The Tandem Post

 The bike above is a barely used Bike Friday tandem for sale at  Community Cycles of California . It is designed to be taken apart and placed into two suitcases (or put in a car) for travel.

Go buy this bike this week. Really, I mean it. Check their hours - they’re having a sale right now and conveniently located near Diridon Station in San Jose, California.

A tandem bike will either strengthen your relationship or bring it to an early end. Either way, you both get exercise and fresh air.

I’ve posted quite a bit about Bike Friday. I bought a used 1998 New World Tourist in 2011, and it’s been all over the U.S., the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Belgium.

I haven’t traveled with it for a few years now…because now I mostly travel with this:

This is a 1995 Bike Friday Tandem Tuesday I bought used in 2022. I have heavily modified it by welding a brace for a disc brake in the back, adding a suspension fork in front, adding big tires, suspension seatpost, and a folding front stem taken from another bike.

My wife and I discovered we loved biking during the pandemic, and like bringing the bike when we travel.

Soon after purchasing the Bike Friday tandem, I noticed how much smaller it was when folding the rear half back, so I designed and welded a custom rear rack. Inspired by Brompton, it allows the bike to stand and roll easily- allowing it to glide through hotel lobbies and fit in elevators, trains, and hotel rooms.

We’ve taken it to Hawaii twice, as well as New Zealand and other places less exotic. More than once, it has allowed us to not have to rent a car at our destinations.

Keen observers will note the different rear rack in this shot -it was the first version of the folding rolling rack.

We’ve both observed that time feels slower when we ride the tandem on vacation. Less than an hour of assembly in a hotel room and off we go. I can’t believe thousands of these aren’t all over Hawaii (car traffic there is terrible and there is so much more you can see on a bike.

We’ve taken the time to size the bike for our wildly different heights and make it comfortable for both of us. If you get on a tandem and hate it (as my wife and I did the first time we ever used one over ten years ago in Alaska) do the same. 

Once your tandem is sized for you and comfortable, you can travel with it, go the the dry cleaners, hot tag sales, go grocery shopping or load up at the farmers market (you can add a little container on the back to put flowers in, as I have). You can drop a person off and pick a person up and have a date night.

So think about the person you love and who you’d love to travel life, the universe, and everything with. Check out Bike Friday and their Oregon-made travel bikes - and if you’re in San Jose or elsewhere in the Bay Area: head to Community Cycles of California and buy that tandem. Thanks for reading and thanks for riding.

Sky Island Journal

My blog. DIYBIKING.COM.

It’s been a while.

Things have changed. I’ve changed.

My name is Michael K Norris.  I took a career detour during and after the pandemic and am now doing some freelance writing. Some of it is for nonprofits. Some of it is for me. 

Like this blog - and like the fiction I’m writing. Four novels, a novella, and ten short stories so far - all the result of a promise I made myself almost a year and a half ago: to write ten pages of fiction a day, every day, five days a week. 

I read Stephen King’s book ‘On Writing’ and I believe what he said that if you want to be a good writer, you have to write. A lot. I wrote myself into dead ends, plot holes to dwarf the Grand Canyon, and characters I realized I didn’t like two hundred pages in.

But I kept at it, and am keeping at it.

Then, about ten months ago, I continued writing but began submitting works to literary agents, literary journals, writing contests, and magazines. My experience in content management is serving me well as I’ve tracked every submission. 

Dozens of rejections followed. And they’re still coming.

But mixed in, there was an acceptance: Sky Island Journal published my 1,000 word short story: The Last Program, in their January 2025 issue. Here’s the link: https://www.skyislandjournal.com/issues#/issue-30-winter-2025/

It’s not what you’d normally see on a cycling build and travel blog that hasn’t seen a new post in over three years - and the story itself is a little dark - but there is a line said by one of the characters that hints at my relationship to travel. See if you can spot it.

Writing is becoming a bigger part of my life, and at some point soon I’ll have a different website to deal with it. You know: tasteful black and white photos of me that give an air of mystery, a blog about this weird writing life I’ve started, a place to sign up for a newsletter, and so on. But for now - because I have no author web site or social media to connect to fans* this cycling blog will have to do.

And I’m going to write more on bikes: I’ve built great** things over the past three years and have traveled a lot more since the first pandemic ended. I want to talk about them.

But later - right now it is about my fiction debut in Sky Island Journal - the editors of which I thank for believing in The Last Program, and in me as a writer. 

Here’s the link again: https://www.skyislandjournal.com/issues#/issue-30-winter-2025/

Thanks for reading and thanks for riding. 

*if and when I find some.

**well…to me