Quote:
Originally Posted by ran49  Bama:What an amazing trek!I'm glad you have the knack to relate it in such fine fashion.Thanks for sharing and keep it coming
"Rocinante"Cool name and perhaps fitting with the windmills but a little over the heads of my crowd.However I might borrow "Hardly Davidson".LOL,thats a new one on me.Ron |
ALL MBer's are on some sort of Don Quixote quest, and a community of fellow enthusiasts is better able to understand all the "little insights" that a non-MBer can't. We are
ALL trying to turn the lowly bicycle into a reliable and efficient vehicle, transform a caterpillar into a butterfly.
And we are unable to communicate to the landlubbers/outsiders/otherworlders all the little nuances involved in this hobby, but I guess that is a universal, from fishing to sailing to knitting and quilting,
only the insiders know what's what. So here is my "what's what".
The name of Quixote's horse was one of those trivia items that bugged me all the way to Denver, and until Dewey and I got to Sancho's Broken Arrow on Colfax Ave., I hadn't had the chance to ask an expert. Here was a bar owner who had read the book 10 times since childhood, so involved in the work of literature that his families four saloons all have Cervantes themes.
Being a fellow Grateful Dead tourhead, this guy instantly understood a lot of the magic of my idiotic quest, to win the Oil War, Exxon and Texaco being my windmill monsters.
He started quoting Cervantes (some of it in Spanish) as he presented me with the shirt off his back (I think the long sleeves are $25) and folks comped me free drinks till way after closing time. My altitude unfamiliarity and jagermeister shots, that's a combo that leads to a badly sung song or two.
From his website:
Quixotes True Blue :: Sancho's Broken Arrow :: Dulcinea's 100th Monkey :: Cervantes' Masterpiece :: Quote:
"Look, sir," answered Sancho Panza,
"those which appear yonder are not giants, but windmills;
and what seem to be arms are the sails,
which whirled about by the wind make the millstone go."
"It is very evident," answered Don Quixote,
"that thou art not versed in the business of adventures."
|
Cervantes and the whole chasing windmills delusional quest is not only a farce, but also a deep philosophical study,
"who is the madman in a mad world?" Quixote reads too many tales of knights, dragons, monsters until he believes them to be true, and then everything around him changes. Inns become castles, and his skinny horse becomes a noble steed.
Likewise, we as a community will read the exploits of others. The big difference is "we know it is POSSIBLE", not just a fantasy.
Some build bikes for speed, some build for distance, all build for durability and seek something reliable and trustworthy. My bike became a pet horse, especially when I was traveling the high plains, with 360 degree visibility. Except I was moving 5 times faster than Clint Eastwood ever could.
BUT, until a person goes out and experiences the outside and unfamiliar world, nothing is real except the "dream of a quest". The writer only tries to tell his interpretation, but the reader can find his or her own reality. It took Cervantes two books and ten years to try to capture the human delusions.
For background Don Quixote thinks of a name to give to his steed in order to set out on his adventures, and chooses '
Rocinante' to establish the horse as no longer a nag. The etymology is uncertain. The name is, however, a pun.
"Rocin" in Spanish means work-horse or low-quality horse ("nag"), but also illiterate or rough man. "Ante" has basically three meanings. First , the Spanish ante means "before" or "previously". Secondly, it also translates as 'in front of'. On the third order, the suffix -ante in Spanish is an adverb.
In other words, because there is a quest, the lowest transforms to the highest, AND strangers can't recognize this nobleness, they only see the nag, AND in Spanish, many adverbs change the meaning of the word to something "beautiful, dear or noble", you make something pretty by simply changing the name (opposites, like "pretty as a pig", or "love as sweet as a lemon").
The second most famous use of Rocinante was by one of my favorite authors, John Steinbeck in one of his last works:
Rocinante Returns to Salinas Quote:
Rocinante is the truck author John Steinbeck drove across the United States in 1960. He recounts the journey in Travels with Charley, a bestseller that initially sold more volumes than any of Steinbeck's other books and won the 1963 Paperback-of-the-Year Award. Steinbeck chose a truck because it is mobile yet self-contained, and it “is a respectable and respected working instrument.”
The truck Steinbeck commissioned was a new model with a V6 engine, an automatic transmission, and an oversized generator. The camper was provided by the Wolverine Camper Company of Glaswin, Michigan.
Steinbeck called the truck Rocinante, after Quixote's horse because his friends called his trip quixotic. Shirley Fisher of McIntosh and Otis painted the name in early Spanish script on the camper's side. When the hurricane that initially postponed Steinbeck trip wore away the letters, she repainted it.
Steinbeck mentions Rocinante occasionally but affectionately in his book, calling her “a beautiful thing, powerful and lithe,” almost as easy to handle as a passenger car. There were a few mishaps along the way. Having equipped the camper with about “four times too much of everything,” two tires gave out on a lonely road in Oregon, and Steinbeck had to replace the overloaded springs in California.
However, Steinbeck maintained that Rocinante was not “mean” or “ugly-natured” like some cars he'd owned. Indeed, because of her “purring motor and perfect performance,” “because of her ready goodness,” he treated “her like the honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife,” and except for meticulous routine maintenance, he ignored her.
|
So, here is the evolution of my Rocinante.
I started out with $100 Next bikes, then got a $35 Western Flyer with curved handlebars. Within a month of building my first three bikes, folks started asking me to build them one, so I sought out a reliable bike shop, found one in Decatur, and I bought a single speed Sun Cruiser with coaster brakes and full fenders. DO NOT REPEAT MY MISTAKE.
Paul, the owner of The Peddler, gave me am out of date J&B catalog,
and I picked out the Sun Retro 7 cruiser, because of the handy half fenders and foam handle bars. He had never built one before, now says it is his best seller, every time I order one, he puts it in the front of his shop and sells 2 more.
He says dollar for dollar, its the best bike in his line.
Sun's website is a real piece of junk, however.
Here are 5 pix, Rocinante right before I headed to Florida, then packed with only a carry bag both on the Florida trip (DeSoto Trail) and Denver trip (an oil pump in Oklahoma). Both times I was carrying a back pack. On the January 2007 Mobile journey is when I added saddlebags and dome tent, and finally, pic #5 when I swapped to the 32cc Tanaka and moved the saddlebags behind the seat.
On the Florida and Denver trips I just carried three tarps. A friend in NC sent me a dome tent in summer 2006. since he had used only it once.
On the dome tent photo #4, the tent poles are down below, inserted into a bottle carrier, zip tied near the pedals. The little black bag in the frame is my tool kit, hidden under the saddlebags. Now that I moved the bags, a lot of handy emergency items like a rain suit, are now carried all the time. It also solved my "air mattress" storage problems which frustrated me until a month ago.
If you look at that photo #4, there is a 4 foot bungie cord attached under the basket, looping around the seat post, which adds stability to the steering when the basket is full of weight. I only do that on overnight trips.
I made my Christmas wishes as clear as possible,
a small pup tent, but misinterpretation of my needs by NON MB relatives means I now own TWO dome tents.