Crawlin'

There is no better way to spend a Friday night

than hanging out with bike friends.

 You can play in traffic on your way to bars ...

ride in the dark without a light ...

 and flip off your friends.  A lot.

Party hard. Ride home.

Will work for beer

Most years, I think of the spring bike swap as the official kickoff of the summer riding season. Unfortunately, I had a work-related obligation a couple of Saturdays ago and missed this year’s event. Luckily for me, Bicycle Commuters of Anchorage—a group that has never gotten its due credit on this blog—hosted a celebration and volunteer recruitment party tonight at Midnight Sun Brewing Company. It felt like a nice season opener.

These folks have led the charge for Anchorage commuters over the past two or three years, promoting bikes as a mode of transportation and working with elected officials to get a new bike plan passed by the Anchorage Assembly. An organized group to speak up for the rights and needs of bike commuters has been needed for a long time, so we’re lucky to have BCA getting the job done.

A bribe here and there can be an effective way to accomplish things, and BCA knows how to grease palms with just the right incentive. One little coupon for a free Oosik Amber Ale was enough to get me to sign on the dotted line as a volunteer for an upcoming event. (Who knows what I would have agreed to if I'd had the Panty Peeler.) I’ll be a valet parking bikes May 1 at the Bike to Work Fashion Show and Festival at the University Center.

I didn’t tell them my role models are the parking garage attendants who took Daddy’s rare sports car for a joy ride in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I’ll be hoping for someone to put a nice new Pinarello in my hands before wandering off to check out attractions.

Trust me, everything will be fine. What? That little scratch? Uh, I’m pretty sure that was there when you gave us the bike, sir.

Way better than marshmallows

The Frigid Bits Burn Barrel is more than just a source of heat. It’s a gathering place, a shrine, an altar for those who worship mountain biking.

We flock to it for salvation on dark winter nights when we gather for the fun and lunacy of riding through super cold air with only a small bubble of battery-powered light to guide us.

And on our coldest nights, we rely on the FBBB for one of its most important functions: Keeping the damned beer warm enough to drink. Where else are you gonna find people holding their brews directly over open flames between sips?

While bike riders in other parts of the nation and world are worrying about how to keep their beer cold, we worry about ours turning too slushy—or worse, freezing solid. And there’s nothing that disappoints a person like popping the cap off a bottle of brew and taking a great big swig o’ nuthin’ when you tip that sucker back.

Keep the beer fires burning.

A beer-run classic

I was preparing to go to dinner at Ken and Heather's place Saturday evening, but I was scratching my head over one of life's most vexing dilemmas: how to transport two six-packs of bottled beer and four big chunks of halibut without my BOB trailer, which someone recently borrowed.

Even if I'd had the BOB, I was really in the mood to ride my Pugsley, which is way too fat to accommodate the trailer's fork. Driving wasn't a good option. My friends live a little less than a mile away, so I'd walk there and back before I'd go beerless for a couple of hours just so I could drive home.

Then I remembered that I had all the parts required to assemble a great American classic: the rack-mounted milk-crate cargo hauler. Give a resourceful man a purloined milk crate and a fistful of zip ties, and he can move damned near anything. It might arrive in more pieces that it's supposed to be in, but he can gawl-darn move it.

These contraptions are one of the greatest utilitarian accessories in the history of bicycling. Over the decades since some some dirt-bag student carried out the first covert crate-snatching mission in the hostile territory of a supermarket's back lot and safely delivered the package to the extraction zone of his front porch, these things have hauled countless loads of beer to college dorms and apartments. Sure, they've also held TVs and supported bookshelves, but who really cares? It's hauling beer that made 'em famous.

So I ran out to the backyard shed and grabbed a crate that I boosted from a grocery-store alley during my reckless youth—27 years ago, to be exact. That's the other great thing about milk crates ... they never freakin' wear out!

Anyway, I went back into the garage, clamped a rack around the seatpost of my Pugs, and zip-tied that milk crate on good and tight. Next thing I knew, I had 'er loaded up with beer and dead fish, and was standing in the driveway trying to figure out how I was gonna get my 44-year-old leg over a bike that was starting to look like the Clampetts' vee-hickle when they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly. Hills, that is.

The act of mounting the bike wasn't exactly poetry in motion, but what the hell—I was off to a party with a full trunk, a smile on my face and no need for a driver's license.

I didn't care if the car-imprisoned civilians stared at my fat-ass tires or the junk in my trunk. I was rollin' a modern-day classic, and cold beer bottles were clinkin' on my six.