NAHBS recap

In a word: awesome. What exactly was so awesome, you ask? Well I'll tell you:

- Seeing all the bike luv hovering around and locked up outside the Portland convention center. There was as much of a show outside as inside.
- 3,000 people stuffed into a convention hall and freaking out the fire marshal
- Steel, titanium, lugs, cargo, fenders, racks, painted flower hubs, wooden rims, singlespeed CX, etc etc
- Andy Hampston's 1988 Giro d'Italia bike
- My new pink wool beanie
- Running into everyone I knew and luved all while oozing with bike luv
- Riding all over Portland Sat night
- Bike trees everywhere you turned
- The magic carpet cargo bike we borrowed from the house we stayed at
- Zack taking me to the best Cajun restaurant after the afterparty and inhaling not just my bowl of jumbalya, but his as well
- Riding home after 2 bowls of jumbalaya, not so awesome
- Defying the laws of advanced aging and staying up til 3 a.m.

Hard to pick out favorite things. I'm a Vanilla groupie so I was digging the Speedvagen, Sacha's proprietary steel tubing CX rig. Thin, teardrop tubing for an ultra lightweight steel frame with lots of lateral stiffness. It's the new Vanilla team issue bike. I know there are other excellent framebuilders out there, but hey, they say crack is whack too.

The most talked about bike was the one that won Best in Show, President's Choice, and People's Choice - the Naked fixed gear.

Total hotness of black steel, chrome, curves, wooden rims, leather, White Industry cranks, integrated top tube bike lock hole, and beer tap handlebars. Rumour is that Lance Armstrong bought it for $15,000 after oogling it at the show. The framebuilder, Sam Whittingham, also hold numerous world speed records such as the one-hour record. He said that he made this bike as an homage to Portland and its luv for bikes.