Strange beverage

March 16, 2014March 16, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Oh, ’tis a fine soft day in Charlotte, North Carolina. Ninety-three percent humidity is good for the skin after a long day spent drinking watery green beer with a few thousand of your closest friends followed by a nap in a shamrock-colored puddle of pee under the old F-350.

I managed to skirt the no-fly list once again and am squatting in the Charlotte airport awaiting the next pressurized aluminum tube full of viruses bound for Chicago, where I understand the climate is likewise good for preservation, especially of things like wooly mammoths, Ben and Jerry’s, and other frozen goods. Just as well, as I’ll be chilling there for at least a couple of hours before catching a Ford Tri-Motor for Bibleburg and Chez Dog.

Skipped the final day of the North American Handmade Bicycle Show, as two days gave us a pretty good look-see at all the touring bikes that weren’t there and I like to rassle my travel arrangements early, especially when I have so little say in how they get made and turn out. If some TSA dude is gonna beat on my kidneys with a mop handle I want to get it over with early, is what.

Meanwhile, Mr. Deme is in Detroit, where he reports he is sipping a Miller Fortune.

“All I can say is we really needed High Life in another package with a bit of Malt Liquor Bull added to it,” he adds.

I recommended a chaser of Listerine, or perhaps some Park Tool chain cleaner.

“That’s next,” he said.

Happy St. Shiv In the Ribs Day

March 15, 2014March 16, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Kevin Harvey's blue wheeler. — Kevin Harvey’s blue wheeler.

Charlotte is busy getting its St. Patrick’s Day drunk on. Never mind that March 15 is the fabled Ides of March, of which Caesar was famously advised to beware.

Maybe it’s a two-fer: Get horribly sideways on green beer and pennywhistle dirges, and then run about stabbing people, shouting the Gaelic for “Sic semper tyrannis,” which as I recall is “Fook the lot of yis!”

But we were talking about the North American Handmade Bicycle Show before we wandered off on this Irish-Roman tangent. And yes, it is a show, in which North American handmade bicycles play a leading role, and nobody was stabbed in the making thereof.

The bike I heard mentioned more than once was Kevin Harvey’s baby. Dude has a day job — machinist for Andretti Racing — but he’s a lifelong cyclist and likes to work his metallurgical magic with two-wheelers in his spare time under the Harvey Cycle Works label.

Check out the Baja-bug lighting system he added to this one. He was deep in the weeds during this little project, fabricating the cap and screen to keep rocks from turning out his lights and crafting bits of this, that and the other to route the cable through the fork and make the whole system easily removable. The lights also can be raised and lowered and toed in or out.

After eyeballing a few more bikes, Adventure Cyclist editor Mike Deme, CycleItalia honcho Larry Theobald and I braved the wild streets of Charlotte, shouldering our way through about 18,000 tosspots in green T-shirts to dine at The Capital Grille. The wait staff seemed happy that the annual pub crawl didn’t include them, and the cop we saw outside the joint looked like she was having about as much fun as the average root-canal patient.

One unsteady reveler at curbside was either preparing to topple into the street, barf on his cellphone or both. Erin go blaaaaugh!

Going Uptown

March 14, 2014March 14, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

My homeboys from Moots were in the house.

Day one of the North American Handmade Bicycle Show got off to something of a slow start today.

Well, for us, anyway.

I don’t do 2 a.m. real well anymore, in anybody’s time zone, so by the time Adventure Cyclist boss-fella Mike Deme and I arose from our coffins, grabbed a bite of breakfast at the Midnight Diner and got ready to roll, it was practically lunchtime.

Incidentally, if anyone is looking for a rock-solid solid investment opportunity, buy yourself a booth at the Midnight Diner and rent it out by the hour. The place was nuts when we walked in and nuts when we walked out, and I would give even money that it is nuts right now.

Anyway, after breaking fast we sauntered over to the show, exchanged pleasantries with various industry ne’er-do-wells, and spent a couple of hours stumbling around in desultory fashion, gazing slack-jawed at shiny bicycles and posing silly questions to ironically waxed mustaches wearing their little sisters’ pants. There was steel, titanium and carbon fiber, Gates Carbon Drive and Pinion bicycle transmissions, and them old-fangled whatchamacallems you shift with levers and stop with rim brakes. We’re gonna do it again tomorrow, but with more shuteye. And more breakfast. And more pictures.

Meanwhile, the NAHBS Exhibitor Party is this evening at Uptown Cycles. Simply everybody who is anybody will be there, so we’ll be blazing over there directly. Not on bicycles, more’s the pity. I couldn’t find one that would fit into the overhead bin.

Good morning, Charlotte …

March 14, 2014March 15, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

… why so chilly? Please don’t make me wear pants on a Friday.

The flight out was uneventual, thanks for asking, which is to say that it sucked. The good thing about my connecting flights in Denver and Chicago being late is that I did not miss them, which seemed a high order of probability when I set out yesterday afternoon. And why is the under-seat space bigger in a pond-hopping turbo-prop than in a 737? Just asking.

Lights out came around 2 a.m. local time and lights on came way too bloody early. It’s barely above freezing and my shorts and T-shirts will stay in the closet for a while yet. But that closet is 23 floors up in a Westin hotel, so, yeah, I got that going for me, which is nice.

Now it’s time to grab some grub and scope out the North American Handmade Bicycle Show.

In like a lion

March 8, 2013 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 32 Comments

March, is it? Whose idea was it to make February so short and start Daylight Saving Time on Sunday? Jesus, I take some time away from the blog to do a spot of work from my deathbed and the whole place goes to hell.

I brought some heavyweight class of an upper-respiratory bug home from the North American Handmade Bicycle Show and mostly have been sleeping at The House Back East® to keep from catapulting Herself out of bed and into the madhouse with my coughs, which sound remarkably like an M777 howitzer in action, if M777 howitzers fired 155mm olive-drab snot rockets.

Between booger barrages I have had to crank out the word count for Adventure Cyclist and Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, the latter now back to twice-a-month publication. Doubling up on the funny is heavy lifting when your brain is braising in bacterial tapioca.

The past couple of days have brought some mild improvement, happily, and I’ve even been out and about on the latest review bike, a Novara Verita, one of the steeds in REI’s velo-stable. I’ve tried not to dribble on it, because the green would clash horribly with the nifty blue-and-white color scheme and might even dissolve the tubeset.

I shan’t have access to that refreshing little pasatiempo this weekend, however. The wizards predict rain, snow and wind — to wit, March weather.

Just as well. Another round of deadlines is upon me like some fresh plague, and I might as well stick to embarrassing myself in print instead of upon the bicycle until the sun comes back sometime next week.