Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Eventful Weekend

First: The Mundo is built! It still needs some extras: chain guard, fenders, lights, top deck, and so on, but it is a fully functional, rideable bike. HUGE thanks to Ben Sarrazin at Yuba, to Tyler and Todd and Justin (?) at Clever Cycles for all sorts of help, special orders, and awesome attitudes, to the guys at Joe Bike for helping us out with a missing seatpost shim, to VeloShop for the excellent green grips and for reaming and facing the first frame, and The Recyclery for doing the same for the second, and to The Recyclery, City Bikes, and Jude at the downtown Bike Gallery for coming through with all sorts of small-but-crucial parts requests.

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We took her out Saturday evening for a shake-down cruise in the parking lot behind our building and found everything to be in order. Which is good, because we had plans for the bike on Sunday.

Sunday we were volunteering at Portland's Sunday Parkways, defending a temporarily car-free intersection from cars and evildoers. To protect ourselves from the ravages of sun, hunger, heat, and boredom, we equipped the Mundo to serve as our asphalt desert oasis:

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The Mundo carried two deck chairs, a cooler of provisions, some beach balls, and a full-sized patio umbrella, along with a cheery palm tree balloon. In spite of our heavy load, however, what most people on the route seemed to notice about our beautiful bike was that it is GREEN. And boy is it.

We had a blast at Parkways, showing off the new bike and meeting all sorts of interesting people. We look forward to volunteering again next month, when Parkways comes to SE.

Following Parkways, we headed north to catch Atomic Arts' extraordinary Trek in the Park production of "Amok Time," an original series episode featuring Spock's problematic... ahem... biology... and Vulcan mating rituals. Awesome, and really quite well done.

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As much as we were impressed by the performance, we were equally blown away by the turnout-- a little event that we had heard of by word-of-facebook had what seemed like about 1000 people out in the sunshine, getting their Trek on. Huge kudos to the Atomic Arts team.

It was a long day, but really satisfying to be out in our new community, getting from place to place in the open air, on our bikes, just having fun.

Technical post(s) on the Mundo build will be forthcoming from Dave, stay tuned!

6 comments:

Julian said...

That is one FINE looking Mundo. Love the the green - the grips were very necessary. And the front wheel came out great!

Matt in Tacoma said...

Wow, set your Mundo to STUN! Looking good...

sara said...

The Mundo looks awesome. I, too, love the green. Sounds like a great Sunday-- makes one want to move to Portland...

She Rides a Bike said...

Cool Mundo. Wow, all those bikes, chalk drawings on the street and a Star Trek production. Another reason why I wish I were in Portland.

inkandpen said...

Thanks for all the compliments on the Mundo! I think she's gorgeous, and was pretty fussy about the cosmetics (while Dave is much more into, you know, making her work) so it's satisfying that you all think she's as pretty as I do.

And as for Portland-- I've never been so glad to live anywhere as I've been since moving here. Then again, the rain hasn't started yet...

Sox said...

Handsome and handy. What more oould you ask for in a bike!