June 2010
2 posts
it's landed
The Bourgeois Bicycle Caravan has landed!
In the Autumn of 2009, the trio of Jimmy Bodean, Harold Hobart Hellybutt & Del Da-Foster embarked on an expedition, along the western seaboard of france, by bicycle. With trailers brimming with the nessasities (surfyboards, box cameras, pencils and books of russian beat poetry) the trio went in search of the image perfect and the ultimate rambling...
February 2010
2 posts
bourgeois bicycle budgets
Bikes: 2 x Raliegh Chiltern (circa 1990) 3 speed heavy steel beasts - Broken, from old cycle hire place in Barnstaple. £60 on parts to get them back to speed (and safe) Brooks saddles and grips kindly donated by Andrea at Brooks. Trailers: 2 x Carry Freedom Y-Frame (large) £150 Modified with custom surfboard racks welded and bolted by max the steel man £40, B&Q garden mesh £5, zip ties £1,...
this is the end...so click here to go back and the... →
January 2010
5 posts
December 2009
7 posts
November 2009
56 posts
disbanded
The bourgeois bicycle caravan bulges in the hot Capbreton afternoon and the streets, parks and beaches sigh in the easy aftermath of the Atlantic storm. The trailers are full, the side bags are full, every holding point is weighed down. Del is whistling, Bodean is making an inventory of his booty of film and Hellybutt is attempting to roll his r’s, because someone has just told him a story...
icarus of his eye
Del da Foster has thrown in the towel. The eternal optimist has crumbled and the falling debris will send ripples and then surges of terror throughout the caravan. “May-bee - just mabee - there ain’t no ‘Wounded Gull’? Huh? Didyer every think of that?” slurred Del at Jimmy Bodean and Harold Hobart Hellybutt, who had been out shopping and searching aimlessly for the...
“and so it goes, our instant photography turns analogue”
– Bodean - stepping up the use of the poloroid film
the sobbing and broken pole-vaulter
The caravan thumps down on the gypsy wooden pegs for the last time in Capbreton - the port town south of Hossegor. Along the stone waterfront, which is being sured-up against the Atlantic, the nations awkward athletes stagger and wheel themselves about wondering whether they picked the right sport. They are all being housed in a red brick, monstrous sports rehab clinic which overlooks the ocean...
the dying Gaul
No waves, no seagulls and no stories. Not a sign of that wounded gull and Bodean has been going out of his mind - this was the adventure to capture the image perfect and the seabirds had either been stone dead and ten days rotting in the wet sand or flying high and free. Yeah maybe there had been the odd funny story, maybe a stoush of inspirational verse here and there, even an intriguing tale...
the blunt sharpshooter
The road is now straight and flat, more or less and give or take, except the suddenly most inconvenient Bassin D’Arcachon. Couldn’t the Germans have filled it in during the Second Great War? Or why not you, Boney? You lazy Corsican ladder climber. The caravan does really enjoy a good ferry crossing, but it is also that damnable time of year in the Southwest where anything of use is...
make all the world's sailors blush
Sitting it out, sitting on it, sitting under this rock pelting, shore-shaping weather. Three absorbed children of the eighties sitting inside of three wooden garden sheds - which leaked and the doors spoke in the high winds - the owner wasn’t anywhere to be seen and it made one wonder what she could be doing in Lacanau-Ocean, it was all boarded up. Then it collectively dawns - that well...
“yup…it’s dead…(sigh)”
– Bodean - today the digital camera broke. It survived wind, cold and rain like you would never believe. But it can’t handle a little one foot fall at the supermarket. Still, the waves are pumping, and we made it to hossegor…so does it matter that much?
Watch
watery destiny
Our watery destiny is now embraced head on as we pack up to the sound of distant and then closer gun shots - those poor animals, all wet, and kept up by a bright moon and lectures by the caravan, then to be chased and fired upon the very next morning. Whooping back into the clearing like a wounded Iroquois is Bodean, yelling about “cranking lefts” and “spitting big-rollers”...
“you do know it’s nearly summer in Australia”
– François - International yachting journalist, in the rain, in the winter, in France