying the Mouse-house Interbike more than its whorehouse cousin, in part because I didn’t have to wander through the desert for 40 days and 40 nights to get to the convention center from the BRAIN hotel, which was blessedly free of white trash chain-smoking Luckies and jerking off one-armed bandits, prayin’ for a gusher.

But this was back in the Nineties, when we were all rich, the only swarthy foreigners we feared were driving taxis instead of hijacked aircraft, and we kept Republicans chained up in the basement where they belong until Clinton, crazed by young and tender poontang, let them out.

There was plenty of high-grade bullshit being slung in Anaheim, to be sure. But there also seemed to be more mom-and-pop ops at Interbike Disneyland — Steelman Cycles, Bruce and Jodie Ruana of the late, lamented Off the Front, Ross Shafer of Salsa (the Petaluma Salsa, not this newfangled outfit). Folks with a sense of humor, like the Society of People Who Actually Make Their Own Shit (SOPWAMTOS). I still prize my Golden Toiddy from that outfit.

And there were concerts, too — Los Lobos, Kim Wilson and The Fabulous Thunderbirds. …

Ah, Memory Lane. Watch out for those trips down that sucker. It’s full of potholes, speed bumps and blind corners. I found a few in dredging up the column I wrote for the October 1, 1997, edition of Bicycle Retailer, in which I proposed renaming Anaheim “Thorazine,” adding, “If California needed an enema, this is where you’d stick the hose.”

“Has it been so slow a year that everyone had to pawn their sense of humor to pay the bills?” I wrote. “I was looking forward to some serious amusement, but I came away feeling as though I had just spent a month in Sagging Jowls, South Dakota, with the United Brotherhood of Refrigerator Repairpersons.”

There was more, plenty more, including references to Hell and Tom Waits (prefiguring “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” by a dozen years at least, and I want my royalties, goddamnit).

But, still, jeez. I can see why nobody wants me to go anywhere on their dime anymore. It’s like inviting a rabid badger to dinner.