Dirt Burger was this past weekend.  This was the second installment of what we hope are many, hosted by Sov and his firefighter homies of Decorah, Iowa.  I wasn't supposed to be there at all, but at 6:00 on Friday morning, as I was getting ready for work, my loving wife came to me and in her endearing sleepy-eyed bleariness, gave me the green light.  Within minutes I was packing my camping gear and biking stuff.  I phoned Reverend Jim at 6:30 but he was still asleep, and Fleck's last known correspondence had been at 3:09 a.m., so I knew…

A day of riding in the Tokyo rain left black, powdery scum all over our rims and brake pads…which found its way onto the carpet in our hotel rooms as we packed up our Travelers Checks for the trip to Nagoya. Scrubbing at the black silt only pushed it further into the carpet fibers. Hopefully, we won’t see a fat bill for carpet cleaning. Next time, I’m going to pack an old sheet or blanket into my TC case to keep this from happening again.  After breakfast and a short interview with Bicycle Magazine, we headed to Nagoya (Japan’s Detroit…home of Toyota) by…

Last weekend, J. Marshall and I headed south for the innaugural Big Dummy Ride and Gathering of the Weirdos. It's a subtly disguised "sales promotional" event that really just allowed us to hang out with some of Austin's finest and do what we do best - get loud on bikes. Suffice it to say that Austin had something out for Johnny and I because it kept trying to hurt us with heat and beer. The former - when I complained (and that was often) - was consistently met with "Aw, this ain't so hot. You should come back in August."…

The Purple One is 52 today.  I regret that posting this video will likely result in it's being whisked off the Youtube, but we'll take the risk because it's such a great tune.  Happy Brithday Prince.

Volume One – Tokyo On May 20th Trevor, Fleck, Grayboy and I did a 10-day, four city tour of Japan.  The theme of the trip was “Ride With Surly,” which was aimed at getting people together to ride their bikes (Surly or not) and have fun.  No sales pitches, no hassles, just good clean fun.  This is the first of four blog posts documenting our travels, and since I am writing the first one I thought it would be a good opportunity to explain what the Surly-Japan connection is all about.  When I was fresh out of college I went…