WE HAVE A WINNER
February 5, 2007, Missoula, Mont. -- “The last time I won anything I was twelve years old, and that was in a dog show,” says Chuck Bailey, the happy winner of Adventure Cycling’s 2006 Bike Giveaway. This time Chuck takes home a lot more than a blue ribbon and a statue, which is what he earned at the dog show. He wins a Casual Agent bike from Vicious Cycles, a small company based in New Paltz, New York. He also gets to participate in an Adventure Cycling tour, and says he’ll probably pedal his new ride on the C&O Canal/Great Allengheny Passage trip this fall.

	The 2006 Casual Agent Giveaway Bike

Chuck, who grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada—when the population was around 4,000!—and southern California, now lives in Friday Harbor, Washington. He has a long association with cycle touring and this organization.

“For my first venture,” he says, “I bought a Raleigh Super Course and rode that all over Europe in 1980.” Not long after, he says, before the Northern Tier Route was put together, he called up our office and said he wanted to ride across the top of the United States. “Bikecentennial staff gave me marked-up highway maps,” he says, “which worked great. One of my more interesting experiences on that trip happened as I was riding from Minnesota into Wisconsin, when I ran into the breakup of the annual convention of Airstream trailers. There were about 4,000 of them on the road.” Fortunately, he says, Wisconsin gave him a bicycling suitability map at border, and he was able to find less-trafficked roads.

“After that,” Chuck says, “I went to work for Open Air Bicycles in Santa Barbara. For training, I attended the United Bicycle School in Ashland, Oregon. Then, in 1986, I led my first tour for Bikecentennial, going from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Erie, Pennsylvania.” Later, he explains, he operated a bicycle shop of his own in Summerland, California, before leading TransAm trips for us in 1992 and 1995. “I had great groups,” he says. “But on the ’92 trip we had a rather odd couple from South Africa who we nicknamed ‘the boring Boers.’ She weighed about ninety-three pounds and they rode an old tandem. When they got into camp each afternoon he would sit in the shade of a tree while she did all the work.”

On leaving Santa Barbara, Chuck, who has two kids and four grandchildren, went to work for Bike Friday for three years and then for Burley for a year. Eventually he found his way to the San Juan Islands and Friday Harbor, where he has worked at Island Bicycles for the past seven years.
Through his entire cycletouring career, which has encompassed three different bikes, Chuck has sat aboard the same comfy Brooks leather saddle, which he estimates has around 250,000 miles on it.

Will he mount the old standby on the seatpost of his brand-new bike for the C&O Canal tour?

“Probably,” he says.

To sign up for our 2007 Bike Giveaway, click here.