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Back in 2011 I bought a Focus Mares CX2.0 cross bike to do gravel rides when I didn't feel like mountain biking. A few years later, in October 2014, I replaced it with a Focus Mares CX 0.0. This was Focus' top of the line carbon cross bike with SRAM Force CX1 groupset. Somehow though, the bike lacked soul and didn't excite. I sold it a year later in December 2015.

I had my red Volagi RD road bike already at the time, so I bought a second frameset in all black to build it up with SRAM Force CX1 and a set of Enve/Chris King wheels I had retired from my 29er. In comparison to the two Focus cross bikes, the Viaje had room for much wider tires. I found my preferred tire width at 40-41mm. This bike got ridden until the end of July 2018.

I got into cycling in the mid 80ies on a steel Muddy Fox Explorer mountain bike equipped with a 18 speed Suntour groupset. A couple of friends and I had just finished high school and we all had started to earn a small paycheck doing an apprenticeship, when mountain bikes began to get popular. Obviously, we had to have one too. First, just as a means to commute to work and get around on weekends, but soon enough we started taking them to the trails. I was hooked from the very moment.

Back in 1994 when I lived in Oakland, California for a year, I picked up a free, locally printed cycling magazine at a bike shop in Berkeley. It had an article about single-speeding and I was intrigued. Fresh out of college spending a language year on the little savings I had made during a short, temporary design job in the medical industry, I had a nice mountain bike - a very nice one in fact - but certainly not the cash to build a single-speed as a second bike. Several years passed in which I returned to Switzerland, worked as an engineer then moved to California to start another job. Once I got established and had managed to save a bit of cash, did I ultimately build my first single-speed.

Most Swiss my age basically grew up skiing. I didn't. I only got my first pair of skies a year before we went to skiing camp with high-school. I sold my skies the same year I graduated from high-school and have never skied again. For one, it's an expensive sport, but more importantly it's a hobby that requires travelling each time you want to hit the slopes. And that's the biggest turnoff for myself. Driving an hour or more on busy weekend highways, arriving at filled up parking lots, then standing in line at the lifts to get up the mountain and meet more long lines at mountain restaurants when hunger calls - that's not how I care to spend the weekend.