Will BikeSmut ever escape Greece?

Its been a strange and costly Grecian holiday. We spent a week promoting their festival, and attendance was good considering the downpour of rain. The crowd was overjoyed as usual. In fact everything to do with the show was about perfect. Great performances, great discussion, great audience participation with two different on stage appearances and removal of pants.

It was everything outside the show that sucked.

We at BikeSmut are no stranger to challenges. From running out of lube in mid crank to improperly sized seatpoast penetration there are hardly any pitfalls we have not come across before. They sometimes come all at once, sometimes sequentially.

But usually they come and then they go.

Since we left Turkey those challenges have kept up quite a cadence. In Thessaloniki a city full of college kids on bikes we didn’t find the right people until it was too late. We showed up in Athens and our host who had arranged for us to attend their massive anti-authoritarian festival brought us and promised us accommodations left us to fend for ourselves.

We found out about a massive weekly ride just after it happened.

Our photographer/mechanic left his camera bag in the front seat of the van, thus the van window was smashed and the 7k SLR cam that has provided many great pictures is gone. We learned about this on our way to a photoshoot which a had few thousand other calamities along the way.

We are hoping

That is not to say that there was no love. The host we found made lots of time for us, and gave us his space and took us for a ride and even gave an extra road bike frame to our tourista who crashed into a parked Jaguar (pictures someday). That was mind blowingly great.