Swift Current

The amount of support that The Tandem Tour receives never fails to amaze us. Strangers on the street have offered us their homes, and friends we have never met want to make us dinner. Helen in Medecine Hat invited us in at a moments notice, cooked us steak at 10 o'clock at night, and gave each of us a bed to sleep in. Or Linda in Cranbrook, who cooked us the biggest dinner we'd had in weeks, and treated us like family as soon as we met her. These people are the ones who make up this trip. We are six bearded men who bike a lot, and bathe seldom, and more often than not we'll ask to use your shower, but these rest nights are the ones that give us the energy to continue on our journey, and the people who take us in are a part of the fabric of what this trip is about.

And then there's the bike shops. We've been through many bike shops in the last few weeks, and every peddle-head gear junkie bike brake specialist wants to get a look at our bike, and some even work on it for us, but no one was as stoked to work on this bike as shane was in Calgary.

Shane works at the largest bike shop in Calgary, and he is a very sought after bike mechanic. His work is respected, and he knows more about bikes than anyone else in Canada. This guy is a legend.

When we rolled into Calgary with our mountain chewed bike, we needed shane's assistance. We found the bike shop, and on the saturday of all days, tried to get someone to work on it. There was a three day wait at the shop to get shane specifically to work on a bike, but he was the guy to fix our quad-tandy. Shane took one look at the bike, and another long look at Big Bear, and he found the time to work on the bike.

With Brent's hunger for knowledge, and Shane's enthusiasm for awesomeness, the two worked on the bike for about ten hours on Saturday. The two of them took the bike apart completely, and rebuilt it from the ground up. In the process, Brent learned a whole lot about bikes, and Shane learned a whole lot about Brent. The two had a bro down for one day, and Shane is now the official number 1 quad-tandem mechanic, and bike mechanic, in the world.

Today we are in Swift Current. The prairies are beautiful. They are slowly pushing us east. The wind is picking up right now, and not in the good direction, but we bike on.

Episode 2 is coming soon. very soon. And it's good. Ben Gulliver has done it again.

sincerely in sasktown

www.thetandemtour.com