The Roquefort Files

(This post comes from the typing-up-loose-ends department.)
You may recall that I bought an old Peugeot racing bike in Vancouver with the object of converting it to singlespeed. Well, the path to singlespeed enlightenment does not always run smooth, as I found out to my cost. (I will admit that I did not bear that [...]

I am, quite literally, back in the house. Our September road trip is finally documented — exhaustively so, and now with extra free photographs in most entries — and normality has ruled during the four months since then. Many birthdays, for instance, have come and gone. A chronological subset follows:

Me
Chris
Neil
Devon
Jesus
my Dad
2010

In amongst all this, Coba [...]

The second week of the diving class came and went without a hitch, but before the final open water dives, there was one last cycling endeavour to be had.
I’d met a guy called John at lunch in the office a few times. We’d chatted a bit about the Tour de France as it had been [...]

The MS bike ride I mentioned before fell on the Sunday in the middle of the diving course. I hauled myself out of bed at an ungodly hour that morning (that’s one aspect of Vanouver’s outdoor fetish I could do without) to an uncharacteristically grey sky and spent a while swithering over whether to go [...]

After a relatively sedate July, August went a bit nuts. First up was the longest bike ride of my life*, undertaken with the Vancouver Bicycle Club. I met up with the few hardcore members (of the club, I mean) taking part, on the far side of downtown Vancouver. We headed through Stanley Park and up [...]

In July, the temperature soared past ‘nice’ and went straight to OMGWTFBBQ. A blind mistakenly left open in the morning would have the south-facing apartment sweltering by the time I got back from work in the afternoon. I spent a lot of time wandering the flat shirtless, avoiding the landlord’s favoured dark leather furniture (so [...]

Well, technically the MS Society of Canada. I’m doing a sponsored bike ride* in a couple of weekends’ time and it would be great if you could sponsor me to the tune of a few dollars!
* In case you think that sounds entirely too much like fun — a not unreasonable charge, given how much [...]

To recap from last time, I had a pair of dimensionally-challenged handlebars which my brakes would not fit. It was time for radical measures. It was time to spent some money on a set of real bullhorns, given that my penny-pinching DIY approach had been found wanting in more or less all possible ways.
This was [...]

So, as I mentioned before, I now proudly rock an old school steel-framed Peugeot road bike, complete with skinny tyres and comically incapable brakes. And while it is now a sleek single-speed machine suitable for silent running and blissfully maintenance free cycling, ’twas not always thus.
My plan, after buying it, had been simple: ‘chop and [...]

Dom and Alice left Vancouver on Wednesday, off for a road trip into the wilds of British Columbia, and so I moved my remarkably paltry amount of gear from the hotel to the company apartment. It’s a big place — my rucksack lives in one bedroom; I live in the other — with a balcony [...]