"Business" Cards

June 12, 2015

Our first long cycle tour shared some of its route with the ACA "Northern Tier". It was there that we ran into our first cyclist that had a card showing what he was doing and giving blog or email coordinates. The began with the cyclist's name, and then the sub-title "Northern Tier Cyclist". I was very impressed, and a little puzzled by this. The impressive part was the idea that being a cyclist could be a sort of occupation, with sort of a title. The puzzling part was wondering whether the card could mean that the fellow spent all his time just passing back and forth over the Northern Tier.

Anyway, from that time forward we produced cards for our trips. They served a couple of purposes. Firstly, they allowed people to find our blog, without a lot of scribbling of URLs on scraps of paper. And hopefully they encouraged more hits. Secondly, when time or patience might be limited, we could field the "usual questions" by handing over a card and just saying - "read all about it in this blog".

Now that we have grandkids on a lot of tours, there is another function for a business card - they make great souvenirs for them and for their favourite family and friends.

During our travels we have accumulate lots of cards from other cyclists. A lot of times they are colourful, detailed, heavy, and expensive looking. We are always impressed by this, but have for ourselves preferred home made and light weight versions, but we do try to have a bit of graphics and colour in them.

Here is a page of Avi and Violet's current cards. They feature both the Bike Friday and the Wee Hoo, which together make for an iconic, weird image coming down the trail:

This year we do not have Wee Hoos available in Montreal, and besides, we are not sure that we would be able to get little Evee to ride one. Last year she was definitely in the NO camp. So we are going with a trailer. The trailer is red, but in our first version we had a yellow one on the card. We actually could not remember the colour, but a call to Montreal confirmed it is red. We had no hope of putting over a yellow trailer on a card, Amelia and Evee are far too sharp for that. So out came Photoshop, and I painted the trailer red!

The original version of Amelia's card had a yellow trailer.

Fortunately the small size of the graphic disguises the fact that I spilled electronic "paint" on the trailer screen. I have always been a sloppy painter!

Evee's card. We hope she will be out there and using it.

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