I'm new here! I'm a bike commuter and occasional longer-ride adventurer who has lived on the west side of LA for the last 8-9 years. My car access in that time has been off-and-on, and the times when I didn't have a car, I commuted via various small and strange electric vehicles (I had an urb-e for a while, haha) and at one point a kick scooter (I was doing 5 miles daily on an adult-sized Razor scooter for about three months
). About 2.5 years ago I swapped over to just using my bicycle.
Becoming a more confident urban commuter led to me trying to bike every road in my LA town (currently over 90%). In the process I have partially completed all the neighboring communities as well. The thing I like best about biking is the way it lets me see every inch of my city, including the inches people don't generally go to look at on purpose, or places where I'm not technically expected or allowed to be, haha. Recently I've begun trying out more climbing roads in the Santa Monica mountains, too.
I mainly ride a steel Kona Rove as a do-everything bike--it's great for both dirt roads and potholes and it makes my commute feel like a ride on a hovercraft.
Despite all that, I joined this website partially to learn more about vintage bikes. Over the last month or so, I began rebuilding a vintage Japanese bike for a friend of mine. I'm no great mechanic, but it's been fun to break it down, clean the rust off it, replace the broken components, and start putting all the bits back together! After cleaning and rebuilding this bike, I may be doing the same to my parents' college bikes (also 1970s Japanese models). I grew up watching my dad work on his Fuji S-10-S in the garage so I'm excited to learn a lot of those skills for myself.