My bike will be 15 years old in June, but it has already reached a milestone today: 100,000 km. For this I sat on the bike for 4340 hours (about half a year) and was on the road 3154 days. (By now it should be clear that I like numbers.) Only 522 times was the daily distance over 50 km (133 times over 100 km, 33 times over 150 km, 7 times over 200 – Benford’s law) and half of the days the distance was under 19 km (journey to work, shopping). On average, I rode 32 km on days when I was on my bike. The bike has visited a number of European countries: in addition to Germany, England and Spain, I have been to Sweden, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, Austria, Switzerland and France, between 28.5° and 59.5° north and between 18° west and 20.5° east .
Not many components are still original, apart from the frame, there are still the handlebar stem, luggage rack, taillight, cranks and the rear wheel hub. Although I’m a bit disappointed with the latter one, the Rohloff hub had to go to the manufacturer twice because a couple of gears slipped. The need to quickly change gears in city traffic when starting at traffic lights was probably the problem.
My data on the bike can be found at http://ronnyerrmann.ddns.net/ (not always online).
The next milestone is a bit further away, after circumnavigating the earth almost 10 years ago and the 100,000 km now, the next point would be the route to the moon (384,000 km). That would, at the current rate, fall on my 95th birthday. I think I will only look forward to 111,111 and 123,456 km for now 🙂
Ronny's traveller blog 