Occasionally I'll get personal email from readers who see something that they think I might be interested in.
Recently I've received email about bike-commuting foreign ministers, bike-parking headaches in Amsterdam, and a request for a good bicycle touring book recommendation.
Ken in North Carolina forwarded the above image to me from BBC showing France's Minister of Ecology and Sustainable Development Alain Juppe walking away from a cabinet meeting with his Dutch commuting bike.
“It's a very nice example for government figures everywhere!” Ken wrote.
Ditto that.
My wife, she reads the blog too, forwarded a funny Washington Post story by Molly Malone in Amsterdam about the problems of dealing with so many bikes. Bet you didn't think this could be a problem.
In “2,500 Bicycles Look a lot Alike at Amsterdam Central,” Malone writes about the annual efforts to weed out abandoned or lost bicycles in Amsterdam Central, the train station that's also a five-story parking garage for some 2,500 bicycles.
The chief attendant says people will lose, misplace, or forget about bikes all the time. As the headline says, the bikes look a lot alike. The annual sweep nets about 500 bicycles from Amsterdam Central alone.
The country's population is 16 million and there are 20 million-some bikes; three times the number of cars. About 800,000 bicycles are reported stolen every year, although many of these are confiscated by the cops because they're illegally parked.
The blogger at the RockyHillside asked if I knew any good bicycle touring books, along the line of Colin Fletcher's “The Man Who Walked Through Time” or “Thousand-Mile Summer” (he was a hiker who just passed away last week in Monterey, California, at the age of 85).
The only one who came to my mind was Joe Kurmaskie, the so-called Metal Cowboy, who has written about his bicycle touring adventures in a series of books. The latest, “Momentum is Your Friend,” recounts his self-supported cross-country bicycle tour with his two young sons.
The books that inspired me about bicycling touring were books about adventure and travel. They include Fletcher's books, Edward Abbey (“Desert Solitaire”), John Steinbeck (“Travels with Charley”), Jonathan Raban (“Old Glory”, his rowboat trip down the Mississippi) and Mark Twain (“Life on the Mississippi”)… Not a bicyclist in the bunch, but they knew how to make the most out of an adventure.
Can anyone recommend a good bicycle-touring book?
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