Tophe Adventures

 The evening and the morning are dark but when it does not rain we are cycling to school. cycling in the dark pro cyclist ?  

As the oil crisis worsen, and the price of petrol continue to raise, more and more Americans are reconsidering their use of their cars, more and more decide to commute using bicycles with some unexpected results. As more and more people take their bike in the streets of New York , more and more agressive behaviour can be seen between the different users of the roads: car driver versus bicycle user, and biker versus pedestrians. Car driver are not used to share their space with bicycle, unlike what is happening in Netherlands (where more than 15% of the population is using bicycles ), American car driver does not seem to know how to behave nor the cyclists as most of them are newbies in the bike commuter comunity. And this highlight the weakest link of the car based transportation system: the human factor. As explained in the book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt , it seems we are behaving like total nonsensical idiots when we sit down behind the wheel of a car. An interesting fact to think ...

I went moutain biking in Ballyhoura moutain , a very moutain bike trail. I had not done moutain biking in a long long time ( first time since i moved to Ireland ), very good and off course i've fallen ( and will fall again ). A video which shows part of the track: A good website for outdoors activities in Ireland: http://www.coillteoutdoors.ie

Parents gone, I am back to my old routine...including pub ... does not really mean I've stopped going during their stay, as it's a bit of a nonsense to visit Ireland without spending some time to the pub... (should I've said in the pub ?... only French can understand that question if they think haircut ...). And it's also back to school, not that I am concerned, except for the heavy traffic in Limerick. Few notes, after reading a dutch story in the New York Times [ In the Netherlands, Life Runs on 2 Wheels (Sometimes 3) ], I've been more and more interested in the past week into: Recumbent bicycle (horizontal bicycle), and Velomobile . And very interesting story, about how in 1934, the UCI ruled that these kind of vehicule were not bicycle and therefore forbidden in any cycle competition. The amazing fact is the world speed record is: 130.36 km/h , set by Sam Whittingham of Canada on a recumbent bicycle (in 2006, officialised by International Human Powe...