About the Bikes

We’re both lucky enough to be closely involved with some of the most talented framebuilders in the world: Firefly Bicycles and Geekhouse Bikes. Even luckier is that we live in Boston, home to both. Charlie rode his steel Geekhouse cyclocross bike, the Mudville, custom built for him to race on with the Cuppow elite cyclocross team. Cindy is a member of the Firefly Adventure Team and also races cyclocross for Firefly, so she spends much of her riding time on this bike. However, these bikes were set up quite a bit differently from their normal lives!

We each own a few bikes, so the idea, basically, was we should be able to ride what we had. Even though we had never taken a trip where any our bikes had been as loaded down while navigating terrain as rugged as we would find in New Zealand, we decided the the bikes we’d been using for cyclocross and light-duty adventuring could, with the right modifications, handle the weight of our camping gear and make it over all the fire roads and single track we would encounter. The modifications ended up being extensive. Each bike got a new steel fork along with a lower headset assembly; a new set of 650b wheels to accommodate wider, knobbier tires; White Industries Variable BCD cranks for much wimpier gearing; and Schmidt hubs and lights, just in case we needed to ride past when the sun set at 9:00 PM each night. We then added front racks and bags by Swift, Revelate, and Dill Pickle.