The bicycle like a boomerang

I’ve posted before about my own travel bike, a custom Sycip with S&S couplings. I designed the bike for maximum versatility. By changing out handlebars, rear wheels, and other peripheral components, the bike can become a road fixie, a TT bike, a touring bike, or a road racing bike. Someday I’d like to do a cyclocross race with it, just to say that I’ve done it all with that bike. I’ve been almost 20 countries with it, and it’s outlasted two relationships. It’s a great formula that inspired Byron’s Davidson Modal bike, but my bike did have a predecessor.

Sycip Boomerang.jpg

Here’s my current Sycip in front of the predecessor, just yesterday.

A few years before I had another Sycip made with S&S couplings. I designed it as a single-speed cyclocross bike; it had the Surly track dropouts without a derailleur hanger. It was a fun bike with a radically sloping top tube and big tire clearance (almost 29er class). I had that bike because I was working frequently as a travel assistant for a world-traveling musician. That bike had been to Osaka, Copenhagen, Regensburg, Warsaw, and Eindhoven among other cities. But I had to make room for my definitive travel bike, so I sold the cyclocross on eBay years ago to a woman in Texas.

Flash forward to yesterday. A guy by the name of Chris Bynum stops in with an S&S Sycip. He gigs as an instrument tech for Leonard Cohen, who’s just about to start a four month world tour. He had some questions about packing the bike in the travel case, and he came to just the right person in just the right shop out of the whole world. Why? Because it’s my old bike!

It turns out Chris bought it from the same woman in Austin that bought the bike from me. In fact, if Chris hadn’t been working a gig elsewhere in town, he probably would have been at our party we hosted with Mellow Johnny’s. We and our bikes just narrowly missed each other. So funny.

It’s cool to see my old bike. Though the bike has a flatbar rather than a drop and different pedals, it had almost all the stickers I had plastered it with years ago. I think back to my other bikes (and there’s been many); I wonder where they are now.

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