Riding from Maine back home soon!

Another summer, another ride.

This time around I am back to tacking a bike ride onto the end of some other activities. Karen and I have Marie and Julian’s wedding in PEI on August 2nd, then will be going to Kennebunkport, Maine to visit our friends Paul and Montress for a few days. From there, starting on Tuesday, August 6th, I’ll be spending about 2 weeks pedalling back home.

The route, roughly, looks like this:

• Less than a day riding from Kennebunkport to Newfields, NH
• Crossing New Hampshire via ~150 km of rail trails, specifically Rockingham Recreational Rail Trail and New Hampshire Northern Rail Trail
• Do some of the ridiculously hilly VTXL through Vermont
• Enter Quebec around Sherbrooke and ride parts of the 5000 km La Route Vert
• Enter Ontario near Ottawa and ride the Trans Canada Trail and Waterfront Trail home

Its a surprising amount of trails and cycling specific routes, which is exciting! The distance is somewhere between 1300 and 1800 km, depending on some decisions I’ve yet to make, especially whether or not I really want/need to do the VTXL in its entirety (probably not), which requires a few hundred extra kilometers and surely many thousands of feet of extra climbing. We choose our battles. I may take a pass on this one.

But, the most exciting part of this particular trip is…

Meet #6

Some folks might call it a dream build, or an apocalype bike, or even give it a (probably feminine) name. I’ll simply refer to it by its sequential order in the bike crazy portion my existence. (9 years, 6 bikes, easy and disturbingly revealing math.)

With almost a decade of long distance cycling behind me, much time spent googling and obsessing over small details (you wouldn’t believe how much time I spent choosing the paint color…, BEIGE for chrissake!), some wise counselling from Martin at Hoopdriver, more than a dash of lived experience (ie. punishment) from riding Colombia, and most especially a lot of help and patience from Patrick and the other good folks at Dismount Bike Shop who built it up for me, I present my new, custom built, all terrain, world exploring, adventure touring bike.

I’m not going to bore you with the fine details, but indulge me a small essay on some of the more significant features 🙂

The main thing here is the belt driven pinion gearbox. Inside that little (kinda weighty) box between the pedals are 12 evenly spaced gears, with a spread of 600%, powered by some kind of alien technology I don’t even try to understand. The unit requires that the oil be flushed every 10,000 kilometers. The belt can last up to 30,000 km with no care whatsoever (I’m lucky to get 4,000 km out of a chain). A more low maintenance setup doesn’t exist. Note that the belt and the gearbox both require a frame that supports them.

The gearing is low, and I mean surprisingly low. I’m in the top gear on hills where I’d drop at least a few on my other bikes, and I don’t think I’ve had it in the bottom half of the range yet. Physics aside, I think I could ride this bike up a wall. Initially, I was a little freaked out by the lack of higher gears and the speed that comes with them, but I’m thinking I will learn to appreciate the low gears somewhere, say, around the middle of Vermont when I’m loaded and going uphill (over and over and over again), perhaps on a class 4 road.

Speaking of frames, this one is a mountain bike inspired steel tourer, or maybe the other way around. Pretty high quality (though not the lightest) steel, mounting points galore, sloping top tube, long wheelbase and options for some internal cabling. Panorama is a small mountain bike comany in Quebec, and the pinion version of the Boreal was a limited run of frames, they only made 18. This is why I got to pick the color. As a poor decision maker, choosing one color out of thousands of options (from a terrible website) was torturous and laborious. That’s why I ended up with a safe, dad-business-casual-khaki-docker-slacks beige, otherwise know as somewhat cooler sounding *thatch brown*. If it were really cool, it would follow the trend common in male-oriented sports items by rebranding tan as coyote, which must be pronounced in a long howl and punctuated by chest thumping.

Anyway, the folks at Panorama so loved the color I chose that they commented on it. Truth is, I love it too, super subtle and thematically appropriate for a bike I believe will see a fair amount of dirt. However, I did end up accenting in with day-glo orange pedals and bar tape, which is a little ostentatious and perhaps not befitting a 52 year old introvert, but I did feel it needed some personality. I believe this is what normies would call whimsy, Tyler. 🤣

The saddle is a leather Brooks B17 (just like what I recently started using on my other touring bike), and I will probably never bother trying out anything else. Its amazing. Even better, Patrick talked me into a suspension seat post (that parallelogram thingy under the seat). I’ll concede that its a little fugly, however it takes a major edge off crappy roads and other unsavory surfaces. So much so that it feels a little like cheating. Rattling along rough roads is part and parcel of the bike touring activity, and the thudbuster just does away with a good portion of teeth chattering. I am confident I will find other ways to self impose some suffering.

The wheels are both hand built and have pretty large volume tires on them (2.2 inches, Patrick is convinced I’ll want wider soon, and he’s probably right). The setup is also tubeless, which is new to me. Rather than an inner tube, the tires have a few ounces of liquid sealant in them that is able to instantly self repair small punctures. Larger blowouts are a different matter, and the stuff of nightmares for me (literally the only nightmare I’ve had in years was about this). Patrick held my hand and walked me through how to fix them though, so I can sleep again. Additionally, riding tubeless means lower air pressure which translates into more grip and comfort. Between this and the seat post, the bike rides – glides… floats… – like a 70s Chrysler or something. Its beautiful.

The handlebars belong to a category of bars called alt bars. These are hybrids of flat bars and drop bars, giving a rider some of the benefits of both styles. Specifically, these are Velo Orange Crazy Bars. They are extremely wide (barely fit through a door) and fairly swept back, meaning I can ride in a super upright and alert posture with a ton of control and easy access to the brakes (I’m thinking here of those nasty, chunky descents on Colombian dirt *roads* where it took everything I had to squeeze the brakes tight enough), or I can lean in and ride the horns. So far, I like the latter more. The beach cruiser vibe is taking some getting used to.

Bonus item: the top of the stack (the vertical cylinder at the center of the handlebars) boasts a USBc charging port with a 1500 mah battery stuffed down in the head tube. A dynamo hub in the front wheel charges the battery while I ride (and powers the headlight), and the battery charges whatever I have plugged in. Goodbye solar panels (…almost, this new system needs to prove itself to me before I abandon the panels).

I’ve had the bike for 2 weeks and I love it. There have been a few rides where I’ve been grinning ear to ear. Its capability is clear to me, despite not having ridden it anywhere crazy yet. And, as mentioned, it is extraordinarily smooth and comfortable, which is the main thing when you are planning to spend 8 or more hours a day for many days in a row on it. Still, I’ll be honest and say I am adjusting. Its wildly different than what I’m used to, so naturally there is going to be a getting to know each other period. This trip is going to be just that, a honeymoon for an arranged marriage of sorts, and I’d bet a lot of money the VTXL is where we will truly bond.

The problem, because there has to be one, is that if something is impassable I can’t blame the equipment!

I’ll be in touch soon! (Specifically, the first trip post/email will be out around midnight on the 6th.)