New Pegasus Kit

This weekend I'm hanging out in the Finger Lakes Region of New York.  My friend Rachel is marrying some friends... as in, she's officiating their wedding. It's pretty here!

Unfortunately it's also unnecessarily cold here. Like 40 degrees or something unreasonable like that. Unnn... believable.

So I'm parked in the hotel room watching tv. It's ok. I'll be active tomorrow. (We brought road bikes.) It's been a long week of long nights being awesome and designing awesome things. It really takes it out of you.

I've gotten so much done, though! I did a logo for a crit in Wisconsin, which I'll post as soon as it's finalized. And here's the final Pegasus Casual Kit design!

In the end it won't change the face of cycling kit, but I think it's pretty solid. If you think it's solid, too, you'll be able to pre-order it soon. This is the first kit we're opening to non-Pegasi.

As for me, I'll be here watching a Gravity Falls marathon. The opening credits are neat.

Pegasus Kit Coming Soon

I've been busy! I just finished the new Pegasus kit, which will be available to the public shortly. I'm excited to show it off, but we're just releasing teasers for now.



I'll explain about the squirrel when the kit gets released. It hearkens back to the old days of Pegasus, circa 2005.

And now, back to work for me!

Living Through the Lens

It's a new and amazing feeling to look though these photos and articles by Matt Wragg on pinkbike.com about the Enduro World Series and recognize the surroundings from my vacation last month.

Enduro World Series Build-up
I stayed in the campground the riders are staying in. In one of the cottages just like the one pictured. I was there on those beaches, and I presume I rode one or two of those trails (it's harder for me to recognize those sorts of things). I know that parking lot, I know of the charcoal burning spots in the woods, and I recognize the restaurant some of the riders are hanging out in front of. I was even able to recognize Ben Cruz's perma-pervy smile from the time I spent in Finale Ligure during the team camp. It all feels pretty damn awesome.

Enduro World Series Prologue
And this! I walked up and down these streets and can recognize the view. It would have been amazing to be there, seeing the streets I lazily toured filled with fans and racers. I'll just have to use my memory and the photographer's lens. It's a strange feeling in that I've never read race articles and wanted to be there in this way. It almost feels like there's a race on my home turf and I'm not there to see it.

Alas that I live here in reality and not in Punta Ala.

Tree Frog

Today I was sitting at my desk and pretending to work (kidding!) and my friend Lindsay came up to me and said she had something to show me outside. "A present for me?" I asked. She said, "Sort of." And indeed it was. I love all the little creatures, and this happened to be an adorable tree frog.



This bike is used to zip between the two buildings at work, and somebody noticed the frog as he was biking over to the office. There was a small crowd gathered, and we basically spent a few minutes cooing over it and taking pictures (tweet tweet!) before setting it back in the wild.



I'm gonna put this picture in here because even though my hair is still in a ratty old braid from biking to work, I'm wearing a perfectly nice dress and jacket, which is better than most days.



After everyone had their fill we rolled the bike over to a tree and persuaded him to jump ship.



He wasn't getting it at first.



Oh, goodness. So cute.





Home safe! And that, gentlepeople, is how you blog about something crazy-mundane.

Tarrywile

This weekend was not as charmed as last weekend, but luckily I've got a few good friends to brighten things up. Lindsay and I bummed around the house yesterday, and today Rachel stopped by for a visit. We went to Tarrywile, which is really a neat place for, uh, a place in Danbury. There are some decent little hiking trails, and today was especially nice with the sun and all the families out and about.





Rachel was transported to a magical place by my camera's 'miniaturize' setting.



It was a decent outing, even if I was at one point threatened with a stick by a depraved individual.

Tarquinia, Too

Let's travel back, shall we? On my last day in Italy, if you remember, we visited Tarquinia - but that was not all! I know, you were hoping that was it.  Sorry. I've got a few more things to report on. In Tarquinia, there's a famous necropolis, which we tried to check out. Unfortunately, it was a Monday and things are generally closed on Mondays in Italy. We saw what we could, and poked around and found an old aqueduct, too.

Here's one of the tombs we saw.

Matt got about this far before he stopped and hollered.

The chamber was swarming with fairly harmless looking but still disturbingly large black wing-ed insects. They were everywhere and Matt didn't want to risk getting any in his hair.

This was the inside, for those who are curious. All those black spots? Big icky bugs.

We had spotted an aqueduct from the road and went to check it out. It was neat to see one in person.

The top.

Looking out across the field.

Inspired by our near miss of the Etruscan necropolis in Tarquinia, Matt found another necropolis on the way to Rome to check out, the Necropolis of the Banditaccia. This place was really interesting with plenty to explore, even without the grand tombs that were closed. We got mobbed by cats and a guide dog when we got there.

Seriously, there were a serious number of cats.

There was a sunken road of sorts lined with tombs.

Our guide dog posed for a photo on top of this one.

Lots of them were flooded.

After walking down the road a while, we got into the nicer neighborhood of the larger tombs that seemed to be at least partially built out instead of just carved into the rock.

Here's the ceiling of one of those.

How about a short creature feature? There were some snails here and there, and a giant worm.

Hand for reference, click on the photo to see the whole thing.

Then there was this guy, lurking in front of one of the tombs.

And again! in front of one of the large, multi-chambered tombs that was closed.

Sometimes you just never know what you're going to run into in a burial ground.

Textbook Weekend

This was a textbook weekend in that I was too busy having fun to catch up on any of the work I should have been catching up on. I hope there are a lot more like it this summer.

On Friday night I went, last minute, to a Yankees game. 'We' lost, but ah well. I had cheese fries and a corndog, so I, personally, won.

I inadvertently took the same photo, day and night.






After the game, a coworker, Ryan, and I headed toward Pennsylvania for VeloFest, the bike swap on the infield of the Valley Preferred Cycling Center track, aka T-Town. We stayed the night with a couple of his friends before heading out for the swap early Saturday morning.

Here's a late-in-the-day, badly done panoramic photo of VeloFest. About a third of the booths were gone by this point. But hey, I was too busy selling old bike junk to get out and take photos.



Here was our table, which yielded a surprising amount of cash for us. We got rid of a lot! That's Ryan on the left, and his friend Keenan on the right.



A little after 2:00, we loaded up the car with what was left of our bike gear and hit the road, listening to a book on CD that Ryan found on the free table at work - the young adult book about dragons and magic and such, Eragon. Ryan had brought it along as a joke, but I don't joke around when it comes to audio books.

I got home later than planned and wound up hastily figuring out the logistics of a trip into Brooklyn the next day. I planned to take the train down to New York, then take the metro/bike around the city. Just before leaving in the morning, I realized I had left my cycling shoes at work and didn't have time to get them - I would have to wear tennis shoes while pedaling my bike with Candy pedals on it. (In the end, it wasn't as bad as I had imagined.) I had planned ahead and brought sunscreen, which was something I had forgotten the day before.

This was new 'natural' sunscreen that I had just bought... after smearing it all over my face, I figured out that 'natural' meant terrible, terrible chalky zinc sunscreen that makes you look like a ghost. Or not even quite - there was a just a hint of it that made me look vaguely sick. It was terrible.

Neverless, I managed to have fun. I happened upon the TD Five Boro Bike Tour, which is a huge event in the city. Security was high after the Boston bombings. I rode with the ride over a bridge, car free, with the group. It was quite the sight. After I got into Brooklyn, I met my friend Tyler and we hit up the Brooklyn Flea Market. It got pretty busy as the morning wore on.



We happened across some kind of outdoor food fest in the Brooklyn Bridge Park, and I couldn't resist having a ride on Jane's Carousel.



It's been a long time! I did my best to pick out the prettiest carousel horse, but as I was about to hop up on one, a woman and her young son appeared on the other side of it. She asked if she could have it, and I asked if her son had his heart set on it. After all, I had carefully deliberated this and they had seemed to just appear all willy-nilly on the other side of my pick. But she said that yes, her son (who looked suspiciously ambivalent) would have no other horse. After briefly thinking about shouting 'NO!' and getting on anyway, I conceded and got on the second-prettiest horse.

You had better be enjoying that horse, kid.



It is a beautiful carousel, though, with quite the view. It was flooded during Hurricane Sandy, but it looked pristine. I couldn't see any sign of it.

I didn't get a pic of my pick, but here's Tyler enjoying his ride.



After that we had a late brunch complete with margaritas - it was Cinco de Mayo, after all - and met a couple of Tyler's friends for some biking around Prospect Park.



I was all set for New York with my fixie, which I just got back over Christmas. (I sold it to a friend when I left Milwaukee, then bought it back this year.) Cruelly, after getting sunburned and roasting in jeans the day before, this little number left me chillier than I had planned, due to a drop in temperature and a cold wind off of the water.



I thought this was pretty good - a pigeon sitting on an eagle above a ram's head (hard to see) above an axe.



This fountain wasn't going yet, but I'd imagine it will be soon.



Well, that's about it. After a very full weekend, I caught the train home to Danbury and tucked myself in just before midnight. A weekend well spent.