When things work out: A bike tour with friends in May 2023
When it comes to two of my favorite things (and the raison d’etre for this website) bicycle riding and photography, this was not my year. After a bevy of exciting projects, big adventures, and proudly published articles in 2022, my “careers” as an amateur bike racer and photographer both came screeching to a halt in 2023. After a half decade of really good luck with my health I managed to collect Covid, RSV, a cold, and West Nile (!) this year before settling into a life of homelessness after water damage and mold forced us out of our house for major repairs and reconstruction - a process that is ongoing 7 months later. My last published article went live in early February and I managed to start only one bike race all year, which was cut short by one of the aforementioned illnesses. I had some big aspirations for endurance racing and photojournalism, but sadly life got in the way.
Which is not to say that all plans involving bikes and cameras went awry, there were a few bright spots. I’ve captured a few shots here and there on shorter local rides, which I’ll share here shortly, and had the very good fortune of squeezing in a 5 day bike tour with some friends, new and old, right before everything fell to shit with my our house. I’d completed the route from Pittsburgh to DC along the Great Allegheny Passage Trail and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Tow Path four times already when this trip was proposed, but it’s a route I love so much I will probably never turn down a good opportunity to do it with the right crowd, provided I am free. I hardly ever travel anywhere without a camera and this tour was no different, but having just published a massive photo essay on the Radavist about this route the prior year, bringing a camera was just for capturing the memories this time, not with any aspirations for publication.
I brought my on-the-bike-stand-by, my reliable, weather resistant, and compact Fujifilm X-T2 and 27mm f2 WR combination. I really enjoy the 40ish mm field of view and with a backup battery and a dynamo charger on hand it’s about as a worry free a set up as you get. The Fuji color profiles really lend themselves to the endless tunnel of green this trip entails. We had a great time, had perfect weather after a rainy day 1, and I am pretty please with the photos.
So here we have it, a photoset published in celebration and fond memorializing of a bike and camera trip that worked out just about perfectly, despite a little rain, during a year when little else did. “GAPCO” coming through for me again.
Andy
2023 in a nutshell.