o Denver Cruise, how I shall miss thee...

Last Wednesday evening included many beers, my date crashing his fixte, some drunken streaking chicks and lots of wrong turns.

ahhhh, Denver Cruise, how I will miss thee in the cold winter months... yet therein lies a tale:

A long, long time ago, in a city far, far away, high up in the Rockies where the air is thin and the microbrews are phat -- there were a bunch of cruisers. Most were former (or current) couriers, and every Wednesday night throughout the soft summer months, they would meet at the wineshop with their friends, dress in humourously themed costumes and ride their cruiser, track and singlespeed bicycles around from bar to bar to bar until either the bars closed or they were too drunk to balance... or both.

One of the cruisers, an enterprising young Irish lad, decided that the key to ultimate cruising bliss was to build himself a 'Drunken Cruiser', to merge the themes of boozing and cruising in a metaphorical endless, infinite feedback loop; a proverbial Moebius of debauchery. Being that he was himself a metalworker, and owned a property full of lathes and welding equipment, he cracked a 40 and got down to work.

Thus the Ketel One Valdez was born. Conceived in inebriation, born in intoxication, nurtured in pure unabashed blitzedness and intended never to be ridden sober, it became the paradigm of debauched pubcrawlery. Weighing in at a svelte 83 lbs, stretching 9 feet long, and carrying a fifth of Russia's finest in the conveniently located faux fuel tank, this behemoth inspired fear in the hearts of fixed gear riders up and down the Front Range.



Imagine the pure visceral terror felt by the rider of a scant sixteen pounds of gazelle-like grace and noble purpose that is a fixed gear bicycle, as this juggernaut hurtled out of control on an irrevocable intercept vector, the high child-like scream of its thoroughly inadequate braking system sounding as the klaxons of doom.

on Wednesday night, the KOV claimed its fifth victim.*


*no fixed gears were harmed in the making of this tale

cheers,

LFR