Rear View 2024: The First Quarter

 Hello! it's time again to review the year on Guitar Ted Productions. The "Rear View" has been a staple of the blog since almost the very beginning. This year there will be four Rear View posts looking back on the year in quarters. I'll also have a post looking ahead at 2024. Enjoy the look back and thanks for reading Guitar Ted Productions!

The first three months on the blog for 2024 were kicked off in the usual way with my look at the State of the Gravel Scene posts. Then it was on to review items, which was a new thing folded into the blog at the end of 2023 as I left the Riding Gravel site. 

Things were cooking along with plans in the background which would end up dominating the blog for the first three months. This had to do with the making of the Honeman Flyer gravel bike by King Fabrications and plans leading up to and including attending the Mid-South gravel event in mid-March. That wasn't all that was happening though. Here are some other early 2024 highlights on the blog. 

The reviews were coming in which included the Big Dipper Handlebar from Tumbleweed Bikes, the Axle Pack from Old Man Mountain, WTB's new TPU tubes, and a review of a Boss IR-2 Amp & Cabinet pedal for guitar. 

The day I brought the Tamland Two home in 2014

Anniversarys for bikes I own included a review of a decade of riding the Raleigh Tamland Two and the one year look-back for the Singular Cycles Gryphon Mk3.

I had a couple of series on the blog early on in 2024. One was a short series on wheels. The other was the ending of the Guitar Ted Death Ride tales which started at the end of the Trans Iowa Stories series a couple of years prior. I also started another Guitar Ted Lube-Off test pitting a couple lubes against last year's winner. Finally, I was proud to present an article by John Ingham entitled "Not Time To Die". 

But the biggest deal for the early portion of 2024 was the unexpected but awesome addition of the Honeman Flyer to the bike stable along with the trip down and back to Mid-South. I tested a theory I had (also held by N.Y.Roll) that there was really nothing stopping people from doing events like Mid-South without entering the event "officially". Doing the event "bandit style" was therefore undertaken as an experiment. I was a bit surprised to have randomly met a few others who, when they heard I had done Mid-South as a bandit, admitted to me that they had also done this as well. I'll have more to say about that in my upcoming "State of the Gravel Scene " post at the beginning of 2025. 

 What I also did not expect was that Mid-South had a very deep impact on me. As I entered the trip my expectation was that this was "just another gravel event", but I was very wrong about that! So, I am very thankful that the first quarter of 2024 ended on that note. 

Look for the next Rear View covering the second quarter of 2024 next week!