Weekly Cyco Gallery: Issue #4
Groovy, man.
Greetings bikers.
I hope your week has been swell. Welcome to another installment of the Weekly Cyco Gallery.
Let us take a moment to reflect on the favorite from last week’s WCG. Michael Jarosick snapped a photo of his Groovy Cycleworks Kauai 650B with Rohloff SpeedHub drivetrain and S&S couplers leaning up against a Scottish cairn.
That’s a cool sentence to write. Here’s what he had to say about it.
Michael Jarosick, an ER doc, was burned out. He had wanted to take a year off work for a while. Then, the company he worked for went through an ownership change. It was time. There were a few trips he wanted to take. One of them was Scotland.
It was September 2009. He packed up his bike and flew to the island’s highlands to ride.
The bike he took was cutting edge. Made by Rody Walter of Groovy Cycleworks, the bike had a Rohloff SpeedHub, meaning the shifting happened inside the hub. (Sounds handy, especially after my MTB’s derailleur got gnarled into the spokes recently.)
But it also had something cutting edge: couplers. Welded to the frame on the top tube and the down tube, they allowed the rider to take the frame apart.
“Enough so you can pack it in a standard suitcase,” Jarosick said, adding he’s taken the bike on a number of other trips. “You can’t tell the airlines you have a bike, or they’ll charge you a service fee.”
Jarosick is a friend of Walter’s. So he has three of Groovy’s bikes.
Another cool thing about the bike is its paint job.
“(Walter) does killer paint jobs. He’s artistic and creative — but he didn’t do it. Some other guy had a unique process of putting patterns on bikes,” he said.
This one borrowed its pattern from a copperhead snake’s skin.
“Definitely a conversation starter in the parking lots,” Jarosick said.
Jarosick remembers the ride in the Scottish highlands like this:
“It was a big, long climb. I was on the trail by myself. It was the a typical Scottish thing. There was fog, brief periods of rain. Rocky. Big fields of heather growing on the hillsides. It had that out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere feel … The whole trip was fantastic. I did a lot of riding.”
My pool of submissions is running dangerously low this week. It seems I’ve forgotten to regularly remind you all about submitting photos. It’s OK. So, instead of photos of bikes this week, I’m going to include photos from Jarosick’s Scottish biking trip. He gave me permission to include these great shots so we could all take a moment to daydream of an awesome ride through the woods. Thanks Mike.
Until next week, cycopaths. I hope you all are able to take advantage of some favorable weather this weekend to get out and ride.
There will be no voting today. Just take a moment to escape into a daydream full of Scottish highlands MTB riding.
If you think of it, please submit your photos of bikes leaning up against stuff to brazdill.25@gmail.com. When you do, please include the year, make and model of the bike. And where and when in the world you were when you snapped it.
Thanks all. Peace.