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This year I rode 13,709 miles, of which 3,196 were ridden tandem. That’s basically in the range of my mileage for the last five or six years – but I may back off from that level in 2026

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I got the Ibis Tandem back from R+E today – with the broken shifter re-engineered.  The Litespeed Tandem is done (except for final buy-in from Odette on her bars and saddle.)  The clip-on fenders work on the Rodriguez  Tandem.  So now on to other projects…

Waiting is hard

Made in America

After watching Ebay for a year-and-a-half I found a medium sized Litespeed tandem on CL last night and bought it this afternoon.  The price was less than I was prepared to pay for a frame-only.  It’s got a mix of parts – some Campy, some not – and nothing matches.  It will be fun to decide how I want it built out.  (Di2?)

 

Litespeed tandem back story

When I went to replace the tires on the Centurion this fall I couldn’t find any Vittoria Zaffiro 23s so I upgraded to Continental Gatorskin 23s.  The new tires were just a little bigger and there really wasn’t enough clearance under the caliper / bridge.  I flattened out the fender and bent the edges upward and eventually got it so that it ran without rubbing, at least on the stand.  Yesterday I couldn’t get it to stop rubbing and when I got home I found that the fender had cracked where I bent it.  So…. I got the hacksaw and cut out the section under the caliper.  I rode it today and it was quiet for 40 miles.  I wish that this hack was a little more rigid, but it will work for now.  I like the vintage PDW look but eventually I’ll probably have to move to those partial fenders that mount higher than the brakes.

Here’s some photos:

After our experience in Eastern Washington, Odette decided she needed to do some training rides.   Here is the list of old favorites I gave her:

 

Nile 50 / 2500

 

It’s April and we’ve settled on a couple of significant tandem trips for 2025:

 

June trip:

Winthrop / Chelan

6/9 – 6/11 Sun Mountain Lodge, Winthrop
6/12 – 6/13 Driftin Cabanas, Chelan

MON 6/9: drive to Marblemount, ride Marblemount,  drive to Winthrop, stay SML

TUE 6/10: ride Chuwich, stay SML

WED 6/11: ride Carleton, stay SML

THU 6/12: drive to Grand Coulee,  ride Grand Coulee,  drive to Chelan,  stay DC

FRI 6/13: ride Navaree Coulee,  stay DC

SAT 6/14: drive to Leavenworth, ride Plain,  drive home

 

July / August trip:

Danube Cycle Path

Crude map of the route – with the towns we’re stopping  in as waypoints

(This is Google Maps routing – we’ll actually ride the EuroVelo route 6  with the route adjusted by the agency handling our lodging / transfers.  Also, we have too many waypoints for Google  so the final day, which is excluded from the map, is a ride on into Vienna. )

komoot

RWGPS

7/24 – fly to Zurich with the tandem and get a car to Donaueschingen, Germany (the source of the Danube and the start of the Danube Cycle Path)

7/25 -8/11 bike to Vienna with an extra day at the start, a layover day in Passau and a couple of extra days at the end.

Wikipedia on towns we’ll be stopping in:

Donaueschingen

Fridingen

Obermarchtal

Ulm

Donauwörth

Ingolstadt

Regensburg

Deggendorf 

Passau 

Aschach / Brandstatt

Grein / Ardagger

Krems

Wien

8/11 – fly out of Vienna.

We’ve got about 90 days to get back in riding shape and some details still to work out but this is exciting!

 

2026 trips

We also put down a deposit on Santana Adventures Dubrovnik to Athens bike cruise from October 21 to November 1, 2026.  We’ve looked at Santana since back in the day when they were exclusively for tandems, but we never felt like we needed to spend the money and preferred being on our own.  Now that we’re older the convenience of being with a group based on a boat is more attractive.  This also looks like a great trip on its own merits.

I hope to get in another local trip in 2026 – maybe the Selkirks or the Okanagan.  We will probably want to go someplace warm in Q-1 2026 and maybe we can take the bike along for that (think New Mexico or Arizona…)

January 2025 in Seattle was abnormally warm and dry and I rode just over 1,000 miles – well above what I’d expect to do at that time of year.  The end of January / beginning of February, was cold and wet – only a little snow but Ice for a couple of weeks.  I stuck close to home and only did about 150 miles before Odette and I left for a trip to Europe.  When we got back on March 4th I knew that I wanted to get 1,000 miles in during what was left of March.  That would still leave me with the shortest quarter since Q-1 2014, so a little more than 1,000 would be better.  In order to get there I figured I’d ride 40 miles a day for 25 days leaving a couple of “spare” days to make up for bad weather or to overachieve.  I started out with old favorites and quickly realized that I’d done half-a-dozen days without repeating a route.  Naturally that prompted me to wonder if I could do that for the full 25.  I turns out that I could – here are the maps – 25 rides for 1,032.5 miles, 53,576 feet of elevation and no repeats.

I would do a few of these differently next time, but if anybody is looking for a 40 mile ride starting in Phinney Ridge, any of these would be a reasonable place to start.

tandem repaint

 

A little bit more mileage and elevation this year compared to 2023 (14,073 vs. 13,717 and 726,005 vs. 720,518.)  Not too shabby for the first full year with a PD diagnosis.  The real news is in the tandem numbers:  1,729 for the year vs. 2,959 last year.  That’s what happens when you only get 111 in the 4th quarter and nothing in the first.

Here’s the link to the annual and quarterly numbers.

Great minds think alike – shortly after I finished this post i read this blurb in a Rivendell weekly email:

Question of the week
I get a lot of good questions emailed every week and I’ve decided to answer them here, in case anybody else finds it useful. Here’s a good one:

Hi Will,
I was catching up on newsletters, and saw you’re putting dynamo lights on your new Clem. I’m doing the same thing. If you have time, I’d love to see how you run the wire to the rear light. This is my first experience with dynamo lights, and getting the wire to hug the frame and rear rack (Nitto 32R) nicely isn’t intuitive to me.

I do it quickly and sloppily, and I’m happy with that. I use thin black zip-ties and coil the wire around the housing or frame tubes. I was hunting around for a “clean” solution to routing wires back to a rear light when I realized that a thin zip-tie really can’t be improved on, and is in keeping with the spirit of having everything external and easily figured out. The one thing I do that can be considered a little fancier than what’s strictly required for the system to work is I put a dab of solder over the wire in the crimps. That way, I don’t have to worry about the wires ripping out if I yank a little too hard on the wire. Peter White has instructions on dyno wiring and crimping.

The Secuzed is the rear light of choice for Riv employees. It’s affordable, super bright, and stays on long after you’ve stopped moving too. Plus, I think it’s the only one we sell that isn’t specifically made to mount to a rear rack, and most of us are front-rackers.

The Secuzed’s included mounts work fine, but I prefer to find a bracket in Mark’s bin-o-stuff, bend it 90 degrees in the vice, and attach the light to the upper seatstay braze-on instead. If you don’t have a stash of random brackets, a hardware store will definitely have something you can use.

Then the next week Jan Heine did a journal post on setting up dynamo lights!

I suspect that there is something of a surge in sales of lighting systems around Christmas – I know that I got a hub for my Fuji that way.  For what it’s worth the Peter White discussion is still the best.