Archie and I are doing Sunday Parkways today. If you don’t follow the link, six miles of streets in N Portland are closed to cars for the day and the streets are filled with bicyclists. It’s part of a convention in town to discuss carfree cities.

If I can bike someplace within an hour, I do it instead of using my car. Portland is perfect for this sort of thing because there are so many cyclists in the city and most streets have bike lanes. I used to ride my bike as my main transportation in San Francisco, and I can tell you Portland drivers are actually wonderful when it comes to bicyclists. It’s not to say I haven’t had a few close calls, especially scary because I have a bike trailer for Arch, but nothing like San Francisco. Every morning, Steve and I would ride from the beach to downtown and the Art Institute’s bus would try and run us off the roads. Make an honest attempt at killing us. It was really horrible. And FUCK THE ART INSTITUTE. Poseurs.

Anyway, I hope that if enough people support this thing, Portland will take steps to close off some streets to cars permanently. Maybe a route around the city that’s just for bikes and pedestrians. That would be very cool.

I bought my bike five years ago. It was really, really expensive for me at the time — $350. But, also at that time, gas was really expensive (probably around $2.) And the bike is Italian, which means the cost was rising and rising as the dollar was sinking and sinking. But I bought it and told the guy, “I just don’t want to buy gas anymore.” Same thing I say now.

It’s a perfect city bike. 8-speed with shimano parts and an internal derailleur, which, according to the bike guy at Mississippi Bikes, is not an internal derailleur but something else not French and cute sounding. Whatever.

How cute is it??? So cute. And yes, I used it for my author photo for Upstream, because I love my bike.

And it has this other cool thing happening with it. It’s a cafe racer. From when I bought it, ’til yesterday, I just thought that was a cute name Bianchi gave my bike. Because how cute? I race from cafe to cafe being French and cute. And then I was reading shoes on powerlines, and he’s got a whole post about converting a bike into a cafe racer. Well, the post is not about that. It’s about his roommate getting into an accident, which is just harrowing to read. And it’s been keeping me up at night because I was in a motorcycle accident (well, it was a Lambretta suped up to be freeway legal) when I was 23. I broke my femur (that’s a thigh bone) and my hip. It was horrible. I was in the hospital for a week and in traction and now I have a titanium rod in my leg and scars on my knee and my butt cheek where they cut me open to put the rod in. To read about someone else’s accident takes me right back to that moment and makes me want to scream STOP RIDING THOSE FUCKING ORGAN DONOR MACHINES. But you cannot say that to boys who ride motorcycles because they do not hear this. At all. So you say things like, oh, hmmm, and that must be scary. And you just scream inside.

Back to cafe racer. Apparently a cafe racer is the design of the bike. Maybe with a shorter body? Or a wheel tucked under the seat. Or I don’t quite know because that would involve knowing about gears and parts and things and I’m just a girl with a tiny girl brain. And a very cute bike.

So if you’re at Sunday Parkways on this rainy Portland day, ring your bell when you see me racing from cafe to cafe.