About

This site is a journal recording my ongoing evolution and love affair with bicycling.

As a young teenager, I did a fair amount of riding one summer on a beautiful 1974 Raleigh Grand Prix.  Then a long hiatus during college and early career years.

I eventually started commuting to work by bike and riding a few event rides.  When I realized that I was looking forward to the commute more than the work day itself, I decided to retire from the daily grind.

That led to a multi-year involvement with the Phoenix Metro Bicycle Club and a sophomoric venture into bicycle racing. My wanna-be racing days were a lot of fun, and I was a fairly strong rider, well back then anyway.   But I soon learned there are SO MANY fast riders out there, and I eventually figured out that my prospects were limited.

Friends and club events led slowly but surely down the touring path, starting with fully supported multi-day rides, and then with lightly supported ones. The day that my friend Randy accompanied me on my first self-contained tour in the Dakotas, I was pretty much hooked.

This site covers that ongoing love affair, as much a diary and photo album as anything else. I’m really really lucky to have a friend in Jack who enjoys this hobby as much as I do, and will periodically tear himself away from normalcy to do it.

Punch into the Rides page, which gives a summary index of the various ride topics here. From there you can click into sub indexes and go from there.  I throw in the occasional product review too if I think it might benefit someone.

If you have a comment, you can drop a line to parmalat44@gmail.com. Apologies that blog comments are turned off – I miss them.  The malicious spam got to be too much for me and my server to handle, and I haven’t found a suitable anti-spam plug-in.