Bike Bikes Bikes! Growing up in a small town in rural southern New Hampshire, bikes quickly became the lifeline for us to visit our friends, go to Baboosic Lake in the summers, and get around town. If we threw bikes in our dad’s pickup truck, we could skip Church after Sunday School and bike home from the town next door. That was an easy choice for me and my twin. 😉

All The Bikes!

I learned to ride on this schwinn baby, in the parking lot of our elementary school. (I’d learn to drive my dad’s manual transmission pickup there nearly 10 years later). Bike wasn’t great, but it had wide stable tires – and the coaster brake was fun. I’d hand-me-down this bike to my younger sister.

My dad, brothers and I all had this bike. My dad liked that it made servicing easy at the neighborhood bike shop in someone’s house. They were quite dorky, heavy, and the swept-back handlebars were absolutely awful. That steering turned what could have been something close a classic 80s 10-speed into an unstable tank.

Middle school! Tired of the PUCH bikes, my twin and I learned how to work on bikes in our basement. We’d “frankenstein” bikes together from spare parts and from castoffs at the town dump’s metal piles. We’d rebuild hubs, spokes, cranks, head units - everything. Our favorite were singlespeeds.

The bike cult classic “RAD” came out in the 80s and BMX bikes were all the rage. I swapped out tires, pedals, grips, the seat, brakes, headset, brake lines, and more, to take an otherwise normal-looking silver chromoly “Supergoose” bike, into a bike I loved to look at and ride. I laced up custom rims with bling spokes. I even got red dice custom tire caps that was a huge crowd-pleaser. We setup dirt trails and small jumps around the property and goofed off with our little single speeds.

Though I loved the BMX bike, to get further across town, the bigger tires and multi-speed practicality of a drop-bar 80s 10-speed could not be beat! This was a pretty basic steelie 10-speed. I had it for 20+ years and it eventually moved from the NH house to the Cape Cod vacation house.

Here I am in 2004 having fun with my twin on Cape Cod. It’s a low-resolution still-frame from an early ELPH camera video.

I spent my last two college summers in Palo Alto, California. My mentor and I bought the same bike in Redwood City. The 1992 Trek 930 “SingleTrack” hardtail / no suspension. The early days of mountain biking – these were insanely fun. This was the first new bike that I bought.

On weekends, we’d ride all over the Bay Area Peninsula. Purisima Creek was one of our favorites. California bay area coastal rides are hard to beat! The blurry pics are from my Pentax K1000 full manual SLR camera and actual film. 😛

This was my 1987 Plymouth Horizon. A very weak four-cylinder engine, but it was bulletproof reliable. We put a custom sunroof in. I drove it across the country four times, for my Xerox PARC summer internships. I’d get both bikes out and back for our summer rides.

After Hunter’s and my mountain bikes got stolen out of my locked garage (and locked together to a heavy bike rack) in San Francisco 😡, I had moved to the East Bay (Lafayette) for the first time. It’s utter road-biking heaven! So we got Trek aluminum bikes. Mine featured Shimano Ultegra components and a carbon fork. This is ~2004. I later mailed this bike to my twin in New Hampshire. We rode 30 to 100 miles every weekend.

My first all carbon bike! This Trek Madone 5.2 had great black-and-white styling. I bought it early 2008 - just in time for our first AIDS LifeCycle charity seven day ride, SF to LA, in June.

NEW BIKE DAY!

I’m utterly thrilled to have a carbon bike, surrounded by endless country roads and hills in Lafayette, CA,

Psyched to test out this lightweight climbing machine, I immediately take it up legendary Mount Diablo (3850’ high)!

Summer 2014, I got two girlfriends to fly out to vacation together at Cape Cod. We had a ton of fun together! I bought two cheapie singlespeeds for $300 each (the “outer” Cape is pretty flat). Even with just a single crappy front rim brake and cheap parts, they’re insanely fun! The white styling of the “Romeo” model from Pure FIX looks great with deep dish steelie rims.

The Trek Boone CX bike – quite the Adventurous purchase in 2022. We upgraded the gears so it could climb big hills, and crammed in 40mm tires, to effectively turn it from a cyclocross bike into a legit gravel bike. It has an interesting flex shock absorber piece in the seat post and seat tube junction area that gives it a more comfortable ride. I love the paint job that fades from “atomic red” to teal.

I got this to join a “Thirsty Thursday” group gravel bike ride two-hour evening ride, during the Covid years.

The Trek SuperCaliber 9.8 XT ultra-light XC (“cross country”) mountain bike. My current beloved bike.

Bought in 2023, it’s utterly amazing at everything. Upgrades: lighter wheels and dropper post. Features a single dual-action lever to open or lock both front and rear suspension. Under 24 pounds, with 100mm and 60mm suspension shocks.

I ride this most of my six-days-a-week regular biking days. We can bike over to the legendary Joaquin Miller Park (and Redwood Park and nearby parks) right from our house. On Saturdays, we lead a regular 24 mile north bay loop up Mount Tamalpais and down to the Pacific Ocean. We feel very lucky being surrounded by such amazing bike trails and having such great bike friends.

Bikes have been one of the longest themes in my life. It’s been fun digging them all up again, and remembering how each one changed my life :)