Today, Eerik had his scout troop around to try out some wacky bikes. Although the scout troop is based in Toronto, they’re all of Estonian descent, so all of the meetings are held in Estonian.
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They split into groups for lunch. Each group had the same amount of money to spend at the store for supplies. One group had hot dogs. The other group at spaghetti. Good times!
Next Thursday, the Waterloo-Wellington Canoe Club has invited me to tell the story of my trip up and down the Bow River by tandem bicycle and canoe. All are welcome. Here are the details:
Thursday, October 14
Resurrection High School
Lecture Room 101
7:00 P.M.
It would be great to have a big crowd out. Hope to see you there.
Although Car Free Day is September 22nd, here in K-W there is a whole week of events organized to promote alternative transportation. Today, for the second year in a row, there was a Car Free Festival in Victoria Park. Park Street was closed to cars so that people could try a variety of novelty bikes donated for the day by the Bicycle Forest. We couldn’t have asked for better weather.
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This photo appears in this weeks issue of HELLO! magazine. The shot was taken of Glenn and I in New York City, just after the FHM photo shoot. An excerpt from HELLO! magazine reads, “These two gents are trying out the latest fashion in cycling: couchbiking, which apparently is all the rage on the other side of the Atlantic.”
Today was the FHM Couchbike photo shoot. Glenn and I turned up early at the FHM headquarters so that we could assemble the frame outside. It was about -5°C and windy so it was painful handling all of the metal pieces. Tom and Sam from the magazine had picked out a couch from a local thrift store and told us the measurements. The one they bought was a great big three seater, so we had to fully extend the frame. I barely had enough cable housing to handle the wide spacing.
Tom had planned to shoot a series of photos documenting the selection of the couch at the thrift shop, the mounting of the couch on the bike and some action shots of them riding down the streets.
We tried to stay out of the way of the professional photographer, but I caught some of the action with my own camera too.
Watch for this article in the April issue of FHM!
| Joe Kurmaskie contributes two columns to Bicycling Magazine and is the author of the book, “Metal Cowboy, Tales from the Road Less Pedaled”. Joe’s book is a collection of stories from his bicycle touring adventures. I won’t go too far into the details of his bike trips for now. I’ll save that for the book. Instead I’d like to find out a little more about how Joe has managed to combine his love of cycling with his skill as a writer to become the success that he is today. |  |
| BF | Joe, you are about to embark on a book tour to promote your new book, “Metal Cowboy, Tales from the Road Less Pedaled”. You must know that you are the envy of everyone who’s ever swung a leg over a touring bike. With so few financially viable means of becoming a professional bicycle tourist, the option of writing a book about one’s travels is a goal often considered but rarely attained. At what point in your touring history did you decide to take a shot at writing about it? |
| JK | I’ve been lucky in this respect… I came to my love for writing at a rather young age, not long after I learned to ride a bicycle. I wrote serials and detective stories as far back as grade school and a teacher cultivated my love and helped get some of them published in Scholastic Magazine.And then I was really hooked. So keeping journals and retelling my adventures through letters was a natural during my travels (sometimes I’d just xerox a page or two from my journal and send copies to my friends and family.) I sold a story or two about my cycling adventures now and then but It wasn’t until I was working for a newspaper as a daily reporter and entertainment writer few years ago that everything fell into place. I was struggling on an “epic” book about my travels that wasn’t going anywhere. Then the paper offered me a weekly slot to write my stories… sort of a running serial. I wrote about half the stories in the book that way. Several of the columns won press association awards and publishers came knocking and I was afforded the time to really expand the pieces and write the rest of them. |
| BF | What other kinds of writing have you done outside your work for the paper and everything you are doing now? |
| JK | I’ve been writing professionally since I was a teen. I’ve written over 5000 newspaper articles, been syndicated in AP stories around the globe, I’ve written ad copy, really bad promotional material, I’ve written speeches for university presidents and politicians (you’d think they could write their own) I’ve penned travel magazines, brochures, I’ve written for web sites, e-zines, you name it, I’ve done it in the wordsmith game. And on my worst day of writing I’m having a better time than working a time clock job or doing something I don’t enjoy. |
| BF | What did you do before you became a writer? |
| JK | Before you get a name in writing, it’s sort of like being an aspiring actor… you do whatever you must to make ends meet… when the writing jobs, even the less than enjoyable ones, didn’t make the rent, I worked all sorts of jobs… but for much of my twenties I directed summer camps and year round retreat centers and outdoor education programs. This is also how I managed to fund my extended bicycling adventures. |
| BF | It must have been a relief when your book was finally published, but in the grand scheme of things there is still a lot of work that comes after that. Do you see your current book tour as a necessary evil or more like a reward for the work that is already done? |
| JK | As it turns out I’m a real extrovert so it’s actually a lot of fun… people think that just because a book gets published it automatically becomes bestseller… you’ve got to get out their and get people interested, do interviews… it’s like after a farmer grows a really wonderful pumpkin or cucumber or batch of potatoes ( look, I’m comparing my work to potatoes now ;-)) you have to take it to market or it will rot in the field! The biggest drawback is that these book tours are three weeks or more straight and I’m a husband and a father now and I really loath time away from my family… they will be joining me for part of one of the tours but it’s still hard. |
| BF | Do you have any other book plans for the future? |
| JK | Are you kidding? I’ve got more projects spinning in the air than you’d want to hazard a guess about. The great thing about landing the Breakaway Books deal is that Metal Cowboy is getting good reviews and agents and publishing houses want to see my other work now. People want to talk to me that a few years ago wouldn’t have taken notice if I set myself on fire in their offices! My next project, which is being worked on as a proposal, is called “Surfing With Buddha”… it’s about a group of aging sun-bleached West Coast surfers who are practicing Tibetan Buddhists… surfing monks if you will… I’m gonna blend in the history of surfing with a season of hanging out learning to surf and seeing how they straddle these different worlds and find a balance in life between complete motion and total silence and meditation… It’s going to point out the extraordinary in everyday things and have plenty of wit and humor in it as well. I have two screenplays shopping around Hollywood, a book on bike race teams called “Pack Mentality”, which I’d like to write someday and I’ve… oh heck the list is too long… as you can see writing is more than a job for me… it’s something I love almost as much as pedaling and my family. |
| BF | Could you write another book based on your touring adventures or will you need to go out on some more trips first? |
| JK | I could write three more books… but the short answer is yes… and my publisher is interested in the sequel… Metal Cowboy – Back In the Saddle Again (you heard it here first!) |
| BF | While writing must be an exciting and often fun way to earn a living, does it grate at your nerves not to be earning a regular salary? |
| JK | I’m a gambler and I always have day work writing projects so I don’t sweat it. We aren’t high rollers and we don’t have these big debts or lots of toys we have to pay for so things are pretty good. I like to spend time with my family rather than spending lots of cash in the fast lane… and I just have this confidence (misplaced or not) that I can and will keep making a decent living with my writing. And steady jobs like writing for Bicycling Magazine help. |
Thanks Joe. For more on Joe’s book, check out www.metalcowboy.com.
Les didn’t think there’d be enough time to do the triathlon that morning, but Scott was pretty pumped to do it. This was his day afterall. I’d worked things out, and the way I saw it, if we left Wasaga Beach immediately after the race, we’d easily make it back in time to shower and get to the restaurant for Scott’s big bachelor party. I told Les the only possible reason we could be late is if we got into a car accident or something.
Needless to say, when I called home to tell everyone about the accident, Les thought I was pulling his leg. As we stood by the side of the road watching as the fire department hosed down the other driver’s upturned van, I cursed myself for every random decision I’d ever made that landed me at this particular place at this particular time.
Fortunately, no one was hurt and it was the other driver that was charged. After a brief interrogation, Alex, Scott and I were free to head back to Waterloo in our newly taco’d car.
In the end, we were only an hour late for the party and definitely ready to have a good time.
After the meal, we took Scott out to the parking lot where the couchbike was waiting. We gave him a T-shirt with various tasks printed on the back that he’d need to complete throughout the evening. The first task was a trip through the McDonald’s drive thru.
As we worked our way from bar to bar, Scott also had to keep his eye out for a good Britney Spears lookalike. There was a certificate for the girl we thought was the best match.
The couchbike was fun to ride, but sometimes it got a bit crowded.
There was another certificate to give out to the best looking girl with glasses. It was a tough call, but we found a deserving recipient. If only we’d had an award for the cutest girl in a trucker hat.
Other tasks for the night included collecting phone numbers and armwrestling a humungous bouncer named Stevie.
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Boy! What a night. Thanks to everyone for coming out and making it such a fun time.
Our canoe biking trip was a success. Here’s a photo from just after we pulled our boat out in downtown Calgary and started our final bike ride back to Gary’s place.
The full story from our trip is posted at: bikeforest.com/canoe. Here’s a video of some of the highlights.
The past couple of days have been a little stressful. I built my canoe trailer in Ontario without having seen either the canoe or the tandem bike we planned to hitch the trailer to. I’d designed a custom BOB trailer style hitch to hook onto a standard BOB quick release skewer. I didn’t realize until I arrived in Calgary that our tandem had an internal hub. BOB makes special nuts for use with internal hubs, but we couldn’t source any in Calgary. In the end, we resorted to mounting a stem on the stoker’s seatpost and sliding our BOB quickrelease through a cut down handlebar. It’s not elegant, but it seems to work.
We took the trailer out for a test ride up and down a local section of the Bow River and all systems are a go. We should be good to leave tomorrow.
Today, Gary and I were on CBC’s Cross Country Checkup. The topic of the day was “different ways of exploring Canada”. Gary was one of the invited guests. He was asked to speak about our winter bike trip through the arctic. I was also asked to speak about my Couchbike trip through the Maritimes. Even though I had done the arctic bike trip with Gary, I was told to pretend that I didn’t know him when I called in. This seemed understandable. It might be confusing if they started mixing the topic of arctic cycling with couch cycling when speaking to a single person, so this would keep things simple. What I didn’t realize, was that I was supposed to be phoning in as a random caller, not as an invited guest. I actually happened to be in Central Park in New York City today, so I had to make the call from a pay phone there. I was kind of taken aback when I was just thrown on the air and asked how I like to explore Canada. It was awkward because I don’t think under normal circumstances I would call a nationwide radio show and recommend such an activity to the masses, but there I was. You can listen to my part here:
Gary’s interview is here: