Touring - Nominate your heros!

Who is your bicycle hero?

Did you ride a really cool event lately planned by a non-profit? Or was there an “angel” who provided a warm meal and housing for you on a cold day of your tour? How about a person who got you into bicycle travel in the firstplace. You can nominate these folks for an award, and Adventure Cycling will recognize their efforts. Learn more at http://www.adventurecycling.org/outreach/awards/index.cfm

Oh please! If I had heros I'd be a Bulls supporter. I go out on the road to get away from the hype partly.

Closest thing to a cycling hero I know is this mildly ******** guy who for the last 10 years rides over 25 miles a day, 365 days a year picking up cans and bottles in my area.
Rain, snow or ice he is out there on a $300 mtb with wire panniers wearing street clothes. I'll bet he rides close to 10,000 miles a year.
When he got hit by a car a few years ago and his bike got totaled many people in this area took up a collection to get him a new bike.

I remember reading some threads about that or maybe it was on one of the boards. I think the people who helped out are really cool for doing what they did.

Fred A. Birchmore

He is now in his later 90's. In his seventies he built a stone wall in Athens, Georgia, now known as "The Great wall of Athens" and biked around the world in the 1930's, (and then again, and again....)
His book is great, Around the World on a Bicycle.

--A

Machka is my hero. No one else comes close.

I'm a bike nut who also loves cars and music...

Dale Earnhardt
Jerry Garcia

Fred A. Birchmore


Wow! I thought he was long gone!. He is a great guy and very witty, I heard him speak at a bike club meeting in Atlanta 30 years ago. He is largely to blame for my first trip across the country during the summer of 1977. When I went to Europe in 1982 he gave me several letters of introduction that got me lodging and meals while touring France ,Belgium and Luxembourg.

I think I will write him a letter this weekend.

BTW Fred invented cool in 1939!

http://dlg.galileo.usg.edu/vanga/photos/clr/jpg/clr051.jpg

My bicycle hero is Einstein, I am sure many of you have seen the photo with Albert riding the old two wheeler.

My other bicycle hero is George Bush. Anyone who takes out his Husqvarna to clear brush on his ranch for a bike path is a cool guy.

roughstuff

Anne Mustoe, after reading her book, A bike ride (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0863696503/026-5936135-5814034?v=glance&n=266239), it convinced me to get a bike and do my first tour.
If a 52yo overweight school teacher can get on a bike and ride around the world solo, I figured I could make the 3000km tour to Athens, Greece from Maasticht, The Netherlands.
Fell in love with touring ever since.

Three idealist heros: F. Patterson, D. Rebour, R. Ballantine.

Three realist heros: T. Higgins, J. Taylor, A. Singer.

'Nuff said.

My father - who made me realise that if I wanted transport, I'd have to provide it myself, and who let me scatter the garage with bikes and bit of bikes and all the rest. We even built up an old 40s Raleigh. I can't say it was the smoothest project, but it was good, looking back, that we did it.
Of course, he's not here anymore - how many of them are there, but hey, old man, thanks for that - you put me on the right track.

My heroes are the bike shop mechanics that have done everything in their power to aid me on various tours over the years. There are lots of good ones out there, but the best were in Whitefish, Montana, Sault Ste Marie, Michigan and Bracebridge, Ontario. The dude in Whitefish built me a wheel in an hour after I cracked a rim on my way out of Glacier National Park. I just arrived there unannounced late in the morning, and he had it ready for me just after noon.

In Sault Ste. Marie I had to replace an entire wheelset after I splintered a rim on a tour in Michigan's upper peninsula. I had to hitchhike to get to the nearest bike shop. I dropped my bike off at the shop in the late afternoon, near the end of the work day. The mechanic went home, and returned to the shop to build me two new wheels at one in the morning. He had the bike ready to go when the store opened at 9am on a saturday morning.

In Bracebridge I rolled into the Ecclestone bike shop with a broken spoke in the middle of a tour. The mechanic fixed the spoke and swapped out the cassette body, which had been giving me problems, as soon as I had unloaded my gear from my bike, putting other work aside to service my bike immediately. I asked to purchase a cassette puller so I could repair any broken spokes that I might encounter later in my tour, but he didn't have all of the tools that I would need on the shelf. So he went into his own tool box and gave me everything that I would need, as well as a couple of free water bottles.

Bike shops are always kind to touring cyclists in my experience, but these shops went above and beyond the call of duty to get me rolling again.

John Egan

Pat & Cat Patterson...

Pat is a self described senior citizen. Cat is a heart attack survivor. Together they rode automatically-shifting infomercial bicycles around the world.

I cycled to the Tijuana-San Diego border to meet them as the completed their journey around the world. Amazing...inspirational folks!

Click here to see their web site (http://www.worldriders2.com/Route.asp). This is a photo of them on the island of Zanzibar, Tanzania.

http://www.worldriders2.com/JournalPics_17_1/2iDar2Zan%20029%20(Small).jpg

Oh please! If I had heros I'd be a Bulls supporter. I go out on the road to get away from the hype partly.

I agree to a point. Sure, there are people whose adventures make for interesting reading, and there are people we can learn from along the way, but for me it all comes back to the basic act of getting out on the road and riding. Along the way, a number of different people have come into my cycling life for a while, then moved on. In the end, however, all of this is a secondary consideration to the ride itself, and to my next adventure.

Lon Halderman is a hero, great rider, and doing great things for kids and people in the third world. Take a look and some of the great things he is doing, and things you can help with, http://www.pactour.com/