I hope this isn’t too off-topic. My discovery of Cruzbike coincided with learning of Ed Pratt. He later took my Sofrider for a spin but I failed to catch video of it.
When I got the Sofrider off of Craigslist in early July of 2017, I wanted to use it for commuting to work. I knew that I would need “bicycle bags” for carrying stuff. I later learned these bags are called panniers. They didn’t sell any at the local bike shops so I had to research online to see where to get them and what kinds there were. It was from this to following cyclists on YouTube that I stumbled across videos of some guy named Ed from England who was riding a unicycle all around the world. He was just leaving China, going through a few SouthEast Asia nations before Australia and New Zealand when I learned of him.
Later in that same month of July, my kids have birthdays, all spanning from the 18th through the 12th of August, so, inspired by Ed, I got them unicycles. In October of that year I attended the Recumbent Cycle-Con in Philadelphia, got T50s for each of my kids for Christmas, and later a used Greenspeed Magnum trike for myself.
In the early winter months of 2018, Ed’s world tour brought him to the West Coast of the United States. On his website was a map of his planned route across the U.S. and it showed a more northerly route up near Canada. Not too long into his videos in the U.S. he announced that he wasn’t going to be posting regularly for a while because he was anxious to get home again. The time he spent Ed-itting his videos was slowing him down. He wanted to focus on seeing more, doing more, and save all the footage for when he was finished with the tour and could post it all from the comfort of home. And then he seemed to vanish from the Internet.
Meanwhile, I was taking my kids, their unicycles, and my Sofrider to a high school parking lot after church where we could all practice each week.
All three kids were enthusiastic about their unicycles at first. I was helping each of them mount until they were able to do it on their own. Once they were able to do that and start trying to ride away from supporting walls and posts, I turned my attention to riding the Sofrider.
That turned out to be a mistake because whatever ol’ dad was doing, my son wanted to do it too. First he was hijacking my Sofrider, then my trike after I got that. His sisters continued practicing their unicycles. Eventually they were able to ride all over the place with good sustain. When I tried to get my son back to his unicycle, suddenly he had lost all interest. Truthfully, he felt discouraged because his sisters had gotten so good at it while he had not. He still wants to know how to ride it but only if he’s the best at it. He doesn’t want to go through the learning process anymore, not while his sisters are able to show off and cause him to feel inferior.
Months later, Ed Pratt posted from the headquarters of unicycle.com where I had ordered my kids’ unicycles from. But... that’s down in Georgia! How the heck did he end up so far south? Well, he wasn’t expecting the weather to be so cold when he arrived in “tropical” California when he had planned his route almost 3 years prior so he changed his plans. I looked at his updated planned route and saw that it looked like he was coming through my part of Virginia on his way to New York City.
So I contacted him, said I had some unicycle-riding kids who would be excited to meet him and he was welcome to camp, shower, do laundry, whatever he needed at my place.
I had seen in some of Ed’s videos that sometimes he stops overnight, other times just waves while pushing on. He tries to get a certain distance done each day. He had a live-update GPS tracking map on his website so anyone could see where he was. As he was getting closer to Virginia I was checking it more often.
Since I had no idea what his plans were, I didn’t know if he planned to stop at my house or if we’d have to chase him down as he pushed on through our area. I had the kids’ unicycles loaded in the truck in case we had to drive ahead of him to let them out and try to pedal along with him for as long as they could keep up.
It was Father’s Day weekend of 2018 and due to the custody agreement, I got to have the kids for an extra day until 6pm Monday. I had scheduled the day off from work.
It was after church that Sunday when Ed was passing through our area. I was back home, repeatedly refreshing his website watching the tracker. I didn’t know if there was glitches in the network or what was going on but sometimes the tracker showed him making good progress. Other times he seemed stuck. I had seen earlier on his tracker in other countries that it often made no sense from looking at it, like he’d be following a road and then shoot in a straight line to some random place far away.
I was refreshing the page wondering how often things got updated, why he seemed stuck so much when... my phone rang. It was Ed. He asked if I could come give him a ride.
I had planned for many contingencies but I hadn’t expected that one.
He was only about two miles away. What I didn’t know was that he had worn a hole through his tire. He had been struggling with flats all day and was all out of patches and other options for keeping it inflated. The kids and I all loaded up in the truck to go meet him. I think I had my trike along with the kids’ three unicycles in the back of the truck and my Sofrider on the hitch rack. We still managed to fit that huge unicycle and his touring gear back there.
This might be hard to believe but no one in my town keeps 36” unicycle tires in stock, so Ed had to order one to be shipped to my place. He ended up staying for four days. I had to work Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and he resumed his tour sometime after I left for work that last morning, so we said our goodbyes before I headed in to work.
Strangest thing is, I never saw him ride his unicycle. He rode one of my kids’ unicycles, my trike, and my Sofrider, but never did I actually see him riding that big one of his in his videos.
Maybe he can’t actually ride it. It’s all cgi and special effects. Hmmm...
