Nostalgia: This Bike

Following a fast few rounds of vodka tonics and I'm certain, vehement arguments about nothing of importance at Parasol’s with Alex, I crashed my bike and face planted in front of Coliseum Square and a group of winos who checked me out and said I was "probably fine." I rode home covered in blood (scaring tourists in the French Quarter), and ended up getting 15 or so stitches in my face at Touro Hospital. I decided it was time to give up on my beloved RB-1 that had been crashed a few times before and, I suspected, had a stress fracture somewhere in it that made it prone to failure. Clearly, it couldn’t be the vodka.

I decided I needed a new bike for getting around. I was disappointed to hear that my favorite bike shop in the world, momovelo was kaput and I wrote to the owner Kai for advice. His advertising had a picture that I still consider one of the Top 10 Sexiest Bike Nerd photos in the world. And that's saying a lot, after spending a lot of my spare time looking at sites like this and this.

He told me about Ebisu, where he got many of the frames that he sold. I bought the frame and then proceeded to collect a series of specialty parts for it, including Ritchey cranks, moustache handlebars, bar end brakes and one of those little brass zen bike bells I put on every bike I own. Tim at Bicycle Michael’s built it from all my crazy parts and it was tight. I found the picture above recently on an old thumb drive. It’s jauntily posed in the Marigny, probably moments after I picked it up.

Mustache handlebars definitely deter theft.

This bike went underwater when the levees broke in August 2005 and our recently purchased house got nailed. When I finally retrieved it a few months later, it had been buried in muck for a month and was rusty and unusable. It ended up in those multi-story piles of debris you would see in Lakeview after the storm.

The bike in the storage shed post storm - October 2005.