Joe Kurmaskie isn't exactly the poet laureate of bicycle tourists; he's more like the comic laureate.
I caught Kurmaskie's very entertaining talk at the Seattle Bike Expo, and I'm happy to see he's returning for another Metal Cowboy Holiday Spectacular at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 11 at the downtown Seattle REI. (Cascade Bicycle Club members, 2 for $5; nonmembers $5.)
Kurmaskie's a funny guy. He spends a lot of time every year bicycle touring, often with his family. He finds a lot of humor in that. If you're not familiar with the Portland bicyclist, here's an excerpt from a quiz he sent out earlier this year entitled: “Are You Addicted to Cycling?”
“• You know every traffic light sequence in the tri-county area for stop free pedaling.
• Either it's a Brooks saddle or I will stand and pedal the whole way, thank you.
• You own/wear more tights than a children's theater group performing Peter Pan.
• You have eaten pasta directly out of your front bag, while pedaling.
• You have higher quality, up-to-date intel on bike specs, gear and camping equipment than the staff at your local shop, the sales reps in your community and the editors at national magazines.
• You sport a killer set of bodybuilder quads and a pair of angel hair pasta thin arms. That ten year old boy called again. He wants his biceps back.
• You don't hate drivers as much as pity them in their steel cages, surrounded by shock jock rhetoric and their vague anger over how it came to this.
• You think about each hill as a cyclist, even when you are driving in a car.
• You calculate distances between cities by how long it would take by bike. ( 21 bike days from St. Petersburg to St. Louis.)
• You know how many miles you rode last night, last week, last year.
• You don't find it over sharing to tell people you just met how many miles you rode last night, last week, last year.
• You have a Biker's Tan. (bottom 2 /3 of your legs, lower 1/2 your arms, and two little circles on the tops of your hands)
• You get sad when your Biker's Tan fades.
• You have nothing good to say about logging trucks or RVs with living fossils behind the wheel, or anything sporting wide mirrors.
• You have lost feeling in your hands, neck and groin for substantial periods of time, but still you consider it the fair price of doing business on two wheels.
• You have far too many photos of yourself on or around your bicycle next to signs at the top of mountain passes, Welcome To So and So State, National Park entrances, starting lines of bike rides, historic sites, and in front of bicycle shops.”
Yeah. I'm one of those addicts.
So he'll probably talk about stuff like that, and his trip across the US with his two sons in 2006 and this summer's trip across Canada with his wife and two sons. All on one rig.
Some other stuff that Kurmaskie is up to these days:
Camp Creative: No Child Left Behind is a camp focused on the literary arts and expeditions of bicycling, kayaking and hiking. He's signed an agreement for its new home — 3,000 acres on Government Island, a wildlife preserve in Portland's city limits. More at Camp Creative.
Kurmaskie has penned two books (Metal Cowboy and Momentum is Your Friend) that are for sale his Metal Cowboy website.
Kurmaskie's trans-Canada bicycle tour with his family will be featured in a Bicycling magazine cover story in the Spring, followed by a book, “Mud, Sweat and Gears” in the fall 2008.
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