July opened with overhauls to two tandems, particularly the smaller 20-inch bike, which is perfect for our up-and-coming five-year-old tail gunner, who has completed five rides; the larger bike received Biopace chainrings, which make pedaling a delight! The small tandem, along with our first homebuilt machine, appears in the photo below, which is among the first taken with our new 3-D (stereo) camera. The picture is in cross-eyed freeview format. To view it in stereo, get about twelve to eighteen inches from your computer screen and cross your eyes slightly. Allow your eyes to then relax a bit until a three-dimensional image appears straight in front of you. Ignore the ghost images on either side. If viewing is difficult, it might help to back off from the screen a little bit. If you can’t view the picture in stereo, it will simply appear as two ordinary pictures.
More 3-D pictures appear on a special page on the Mileposters site:
http://web.totalusa.net/tandemcat/milepost/stereo.htm
On our most recent ride with the new tail gunner, we visited Dravo Landing, where he made his acquaintance with the hand pump there. A veteran rider helped him to actually get some water out of it!
Longtime Mileposters friend Fred Durbin, an author who lived in Japan for the last twenty years, has settled in the Pittsburgh area, and joined the group leader for a 32-mile round trip on the triplet from Greenock to Cedar Creek. The picture below, at Dravo Landing, is also in stereo.
Our first ride on the Bud Harris Cycling Track was made, using the new tandem. The track, with its velodrome-like end curves, is an excellent location for short rides.
Both captain candidates are still on the slate for instruction, and an additional stoker has requested junior captain training.
Plans for the ride to Cumberland are continuing, but scheduling it so far has been about as difficult as two years ago. Recent developments offer promise that it might take place after all!
