Category: Bicycles

My 2024 Resolutions

By Joe Berk

The New Year hits tonight.  The years keep rolling by and it’s time for my 2024 resolutions.  I’ve made a few, and with your indulgence, I’ll share them here.

I’m going to continue to hold my tongue (and my keyboard) on all things political.  I’ve never seen anyone read a social media post or a blog or listen to someone with an opposing viewpoint and suddenly exclaim, “ah, now I understand…of course you’re right, and I was wrong all along…”  Nope, the era of intelligent political discourse ended in the 1960s with the Vietnam War protests.  Back then, and now, everyone is convinced their opinion is the only true path.  I’m never going to call anyone ever again a leftwing idiot or a rightwing idiot, partly because of this resolution and partly because I hate being redundant.

I’m going to stop getting upset with people at the gym tying up machines while screwing around on their cell phones.  Nope, you can sit on a machine and text to your heart’s content.  I’ll just move on to another piece of equipment.  Someday, though, when you’re standing in front of the Pearly Gates, you’ll have to answer.  And I’ll be there.  Just in case there are any questions.

I’m going to lose weight.  The answer is to use that calorie tracker on my cell phone and exercise.  Really.  This time I mean it.  I want to be skinny like Gresh.

I’m going to cook more, but in line with the resolution above I’ll eat less.  I do a great barbequed salmon, a marvelous Italian meat sauce, delicious stuffed shells, a wonderful chili, incredible stuffed peppers, a great wild pork sausage and mushrooms casserole, tasty chicken tostadas, and a few others.  I want to try making my own chile rellenos this year and find at least three more dishes to add to my repertoire.

I’m going to sell a few guns.  I own too many to enjoy and more than a few that I don’t shoot.  It’s time to convert these investments into cash and let others have some fun.

I’m going to ride my motorcycle and my bicycle more.  I’ve slowed down on my riding quite a bit in the last three years.  Part of it is the pandemic…law enforcement on our public roads has dropped to nearly nothing, and there are too many people driving like maniacs out there…speeding, weaving in and out of traffic, and screwing around on their cell phones.  I’ve been hit by cars twice in my life while on two wheels (once on a motorcycle and once on a bicycle), and I don’t care to add a third bone-breaking event to my resume.   But I haven’t been riding enough and I want to get out and ride.  Get my knees in the breeze.   You know the feeling.

It’s time to put more pork on the table.  I’m going to do at least two hunts in 2024.  One will be a varmint hunt for coyotes in Arizona with Baja John; the other will be a pig hunt with my 6.5 Creedmoor (location to be determined).  If you’re a vegetarian or fundamentally opposed to hunting, you have my permission to skip any blogs I write about these events.

I’m not going to buy any more watches.  I came across Segal’s Law last year, which holds that a man with a watch knows what time it is, but a man with many watches is never sure.  I’m the guy who’s never sure, raised to an exponent.

I’m going to do Baja again, most likely in March so I can see the whales, eat a chile relleno in San Ignacio, and visit Javier at the La Casitas in Mulegé.  I think Gresh wants to go, too.  Maybe we’ll get our other ExNotes writers in on the action.  You’ll read all about it here on ExNotes.

I’m retiring, for real this time.   I’ll still write for the ExNotes blog and Motorcycle Classics magazine (I enjoy writing for both and I never viewed either as work), but I’m done with everything else.  It’s time.

There you go…my 2024 resolutions.  How about yours?

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The One: A Bianchi L’Una!

Maybe 15 years ago Sue and I were on vacation in Calistoga (where the bottled water comes from).  We had our bicycles with us and we were enjoying the Silverado Trail and other choice bicycling roads in Napa Valley.  I had an aluminum-framed Giant roadbike in those days with entry-level componentry (if I recall, they branded it the Tiagra line).  There was a bike shop in Calistoga, and like gun shops, I can’t pass a bicycle store without stopping to see what they have.

In the Calistoga shop, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.  It was a Bianchi L’Una (“the One” in Italian), and it was the most visually-arresting bicycle I’d ever seen.

Riding an inexpensive aluminum bike, I lusted for a carbon fiber bike.  I managed a plant back then that manufactured carbon fiber aviation components, and a carbon fiber bike was something I knew I needed.

The Bianchi wasn’t just carbon fiber, though.  The bike had top-of-the-line Campagnolo components (Campy’s Record line, which is expensive stuff).  Bicycle guys are elitists (although I’ve found they are not nearly as obnoxious as Facebook and motorcycle forum experts; I swear, some of these guys could be featured on the cover of Modern Proctology).  But bicycle guys also have strong opinions, two of which are that carbon fiber and Campy Record componentry are as good as it gets.

Just about everything on the L’Una that could be carbon fiber was, and most of it was white carbon fiber (the frame, the stem, the seatpost, the forks, and the forks).  The levers were conventional carbon, as were selected bits and pieces on the front and rear derailleurs.  The brakes calipers and a few other machined bits and pieces were titanium.   That’s expensive stuff.  I knew from my aerospace job that the lead time on titanium in those days was a whopping 72 weeks. It was a stunning and stunningly-expensive bicycle.  Everything about the bike was exotic. I had never seen anything like it.

I had to ask, and the Calistoga bike shop guy told me the L’Una was $5700.  I’d never heard of a bicycle being that expensive, although today (15 years later), that would not be an unusually high price.  Back then, though, you could have knocked me over with a feather.  $5700.  For a bicycle.  Wow.

I continued to look at the L’Una for another half hour, but I told the sales dude not to get too excited.  I was a looky-lou, I explained.  There was no way I was going to spend that kind of money on a bicycle.  But the bike was mesmerizing.  It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.  I asked if there was any room in the price, and the guy told me no.  “Bianchi is only bringing a few of these in from Italy,” he said, “and they are what they are.”

The L’Una continued to dance around in my mind for months after that encounter. It was a vision that wouldn’t go away.  I wanted it.

One day about a year later, I was poking around on E-Bay and I saw another L’Una for sale, brand new, at a bike store in Iowa somewhere.  It was posted at $3700.  That was still a pretty damn silly price for a bicycle, but it was $2,000 below what it I had seen in Calistoga.  I called the shop, introduced myself, and asked the owner what the deal was.

“The deal is there’s two feet of snow outside my front door, I have another 25 Orbeas (that’s another high-end bike) coming in, and I need to make room,” he told me.

“What’s the frame size?” I asked, knowing there was little chance it would be my size.  I’d have an easy out.

“It’s a 55,” he answered.

Hmmm.  55 centimeters is my frame size.

“Are there any marks or scratches on the bike?” I asked.  “From the E-Bay photos, it looks like it’s on display in your store.”   If it was scratched up or dinged, I’d have another out.

“Joe, I don’t know,” he answered.  “Let me check it out and I’ll call you right back.”

A half hour later the phone rang.  “I’ve gone over that bike with a magnifying glass,” came the report, “and it’s perfect.”

Hmmm.  I thought about the L’Una all night.  I talked to Sue and she said okay (and there went my last out).  So I called the Iowa bike shop guy the next morning and offered $3400.  “How’s that sound?” I asked.

“It sounds about $300 too light,” was his answer.

You can see from the photos here that I pulled the trigger, and even though I am one cheap SOB and I know spending $3700 on a bicycle is crazy, I’ve never regretted it.  The L’Una is the most exorbitant purchase I ever made, and I own (and have owned) some pretty cool toys.  But my L’Una is in a class all by itself.   I still look at it and just think, “wow.”  The bike fits me perfectly and it’s two miles per hour faster no matter what I’m doing (cruising, climbing, top end, whatever).  In the bicycle world, that’s a  lot.  The fit and feel of the thing is just incredible.

You know, most bicycles, including Bianchi bicycles, are made in China today.  And if you know anything about Gresh and me, and our travels here and overseas, you know that we think Chinese motorcycles are as good as any made anywhere in the world.  You may have a different opinion, but hey, it’s okay for you to be wrong.  But when it comes to my L’Una, it’s one of the original Italian Bianchi bicycles, and I like that.

You can read our blog about a steel-framed, Celeste green Bianchi bicycle here.

Read about Harrison Ford’s bike ride in Baja!

Hey, how about Gresh’s motorized bicycle!

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A Classic Celeste Bianchi

A lot of geezers like me still love our bicycles.  Yeah, we like our motorcycles, fast cars, big trucks, motorcycles, and guns…but a bicycle was our first taste of freedom.  You could just get on them and go, it was the first way we could explore the world, and those distant decades-old memories are reignited every time we clip in.

My first bike was an old green and cream balloon tired Schwinn my old man picked up for cheap.  It was too big for me initially, but I grew into it.  Then he bought me a brand new candy apple red and chome Schwinn Jaguar, another balloon tired, white walled anchor that I positively loved. I bought a Cadet speedometer and pedaled 2873 miles around New Jersey one summer when I was a pimply preteen, loving every second of it.  On one downhill stretch, the Cadet indicated 45 miles per hour, all gravity based (I couldn’t pedal nearly that fast on the single-speed Schwinn).

It was grand, but what I really wanted was a 10-speed, and to be specific, my fantasies focused on a yellow Schwinn Varsity.  A tank by today’s standards, but it was the subject of my dreams in the late ’50s.  With their 10 speeds, the myth was that you could hit 60 miles per hour on level ground (no one could, but believing the myth made for delightful dreams…a freeway-capable bicycle, before freeways even existed).

Fast forward six decades, sprinkled with an addiction to watching Lance dominate in successive Tours de France.  Old age was on the horizon and now it’s here, but I can still ride.  None of us took any pleasure in learning that Lance cheated and indeed, we would have preferred not to know at all.  But the bicycle bug had bitten, and like malaria or leishmaniasis (other bugborne maladies), the disease was incurable.  Gresh wrote of collecting motorcycles; one of my serious afflications is a similar attraction/addiction to multi-geared roadbikes. I never got the Schwinn Varsity, but I’ve more than made up for it since.

Steel, the real deal, made in Italy.

One of my prize pieces is the Bianchi Campione you see in that big photo at the top of this blog.  It’s one of my Italian thoroughbreds, made in a time where made in Italy really meant made in Italy (Bianchi frames are made in China today).   You know, Italy.  Where they make Ducatis.  And Ferraris.  And Lamborghinis.

Celeste green, the classic color common to Bianchi bicycles, is itself the subject of substantial and varying mythology.  Post-World-War-II, the only paint the Italian manufacturer could find was OD green, and mixing it with other colors created the celeste of Bianchi fame.  Don’t like that version?  Another holds that it is the color of the Milan sky.  Need more?  How about my favorite, which is that when the Queen of Italy commissioned Edoardo Bianchi to build her bicycle, he painted it to match her eyes.

I saw the Bianchi on a Craigslist ad down in Laguna Niguel, and I was on it that day.  The price was high but reasonable, the bicycle was in impeccable shape even though it was 25 years old when I bought it, and it had interesting accessories (like a color-coordinated frame pump and a stand).  It was a steel-framed classic with classic down-tube shifters.  Two chainrings up front and 7 on the cassette meant it had 14 speeds (less than other roadbikes I already owned but more than the 10-speed Varsity I was still compensating for), and at 55 centimeters the frame was my size.  I was hooked.

A stand (nice to have, but I’ve never used it), and a color-coordinated celeste hand pump in front of the seat tube (I’ve never used the pump, either). The bike rides like a dream.
Downtube shifters. They are actually easier to use than you might think.
“Edoardo, make it green, like my eyes,” she said…

I added a few extras to my vintage Campione, like the carbon fiber bottle cage, the celeste green handlebar tape, and the matching Vittoria Rubino 700×23 tires.  With its lugged steel frame (steel is real; it gives the best ride of any frame material) and classy downtube shifters, it drew crowds in the pre-Covid days.  To a great extent, that’s what a big part of this collecting thing is all about…having stuff that both you and other folks admire.

Matching celeste green tires by Vittoria Rubino.
Old school brakes, but they work wonderfully well.
Celeste color-coordinated cables. Always avoid alliteration, they said…

This blog came about as a result of a phone conversation between Gresh and me.  Our discussion followed its normal train-of-free-thought path and I landed on the Bianchi, and Joe suggested it might make for a good blog.  I thought I might have done one on the Bianchi already (we’ve posted nearly 800 blogs here on ExNotes in the last 2  1/2 years), but I checked and I had not.  We may do more bicycle blogs.  Bicycles are a lot of fun.  So is writing about them.  Hopefully, reading about them is, too.

Do you pedal your butt all over town?  Let’s hear about it.  Please tell us about your adventures here in the Comments section.

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