Twilight: The Saga Continues

Y'all know how I love mainstream teenybopper pop movies....

There is this race that happens every year here in Athens called the Twilight Criterium.  This day just so happens to be one of my favorite days of the year.  For the past several years I have shown my love for this fabulous day starting early and ending sometimes late, but most often early... real early, those are all good stories on there own, ask me later.  This year I entered a sculpture competition to build the winners trophy for the main event.  The only stipulations were height (20 inches), incorporating bike parts, and that you use the provided "custom (4 2x4's and a piece of plywood) base".  The artsy seeming guy who was at the "custom sculpture base" pick up spot proclaimed that he thought "using gears was too cliche", said guy is planing on incorporating a bunch of used inner tubes in his "sculpture"............... we will see.  I on the other hand/cliche side am thinking on a different plane....My thoughts are bike people like bike parts, and gears are integral to bicycles, so........ I went totally "cliche" and built my sculpture/trophy/blob totally out of gears.... It is not finished yet but will be real soon....

Next step will be a gold flake powder coat

Rising that dirty dirty flux off

The brain child being born

NAHBS 2014....

So..... There is this little thing called the North American Hand built Bicycle Show that happens every year.  The location changes from place to place across... yep you guessed it, North America.  2014's location just so happened to be in Charlotte, North Carolina, a place I have never been and a place I had never even thought about going.  Me and a few of my fellow hand built bicycle enthusiasts.... also know as my friends, decided to go.  My usual riding partner and I decided it would be rad to ride our hand built bikes to the show.  It is only 200 miles from Athens, Ga to Charlotte and we figured we could do it in a terrible 2 days or a more chill 3 days, or a real chill 4 days, maybe with some trail/dirt road mixed in.  That WAS the plan... Well to make a long story real short, the human hand was not meant to do monotonous grunt labor.... 8000 pine tree seedlings later and my right thumb tendon was useless.... not even a short bike ride was possible, much less a 3 to 4 day grind across the SC "High Country."  So, we chose to drive said riding partner's POS car instead.  Well we made it to the show saw a ton of rad bikes and met a ton of rad people.  Oh yeah we enjoyed a responsible amount of tasty beverages as well.  Not sure I will make a real big effort to go to another NAHBS unless it is real close again, but I got a bunch of great ideas swirling around in my head... We'll see what I can make of the swirl.......... Oh yeah, we road trails in Clemson, went to a rad after party put on by The Spoke Easy bike shop, hung with old riding friends, met new riding friends, broke bikes, went camping, met a super chill forest ranger, almost ran out of gas, windshield wipers stopped working in a huge rain storm, got lost in Charlotte (some of us), 2 flat tires (car) and ate at Bojangles.

2014 NAHBS