DIY Panniers

When you travel with your bicycle it is useful to be able, to carry your stuff on your bike instead of your back. Therefore you can get some expensive bags, that are made for that purpose, or you build something yourself!! In general, there is 2 options: Either you make something that hooks on your rack. Or you have a construction that allows you to easily attatch your backpack or whatever other things you have to transport. For the first option, you can either look for exisiting bags and add some hooks that they can hang on your rack: It…

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Starting in Pamplona

It took us seven days to arrive to Pamplona from Barcelona with all the biketour equipment. We had to cross the desert (Los Monegros) cycling in the crazy Spanish heat. Just one hour after we arrived to the „Gaztetxe” (squatted social center in Basque) Las Maravillas other people started showing up asking for Ecotopia Biketour. Perfect timing! At the end of the day we were already more than ten participants. Las Maravillas has been quite recently squatted (less than one year). It is located in the old town in front of one of the main squares where people gather for…

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Queer Ecotopia Biketour ?

Story behind, problems, critique 2 years ago we decided to put some keywords on the poster and the flyers to describe the biketour in a short way. We put amongst others as well „Queer” because we felt like it is a significant part of our community – that we are explicitly not only Cis*-hetero-people and that we are opposing heteronormative* society norms. We received critique from members of the queer community, who experienced homophobia on Ecotopia Biketour 2015. I am very set up when i read queer on that poster!!! I think it is a lie. On the ecotopia biketour…

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DIY Front Rack

It’s often useful to have plenty of loading options on your bike. So when you find loads of food in the dumpsters for example, you can easily take some and be a bit independent from trailers. It is actually pretty easy to attach a rear rack to the front of your bike. Rear racks can be very easily found in any bike kitchen. You just have to figure out the right size, that it doesn’t touch the wheel. If it messes with your mudguard, you can also just remove it. The front mudguard anyways doesn’t do much. You need to…

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Art on Bike

I participated in Ecotopia Biketour this year again. As always, I try to capture some nice moments with pen and paper. It is kind of difficult to find time and space for that within all the cycling, cooking, camping, projects, nice new people or group organising processes. This is the first go of the rocketstove we built in the first days in Strasbourg. This year it is made entirely from trash: A oil-barrel that we received from a restaurant, a piece of an oven-pipe we got in mimir-squat and glaswool that our host had left over. After last year, I…

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Pujarnol

On 13th of September, after 7 km of 5% slope uphill we arrived to Pujarnol, in the north of Girona. Even though of the scary arrival (the dogs were barking as crazy to the bikes) the views compensated it: huge house surrounded by forest, next to an old church and a cemetery. It looked like a castle. A bit of history: the main house is 1000 years old and the last 2 centuries used to be a hostel, where people could spend a night or have a meal. Now it hosts 10 adults and 6 children from different families that…

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From Can Decreix to Pujarnol

In between the projects of Can Decreix (not Candy Crush or Candid’s crash) we had 3 cycling days. The first one was all along the coast going up and down the cliffs and passing through little fishing villages. We left France and entered Catalunya by a mountain pass where we found a memorial about Spanish civil war. The first evening we were welcomed with full dumpsters that provided more than what 20 hungry cyclists can eat in a day. We had a feast in our wild camp, which was an old bunker with view on the sea. The second cycling…

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