No clues from outside the house is the first clue. I’m paranoid about thieves knowing we have several very good bikes, so I disguise that the inside our abode is infested with bicycles.

If you were invited in, after I chained up the bike guard dogs, you’d notice my red Thorn Audax near the front door. Luckily our foyer is voluminous enough to store a bike, cycling shoes, helmet etc

Hi there Léo,

Not sure why/how it took me a year to find your question & its thread, but never mind...

The short answer to, What gives you away as a cyclist? is, at first glance, "practically nothing".

But, to back up a bit, my reply would be, "It depends..."

Depends first, of course, on when you stop by. Let's simplify things by assuming that you didn't pop in for a cup of Christmas cheer, welcome though you would have been. Had you done so, say, by hitching a lift with a westbound crow from Toulouse,  you'd find yourself at approximately the same latitude but stuck (possibly literally) in the middle of "quelques arpents de neige", as Voltaire not-at-all-endearingly put it.  And, you might hear people singing the refrain to a song I learned from a Saskatchewan friend, "And why we live here/No-one knows."

But 'nuf of what might have been--although M'sieu V got it all wrong, it can be astonishingly beautiful, and people do ride bikes though it all, esp bikes of the recent soi-disant "fatbike" variant, though I'm not one of them.

If you were to ride or wander by in the glories of an Ontario summer, however, you -- like everybody else -- would see first, my wife Marcia's spectacular garden, the product of many years of TLC.   Just a couple of examples:

From time to time, though, you would also see two-wheeled conveyances.  Here's one from a couple of decades ago, wheeled out after a couple of decades of restoration:

This ex-comp scrambler is just to say that you don't have to stand on Westminster Bridge to see something "all bright and glistening in the smokeless air".

And, were you to come by last autumn, you'd have seen Freddie, my spiffy new Mercury Mk 3, relaxing on a carpet of leaves in our back yard after a mid-afternoon October ride:

But, most of the time, there'd be few if any external signs that A Cyclist Lives Here. Reason for that is what Graham signalled in the post just above:  I keep my bikes out of sight of casual passers-by.  Our city bikes live in a garden-variety garden shed, locked of course.  My quality bikes live in my basement workshop. Because they're quality bikes, I can hoike them up and down the stairs to the kitchen with no difficulty.  (Long ago and far away, I had one experience of a quality bike--the first Really Good Bike I'd ever owned--being stolen from an inadequately secure storage space. Never again.)

So the workshop is full of bikes, spares, tool, manuals, charts, usw, as one would expect.  The bikes go there for tweaking, as well as secure storage.  Here, for example, is Freddie's lovely new Spa Cycles crankset-mit-Velo Orange touring pedals, installed in early January:

(In securing my quality bikes, I am helped by the fact that in recent years, nearby neighbours have bought high-end German cars.  I reckon that any self-respecting thief would focus on pinching one of those.  In this sense, I'm rediscovering an axiom of life in Lusaka, all those years ago: "Always park next to a Benz.")

We bought this old house, now well over a century old, when we returned to Ottawa 30-plus years ago, after spending most of the 1980s in Central/Southern Africa.  For a pittance by today's standards, it has given Marcia ample space for her garden, and me my workshop; and at different times, room enough for two kids, several cats, a home office or two, and a spare room.

And of course, you're always welcome to come and use our spare room as a base for cycling in the Ottawa Valley.

Cheers, mate 😉

Perhaps a small velopedic gargoyle on the fence would give a hint.