Reader stories from the Velorution community. Got one? Comment below.
Some bikes get sold. Others get adopted.
Ten years ago, Dennis walked into the Velorution shop in London and bought a black Retrovelo. He was living in the city at the time. When he eventually moved home to France, the bike went with him.
Today it lives in a small village in Brittany, near La Baule — home to what locals proudly call the longest sandy beach in Europe. The stretch of coastline where Dennis rides has a better name still: the Côte Sauvage. The wild coast.
“My bike is still up and running very well,” he wrote to me. “My daily loyal partner.”
Image: Dennis Blanc
The bike that shouldn't be this healthy
Here's the thing about where Dennis lives: it should be killing his bike.
Salt air is a bicycle's natural predator. Add wind-whipped Atlantic winters and a village a stone's throw from the sea, and most bikes would be a museum of rust inside five years.
Dennis's Retrovelo, ten years in, is in perfect condition.
Some of that is Dennis looking after it. But some of it is what the bike is. Retrovelo was founded in Leipzig in 2003 with a simple, stubborn idea: build city bikes the way they were built when bikes were made to last a lifetime — steel frames, relaxed geometry, and big, comfortable balloon tyres — but with modern components where it counts. The kind of over-engineering that seems excessive right up until year ten on a salt-sprayed coastline.
It's exactly why the old Velorution shops stocked them.
Image: Dennis Blanc
Riding with the birds
The best detail in Dennis's letters isn't the beach. It's the marshes.
Near his village lie protected salt marshes — a famous ornithological reserve where flocks of migrating birds stop to rest twice a year, on their long hauls between North Africa and Northern Europe.
Dennis rides there often. And this is where those fat Retrovelo tyres earn their keep: they let him roll slowly and silently down the narrow paths between the marshes, close enough to watch the birds without disturbing them.
A bicycle as a bird hide. I love that.
The mysterious black bike
Dennis has personalised his Retrovelo with a sticker on the back: his local postcode, 44, alongside the Brittany flag. A London bike, naturalised French.
He reckons he's the only person in the region riding a Velorution bike — and the locals have noticed. People regularly stop him to ask where the mysterious black machine came from.
The answer takes a while: a German frame, bought in a London shop, ridden on the wild coast of France.
Dennis signed off one of his emails with a line I've been thinking about since: “As you may know, we all like the French Révolution as a key milestone of our history.”
A Frenchman, a Velorution, and a revolution. Ça roule.
This story came from a reader email. All images courtesy of Dennis Blanc. If you've got a Velorution bike with a story of its own — however ordinary it seems — comment below. The ordinary ones are usually the best.
