This piece of artwork from Hiawatha Cycles is beautiful, and expresses a nice sentiment.
I couldn't locate it on their site, so here's the post from Surly where I found it originally.
British Summertime has arrived, although the very first day of it saw me cycling to the train station in pitch darkness and dense fog, at a temperature of 3°C.
Things have gradually become more cloudy (and slightly less cold) through the week, and today is the sort of grey drizzly day that has you closing the blinds in the office, and opening them a few minutes later, in the hope that the rain has buggered off, to be replaced by the sort of cheery yellow sun that adorns children's pictures of landscapes.
Which is all by the by, as the real purpose of this post is to share a bit of subvertisement from Crewe.
This is an ad for some sort of car, enhanced by a local wag/activist/irresponsible vandal with a cut out of a superhero like character exhorting the viewer to buy a bike. Good advice, if you've ever seen, or been a part of the jams on the road adjacent to the poster, and a lot cheaper than even this (allegedly modestly priced) motor vehicle.
Here's a detail;
[1] Albeit a typically British piece of infrastructure - just next to the poster, you rejoin traffic with the typical 300° angle of view required to observe traffic entering the road you turn into and the path ahead. Maybe it's designed for cycling owls?
For all the moaning about the weather and the design of local bike paths, I'm still riding, and beginning to feel the effects of my short commute winter less and less. The truth for a lot of us is that despite the shortcomings of infrastructure, fellow road users, and the local weather, cycling is still more fun than getting to work/the shops/Auntie Mavis' house any other way. It has to rain VERY hard for me to wish I was elsewhere.
Anyhoo, don't forget that 30 Days of Biking starts tomorrow. If you're undecided as to whether or not to participate, maybe I can persuade you?
...Lynch’s map was more than a mere mood-setter for studio execs. It was an essential tool for writing the series.
Last year, I participated in a fun little event called "30 Days of Biking". The essentials of this are that you pledge to ride every day of the month (in a month with 30 days in, naturally), record your rides (at the time, this happened on Daily Mile, and was one of the reasons I have an account there), and tweet/blog/flickr/whatever about them as the mood took you.
I confess, it's a fairly easy challenge to do if you ride in to work every day - as I already had a habit of riding on Sundays, I just had to figure out how to justify/fit in a ride on Saturday.
From the year I did the "Photo a Day" Challenge on film - it's like riding fixed, for photographers.
This year, 30 Days of Biking takes place in April - it's bigger, with a fair amount of social media buzz going on around it. Predictably, the naysayers have popped up too, to ask what the point is, to deride the idea that anyone *wouldn't* ride every day anyway, why it's not held in a "harder" month, and so on.
So what is the point of 30 Days of Biking?
Yellow - a shot I'd taken lots of times, in lots of formats - all you need is the weather.
Let me offer an analogy. Back when I had more time for it, I was a keen photographer, and one of the things I used to participate in was a "Photo a Day" challenge in July. Now I was purely a hobbyist, and no one was stood over me demanding my day's output - any pressure was solely self imposed. I have to confess that some days were easy - I was already at an interesting location, or I had my shot for the day planned - this building (above) for example, was a picture I'd rehearsed, and simply went back to take.
"World of My Garden" became a recurring theme on days when inspiration failed.
But the interesting days were the ones where my plans fell apart, or were non-existent to start with. And it was here that I felt the pressure of the challenge, and from that produced some of my better pictures (in my opinion, that is).
My daughter in "Why Princesses Wear Crowns" still one of my favourite pictures, and one I'd never have taken if not for the photo a day challenge.
I think that's what 30 days of biking has to offer to you - it'll be easy to ride on the days that you planned to, or do ride on already. Some of those rides may turn out better than you thought, like the planned pictures I had did (sometimes) in my photo challenge. But what will you do on the days you'd not normally ride? That recovery ride you know is a good idea, but somehow never get around to? Trying to do more errands with the bike, instead of using the car? Trying a commute, if you don't already? One day, you could point your bike in a direction, and simply see where it takes you.
In my case, I rode errands on the Brompton and released the Surly Long Haul Trucker from commuting duty to explore the local trails too rough for the SCR2.0 to handle. Generally, my experience of 30 Days of Biking was that it quickly turned a sense of having to ride (to satisfy the challenge's requirements) into having fun, exploring new places, and generally getting more out of my cycling.
If you already ride every day, your rides could inspire others, or give them some idea of what kind of things to do if they're running out of ideas. If you don't, you could find that the challenge is the inspiration you needed to try different sorts of riding, head for that trail, or that route you always wanted to, but somehow never get around to.
If you want to know more, Road.cc has an article here, and the UK 30 Days of biking facebook page is here.
Utility Cycling reviews the options available for lugging serious amounts of stuff around by bicycle - nice pictures, including this capaciously basketed Pashley.
It was a cold day this morning (hence the shiver induced blur on the photo above) but a beautiful day.
That's the sunrise as I left Crewe at 6am ish.
We're close enough to Summer now that I don't see the sunrise on the Manchester leg of my journey, which is a good thing, it means Summer, and rides where I can still feel my toes after 40 minutes are on the way.
If I were a cycling Mr T, I'd pity the car driver that missed being on a bike on days like this.
This review is by Kalina Wilson, who can also be found at geminica.com.
Antietam (pronounced something like an-TEE-dum) is not one of the more frequently appreciated colors of Noodler's ink, but I'm a big fan. This ink is generally described as looking "antique" or like dried blood. It caught my eye while searching for a rich, red-tinted brown, and it fits the bill very, very well.
This particular color of Noodler's isn't widely available but right now it does appear to be stocked by both Writer's Bloc and Goulet Pens.
Because the color has such strong shading, it changes a lot depending on what you're using it with - your paper and especially your pen make a huge difference. In general, the thicker it is laid on and the less absorbent your paper, the more the ink moves towards an extremely rich deep red. A lighter layer can look like rich orange or thin tomato, depending on the paper and pen. Some paper pushes it towards brown.
There's some lovely art in this review too, well worth reading further.
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