Being absent from this here web-log for the past few weeks (and scarce for the past few months) has been an exciting, but lonely time for me. Lonely because I truly enjoy chatting with you fine people, but exciting because I have been living life on the rivet, to a great extent, for the past couple of months since taking the job at Bike Magazine. Learning the ins and outs, and trying to live up to the high standards left to me by my predecessors has proved no easy task.

But there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

As I write this, I am at flight level 360, or somewhere thereabouts, staring out the window at a nearly full moon, heading for BRU. That’s Brussels for those of you who do not have the entire list of airport indicators memorized. If you are reading this site in the first place, I think it is safe for me to assume you know the reason why a person like me would be headed to Belgium for Easter Sunday.

Yep. The Ronde van Vlaanderen.

As it turns out, the fine people at the magazine corporation saw fit to give the staff of Bike an extra assignment; make another magazine—just one issue—about whatever you want. We chose to do one about pavement, instead of dirt.

So hang tight sports fans, because for the next few days I’ll be coming at you direct from the place where it all started. And yes, as a matter of fact, I have been promised 6 days of rain. You can almost smell the fritjes, can’t you?

Dave Fahrner - Santa Rosa, California

That sounds like a great idea, Dave. I highly recommend it.

Personally, I think that for the real Classics experience you should try and check out at least one of the three races of what I like to call The Classics Week. It all starts with the Ronde van Vlaanderen on April 4th - Easter Sunday. If you can only take in one event and are looking for the crazed Euro-fan, knock-down, drag-out bike race experience, this is the one to take in. The Ronde van Vlaanderen is admittedly not as much on the radar of American fans as Paris-Roubaix is, but most of us consider it to be the harder of the two. Also, without too much difficulty, you can check out at least a couple different sweet cobbled climbs without having to break too many laws. In fact, I have often talked about bringing a small group over for the Ronde and riding bikes from one cool viewing spot to the next.

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Kevin Bengtson - Minneapolis, Minnesota

Well Kevin, that's sort of a tricky question, since riding trainers indoors during the Minnesota winter is basically torture, for the most part. Sure, I could list off a whole bunch of beautiful and hard-fought bike races for you to dream about while you're sweating all over your basement floor, but that just might do you a disservice. Unfortunately too, so many of what I would call "the best races of all time" aren't available on DVD anywhere.

It's also really hard to pin down what the absolute best races were, since they all have some cool, redeeming qualities to them. My pick for the most amazing Tour de France ever is definitely Greg LeMond's 1989 8-second victory. Other than that, every race is pretty special.

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Patrik Lyons - Oakmont, Pennsylvania

I love this question, because I love the fact that cyclists are wagered upon just like boxers and horses. Yeah, I know, other sports are wagered upon too -- ball sports and whatnot -- but when I think about sports that have a book, I think about the suffering sports.

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