CONTEXT
I've noticed that many of the photos I have doesn’t seem to be particularly beautiful, but I wanted to keep them anyway for a reason.
They are best accompanied by explanations of why I wanted to keep them. I will add more from time to time.
French version here.
Old bike…
This photo was taken in Germany, during my summer trip 2022. This man was looking at our bikes, fully equipped with bikepacking gear.
I thought his bike looked funny too. When I looked at it more closely, I noticed that he had painted his E-(fat)bike completely as if it was very old and had been left to rot in a forest for many years. He even put fake rivets all over it, and painted his helmet the same way. I thought it was cool.
Spot the difference.
Here's something funny that I'm not even mad about.
It concerns a photo of my friend Loic Biteaud I took at the National Moutarde Crit 5 in 2017, can you guess which one is mine, and which one was randomly received a friend by email about an electric bikes sold on Alibaba? I can't either. What makes it even funnier is that the person who had to do this had to remove the track bike, and put their talent to the test by recreating the leg, and adjusting the arms to hold the bike properly! And they even made him more fat… You know you've made it when you get to this point.
It’s this way!
Here's a series of pictures that I like for their funny side. It is nothing very complex and it might happen quite often when bikepacking, but I like this souvenir I would have forgotten without them. This was during my very first bikepacking trip in 2020. We were following a route on our GPS, and it was saying the road is in this direction, and that we were right on it… It might have been a road at some point, but it wasn’t really one anymore when we were here. We didn’t know it we should look for alternatives, or if we should “follow it” anyway.
Bloody ball!
I've had several comments in the past about the mark on this ball, from the SSCXWC 2018 in Belgium.
So the answer is yes, this is blood. This was initially supposed to be a “funny competition”, wich really was, but there was a section of the track filled with huge inflatable gym balls, just to make thing a bit more funky and difficult. The public loved that, especially the kids, perhaps a little too much as they picked up the balls to throw them at the participants. And even if these were inflatable, they were still quite heavy and hard, which led to a few blood marks. After a few laps, people were all red in the face, the balls really acted like whips…
Requesting backup.
I was in Paris, taking photos of these three bikes (my Parallax, Pauline's Vigorelli and Boris's Histogram), when these two cops walked into my frame, out of nowhere, and thought it would be a great spot to fix the bike they had just broken seconds earlier after throwing it at someone in the stairs right next to us to try and stop them getting away....
They bent the brake disc as a result, and struggled to get the bike back into working order.
This wouldn't have happened if they had been riding brakeless track bikes.... Just saying.
