Sometimes on a Sunday morning there’s nothing better than a good old-fashioned road ride…
…on a good old-fashioned road bike:
It’s my current “What, this old thing?” bike:
As a former semi-professional bike blogger who was relevant for a few months in the early aughts, I have an almost grotesque variety of bicycles from which to choose; as such, I rarely ride the same bicycle two days in a row. In fact, while I’d never say so publicly, I find the idea of riding the same bicycle two or more times in succession to be rather déclassé if not downright vulgar, like wearing post-Walton Rapha and riding a Canyon with a pie plate:
[I mean I’m sort of kidding, anyway.]
On this particular weekend however I rode the Faggin no fewer than three times in a row–that’s Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. (Yes, I consider Friday the weekend; working on Friday is also déclassé.) I have no explanation for why this was, other than that sometimes I enjoy the thrum of a 23mm tire and the feel of a Campagnolo Ergo shifter under my thumb, and in this particular case it was enough to keep me coming back for more. And yes, by not licensing “Under My Thumb” by The Rolling Stones and engaging Mick Jagger as a spokesman, Campagnolo missed out on what could have been a phenomenal marketing coup for its thumb-centric Ergo shifters:
Sure, it would have cost them like a gazillion dollars, but perhaps if they’d dug deep they’d be still be the preeminent drivetrain manufacturer instead of just a legacy brand. Perhaps SRAM would have countered by leveraging the “I touch you once, I touch you twice…” line from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s 1986 hit “If You Leave” in order to promote their DoubleTap® technology, but it would never have had the same impact:
Yet here we are in 2025 and SRAM (to say nothing of Shimano) is eating Campagnolo’s pranzo:
Look, sometimes you gotta spend money to make money is all I’m saying.
Anyway, speaking of road rides, this past Friday I mentioned a new bicycle and pedestrian bridge, and yesterday I rode my own bicycle over that bridge for the first time:
It was fine:
Yes, it allows you to avoid the entrance ramp to the New York State Thruway, but it’s short, and if you’re traveling north as I was you have to get across the roadway to access it. Here’s the Thruway, by the way, and you can see the Tappan Zee Mario Cuomo Bridge in the distance:
As I gazed at it my thoughts turned to the end of summer, for it is this very route we will take when we head off on our annual end-of-summer vacation. This of course raises the profound and vexing “Which bike do I take with me?” question, and it’s perhaps the only time in the course of the year when I engage in anything resembling soul-searching or introspection. And naturally since I was on a three-day Faggin jag I found myself wondering if I should just bring ol’ Pinky this time:
The skinny tires and racy gearing would take certain routes off the table, but hey, you never know.
Speaking of introspection, have you ever yearned to see the inner workings of an e-Citi Bike? Well, thanks to the stolen Citi Bike graveyard that is Yonkers, now you can!
Fascinating.