INSPIRATION

Well, it's been a while since I posted.  Things have been busy with Hank, school, and some much needed early summer vacation trips. We spent this last weekend in Ventura with my wife's sister and her fiance, Uncle Dirty.  After a few rounds of Red Stripe Dirty poured us some whiskey and turned on the Tour de France.  Suddenly, we realized that our calling, as brothers in law, must certainly be long distance cycling. The problem is, neither of us have a touring bike. He rides a beach cruiser, and I alternate between my hardtail mountain bike and my fix'd. Oh what a glorious problem to have! Today Dirty bought an nice older Trek set up for touring, and I dug around in the shed and found an old steel Schwinn frame that I bought for about $20 a while back. I hooked up a free Araya wheelset on Craigslist, and bought a Campy 34/50 nine-speed crank set on ebay.  I have a nice wide set of Soma pursuits and a rear rack laying around somewhere too, as well as a bunch of random derraileurs, brakes, levers, etc.  That leaves a pretty small amount of stuff left to purchase, so I'm hoping to do the whole thing for right around $150. 

The frame needs a new paint job, obviously, so I think I'm going to recreate the legendary 'Kalishnakov'- one of my favorite bike projects whose life was ended prematurely by a stop-sign running BMW a couple of years ago.  More to come on this as the design progresses, but suffice it to say that .50 cal ammo box panniers are in the works.

Our first ride will be Santa Barbara to Ventura in a few weeks to test our bikes (and our strength), and then we're going to try SLO to Ventura sometime in September.