More Holga shots

Here are some new holga shots from my trip out to New York, Washington DC, and somewhere on the Cowlitz river. To get the more out of them, take the time to expand each one so you can see all the details. Please take note that these photos are raw so if they look like they badly need to be cropped or altered, you're right. :)

Much Love,
Christian

One Day, One Gear

I recall as a youngster my friend Josh, who aside from being a self proclaimed hacky sack professional, decided one day he was going to ride his bike from Seattle to Portland in the annual STP challenge. I was never an A+ student in school but I always considered myself quite astute in geography, and since Portland is located south of the Washington state border, I assumed it must be half way to Mexico. Now that I'm older I realize that maybe I shouldn't have been cutting Ms. Clock's geography class to watch Star Wars as often. But seriously, there are two reasons why it wasn't really my fault that I didn't have a clue how far Portland was.

The first is that Ms. Clock's geography skills were even worse than mine. My friend Phillip and I discovered this one day during recess when we decided we would try to improve our geography grades by staying back in class instead of playing tackle football or smear the queer. Our plan was to try and chat with Ms. Clock about all the far away places we had been to on summer break. Surely Ms. Clock would buy into the facade that we were frequent flyers and bump up our grades when she heard about all our experiences and journeys. I decided to tell her about my uncle who lived in Tunisia and worked as an Arabic interpreter for the State Department. I had to be careful not to go into to much detail about his job though, otherwise I'd blow my cover if heaven forbid she actually ask me to point on a map where Tunis is located in the African Continent. Phillip wasn't quite as lucky as me in terms of good geography schmoozing material, so he played it safe and stuck with his own travels. Ms. Clock was polite and even seamed vaguely intrigued as Phillip went on and on about the summer before when his family rented a huge RV (which actually was a 12 seater van) and drove all the way to Leavenworth and back. Then it happened, just as Phillip was reaching the climax of his story about his father stepping into the canoe, Ms. Clock said, "You boys have been on some great trips, maybe next time I'm in Moscow I'll sent you both a postcard".

You could see by Phillip's expression that he was both amazed and bewildered as he tried to imagine where on earth Moscow might possibly be. I wasn't an idiot, and to be honest I wasn't shocked at all. Not only did Ms. Clock mispronounce the name, she openly admitted that she would be traveling to Idaho, one of the ugliest places on the face of the earth. I didn't even know they sold postcards in Moscow Idaho. Anyway, I was a good bluff, so I carefully guarded my tongue as to not make Ms. Clock feel bad.

The second reason why I wasn't accountable for my lack of whereabouts was simply the fact that we never drove south. That's not to say we never went anywhere. Growing up in a large Mormon family meant that the words vacation and road trip were synonymous. Every summer my parents would herd all 7 of us into the 1984 non air conditioned Dodge Caravan. These were before the days when police would report parents to the Child Protection Agency for not making their kids wear seatbelts, so we would pull out the bench seat and lay on blankets and pillows. For some reason that I can't quite figure out, my parents always planned the same vacation. Every year we would make the 850 mile journey to Provo Utah. Oddly we never got tired of these trips to Utah; even though we spent the rest of the year ranting about how much we hated it. Maybe we were just glad to get out of the house, no matter where it was.

Anyway going back to my real story, I never found out if Josh ever did try the STP, and for about 15 years the thought hadn't really crossed my mind to do it either. Though I had developed a love for fixed gear bikes and even became an avid bike commuter. This year in May I joined the bike to work challenge and since the STP would happen two months later, I naturally began to wonder what it would be like to do it on my old steel lugged frame bike. Soon I was decided, and after I plunked down the $88 registration fee, there was no going back.

As many of you know, when you ride a fixed gear bike, your legs are constantly moving. You control your speed by your cadence (the speed your legs are moving). Since I rode a fixie, I was not able to coast down the hills or change into an easy gear on steep climbs. In retrospect it really was a hard grueling day, but I think I’d probably do it again.

Here are some facts from the trip. I discovered with some quick math that in the 204 miles, my legs spun 162,360 times. The trip took 16 hours so I averaged over 10,000 crank rotations per hour. We left the University of Washington campus at 4:45AM and crossed the finish line at 8:58PM. By the end of the race, all pain, fatigue or discomfort had long sense been numbed out.

Thanks to everyone who supported me on my masochistic race.