Fiets - All Comments

Over the top

Fiets — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:52:31 GMT

Today was memorable. Paddling the blues away I reached the limit of my odometer The first thousand on

Over the top

Fiets — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:52:29 GMT

Today was memorable. Paddling the blues away I reached the limit of my odometer The first thousand on

re: Bakfiets, transportfiets, cargobike

pvanooijen — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:01:46 GMT

Nothing to be ashamed for :)
Thanks for sharing

Uphill in the Luberon

Fiets — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 19:40:12 GMT

Our second stop in France was in the Luberon, which is just east of Avignon. This place is flooded with...

Cycling along the Groninger waterways

Fiets — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 08:12:58 GMT

The Netherlands are rich with waterways. Many of these have been dug in past ages for several reasons,...

re: My first thousand

pvanooijen — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 18:49:31 GMT

Thanks Brendan !

re: My first thousand

Brendan — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:52:07 GMT

Congrats! Ride on!

re: Old and new

TimWhite — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 15:18:45 GMT

Ooooooh, shiny!

You have horizontal dropouts on the old steed. Why not strip it down as the winter fixed-gear? That's a fine use for a frame's twilight years. I rode my old Peugeot that way until the chain stays finally cracked.

Internal rust works alongside metal fatigue to number the days of old frames.

Happy pedaling!

Old and new

Fiets — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 08:16:17 GMT

Plain wear, old age, overloading, bad store and this winters salt to finish it off.

It's almost impossible...

re: A penny farthing

TimWhite — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:25:50 GMT

Check out Victory Bikes. I posted a link to them in Citizen Rider, both here and on blogspot. They make replica penny-farthing or "ordinary" bicycles, based on the actual geometries of Victor Cycles from the 19th Century. They are a hoot to ride. The biggest danger was a header, in which the cyclist goes over the front, because you ride right up over the axle. Another design from the period put the little wheel in front, to eliminate headers, but the big problem there is going abruptly off the back if you sit up and shift your weight back at all. I tried one of those and enjoyed pretty good beginner's luck until I tried to do a U-turn in a narrow street.

re: The others on the (Dutch) road

TimWhite — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 17:17:29 GMT

When I was in college, student cars were banned from the University of Florida campus. Some streets were completely car free, while others had a fair amount of traffic. Many people got around by bike, but few were what you could really call cyclists.

I had once crash in which I was overtaking a slower cyclist when he abruptly turned into my path just as I arrived beside him. I was young and impetuous, so I was passing too fast, but I probably would not have been able to avoid him in any case. Going slower would just have lessened the impact. I bent a wheel and lost some skin. As I recall, the other rider was not hurt much at all.

As I ride in the US, I try to hold a place on the road for all the others who might want to ride there, as well as a place for myself. But I do wonder what a bloodbath the streets might become if they were filled with people on bikes who did not respect the bike as a vehicle and the need for orderly traffic flow.

Most of the time on the UF campus, traffic flowed smoothly. The biggest worry was not bike accidents, it was bike theft. That's another whole topic.

As we ride among the motorists, we are often slower and always weaker than they are, so we feel we deserve consideration. But then many of us get on multi-use paths and buzz the pedestrians at least as badly as the autos buzz us. Get these walkers out of the way! They're making me slow down!

And so it goes.

re: A penny farthing

Brendan — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 12:56:26 GMT

This is cool! I'd love to ride one of these. I had a unicycle for a while, but never quite got the hang of it.

-B

re: Cycling through de Ommelanden

pvanooijen — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 19:55:21 GMT

Not evry part of our country is as wide as this. Be we do have "fietspaden" everywhere :)

re: Hello cyclebetter

pvanooijen — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 19:53:38 GMT

Nice quote, didn't know the saying.

Roughly translated it would say : "Better half a year on a good horse than your life long on a donkey"

It doesn't apply to me, I'd rather have it the other way round. As long as I can ride I'm happy. What I ride comes second :)

re: Cycling through de Ommelanden

gkillian — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 18:14:48 GMT

Man, that does look like nice. My part of Virginia hardly even has space for bikes on roads, let alone a nice path like this.

The Dutch get it right again!