S2=Spencer + Sheila
S2Cycle was born in 1990 when we decided to ride a three-day bike event, the Tri-Island Tour. It went from Seattle to Victoria, BC and was a fund raiser for the Lung Association. We were riding single bikes then. The next season Sheila broke her foot in a cycling accident and the cycling hobby went dormant for most of the decade. Then in 1999 we began to explore the idea of tandeming, renting a bicycle built for two and traveling the Burke-Gilman trail. It was a disastrous experience. The day was too hot, the bike wasn’t fitted to us well, and Sheila almost had a heat stroke. Amazingly, it didn’t turn us off the idea of tandeming.
That winter we happened on a tandem for sale at an auction. It ended up costing us $1000, an amount we could easily make back selling it on the open market. We took a chance and bought the yellow “Schoolbus” (shown left). These pages chronicle our time beginning with riding the Schoolbus in 1999. In 2000 we bought a Rodriguez Toucan we call “SweatHard” and rode her 2000 miles in the year 2000. In 2001 we covered more than 3000 miles. So there are two pages about the big trips that year, Ride Across Washington and our New England trip.
At the end of 2000 we decided we wanted to increase our contacts in the tandem world, so we helped start the Evergreen Tandem Club. ETC was officially launched in April, 2001 and had 150 teams the first year. Sheila was the first president and Spencer served as rides coordinator. The club produced the 19th annual Northwest Tandem Rally Memorial Day weekend, 2004 under Sheila’s leadership.
In 2002 we decided we liked traveling with the tandem so much that we upgraded to a new daVinci coupled tandem. Use the drop-down navigation buttons at top to read about our annual travels as the adventures continue! Of special note is our cross country tour in 2012.
With about 37,000 miles under our belt since then, we’re on our third tandem, a daVinci with independent coasting. We’ve been chronicling our journey since 2001 on our website. Here you can read more about our tandem adventures including the STP (Seattle to Portland in one day) and RAMROD (Ride Around Mt. Rainier), RAW, GABA, Hawaii, an Erickson Tour in France among others. In 2001 we helped form the Evergreen Tandem Club and in 2004 we organized the Northwest Tandem Rally in our area.
You can also learn more about Spencer and Sheila elsewhere on the website. But briefly, Spencer is from Salem, Oregon and is an elementary school PE teacher. Sheila is from Newport, RI and is a graphic designer. We’ve been together since 1983 and will be celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary as well as Spencer’s 60th birthday on our return home from Cycle America. We live on Capitol Hill in Seattle with our cat Morrie and we continue to be deliriously in love with each other and life. In addition to tandeming our interests include meditation, yoga, progressive politics, community and eating a healthy plant-based diet.
New pages have been added including an FAQ about tandeming, a page about why we did the cross-country ride and a page called TMI that tells you all about what we’ve packed on this trip.