DAN D’AMBROSIO

Glenn Eames, owner of the Old Spokes Home bike shop on North Winooski Avenue in Burlington, likes to start the day with a ride on one of his vintage bicycles. The early morning jaunts bring back the feeling of riding around the world with his partner, Mary Manghis, produce buyer at City Market, in the early 1980s.

"Today I took a ride on an 1889 Columbia Light Roadster safety bicycle," Eames said. "The smell of the morning as the sun starts to heat up the vegetation, the sweet and sour, I mean it just comes back. That's the way every day would start cycletouring, living on your bike for two years."

The early morning rides also combine two of Eames' passions — neither of which occupies a place in the mainstream of American life — bicycle history and bicycle touring. Eames has managed to build a viable business based on those passions with a loyal following on North Winooski Avenue, homesteading the neighborhood when it was still a wreck of broken windows and abandoned buildings in 2000.

"Since I opened the business the whole neighborhood has changed," Eames said. "In this part of town, the feeling was, 'I wouldn't walk through there at night.' The buildings across the street were all run down, the windows smashed out of them."

Now the houses across the street are painted in bright colors. A Vietnamese restaurant and laundromat moved into a formerly decrepit building that once housed a bus company, Eames said.

Old Spokes offers bikes built for adventure and transportation, rather than speed, from Salsa, Surly, All-City and Jamis. Upstairs, Eames has a collection of more than 30 vintage bikes, tracing the development of cycling technology from the Civil War in the 1860s through 1900, when the modern bike essentially took its form. Eames calls the roughly 40-year period the "golden age" of cycling.

Off to the Yucatan!

At 62 years old, Eames is lean and compact, with the muscled legs of a lifelong cyclist and a full, graying beard interrupted at his sideburns. He grew up outside of Boston, having the usual childhood fling with bicycles before rediscovering them after he left the U.S. Navy in 1970.

"I did it quite a bit as a kid, but then developed a pretty unhealthy lifestyle during high school," Eames said of cycling. "After I got out of the service I finally quit smoking cigarettes, picked up a bicycle and just fell in love with it."

Eames was living in New Hampshire in the early 1980s, where he had opened a party store.

"I didn't have a passion for running the business," Eames said. "It did well, but it was time to get out of that. It wasn't where my heart was."

Eames met Manghis in New Hampshire. She was in business as well, running a natural food restaurant. Manghis, 63, was already a dedicated bicycle tourist, and soon the couple was taking long rides into the White Mountains, and across the Connecticut River to Vermont and Burlington.

"That was how I discovered Burlington," Eames said.

Kindred spirits, Eames and Manghis had an idea. They would put their stuff in storage and take off for a month to ride Mexico's Yucatan Peninisula.

"So we put our lives on hold, and decided a month wouldn't be long enough," Eames said. "We ended up taking off and spending two years biking around the world."

The couple traveled through Eastern and Western Europe, dipping into North Africa before coming back into Sicily, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey, then circling back to Greece. In Athens, they bought airline tickets to San Francisco for $900 each, good for a year, with stops in India, Thailand, Burma, China, Taiwan and Japan.

"We had already cycled as far east as we could, into central Turkey and back," Eames said. "At the time, Afghanistan was occupied by the Soviets and a huge war was going on. In Iran, we had just gone through the hostage crisis. That part of the world was basically shut down."

Experiencing the renaissance

Just before leaving on his two-year tour, Eames, a history fanatic, discovered the history of bicycles, learning that cycling had been hugely popular in the United States in the 19th century.

"I really had no idea," Eames said. "I was majorly inspired by what cycling was doing for me both physically and mentally. I discovered 19th century men and women were experiencing the same sort of renaissance."

Faster than a horse and carriage, and within the reach of ordinary citizens, bikes opened up an entirely new world to 19th century Americans, as Eames discovered in journals from that period.

"It was liberation," Eames said. "My nickname for the bicycle is the transformer, because it takes you other places mentally, and restores health and well-being. It changes people's lives. It's also the transporter. It will take you there. The writings of the 19th century cyclists, men and women, are full of those sorts of epiphanies and experiences."

Bikes can also get you into trouble, particularly if you're in the wrong place at the right time, as Eames said. For the wandering couple, that wrong place was Kosovo, a gorgeous, mountainous land that was filled with tension and suspicion as the conditions that would eventually explode into war simmered and boiled. Eames and Manghis became targets.

"We were on this main road heading towards Bulgaria and Macedonia and all the kids working in the field dropped their tools and fired rocks at us," Eames said. "One kid threw a license plate Frisbee style. Fortunately it flipped up and hit me in the back. It was intense."

Farther down the road, near the border of Albania, the couple encountered an even more threatening, and bizarre, situation. They were riding a tree-lined road along a beautiful lake when 25 or 30 kids spotted them and dragged a tree across the road ahead of them. The gathering children carried sharpened sticks. Manghis and Eames were alone.

"By then I'd had it," Eames said. "I just grabbed my bicycle pump and charged them like a madman, screaming like Genghis Khan, and they all scattered. They were little kids, probably the oldest was 12 or 13, down to toddlers. But you know, it was either that or ride up slowly and try to say, 'Don't do this.' That probably would not have worked out well. Sometimes the best defense is a good offense."

Eames and Manghis also battled Hepatitis A, holing up in an English-language bookshop owned by a sympathetic couple in Oujda, Morocco, for more than two months to recover from the debilitating disease of the liver. In Sri Lanka, Eames contracted amoebic dysentery, and in Taiwan, he sprained his ankle so severely that he needed help from a Chinese doctor to recover.

"I laid down, he cracked my toes, did some pressure points, then took this glob of brown paste that looked like miso and pressed it right on the spot where it popped," Eames remembered. "I thought I was going to go through the roof. I was screaming."

An assistant pressing on Eames' chest told him to be patient.

"It hurt like hell," Eames said. "He maybe reset it, I don't know what he did. I was off the bike for a day. The day after that we were riding again."

The police station garden

While there were challenging days, Eames said most of their experiences on the trip were like the one he and Manghis had in central Turkey. They were in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny village, when they spotted a great place to camp. The couple mostly camped, staying away from hotels, and mostly shopped in markets, rather than eating in restaurants.

Deciding they should ask before setting up camp, Eames and Manghis soon found themselves talking to the local constable.

"He felt it just wouldn't be safe," Eames said. "Of course it would have been. But since the question was popped, he felt responsible."

Instead, the constable said the couple could camp in the police station "garden," which turned out to be a small patch of dirt next to the sidewalk, right downtown. As the constable, Eames and Manghis marched into town, they were trailed by 20 or 30 villagers, waiting to see what was going to happen.

By the time they got to their dirt patch, the couple's audience had grown to about 40 people, watching carefully. Eames turned to the constable.

"We didn't speak Turkish, but if you mimed and used a phrasebook and dictionary, you could communicate," he said. "They are a very animated people. So we indicated we didn't think this was going to work. 'Look at all these people here.'"

Looking around, the constable pulled out his nightstick and waved the crowd away.

"Of course they all came back," Eames said. "Everybody was smiling and poking fun at him. And so he got the picture. Basically they walked off and found us a small hotel room where we stayed for the night."

Before leaving, the constable stressed that the couple should stop by the police station to say goodbye in the morning. They had to. The next morning, Eames and Manghis sat in a waiting room. In the next room, someone was being arrested.

"It was a little heavy," Eames said. "Nobody was getting beaten but an argument was going on."

Time ticked on. Eames and Manghis tried to say their goodbyes, but were asked to sit back down.

"A few minutes later, a fellow rode up on a little moped motor scooter with his buddy on the back with a whole tray of Turkish breakfast," Eames said. "There was fresh yogurt, tea, bread and honey. It was great."

"Midnight Express," the true story of an American college student who was caught trying to smuggle drugs out of Turkey and thrown into a hellish prison, had come out in 1978, about five years earlier. Eames thinks the constable had that movie in mind when he took responsibility for the couple's safety and comfort.

"They just wanted to extend hospitality," Eames said. "Turkey was a fabulous place. That experience was our experience everywhere we went."

And it's the experience Eames wanted to spread when he started Old Spokes Home, after 14 years at the Skirack in Burlington, where he managed the service department and became a partner before leaving to start his own shop.

"That's the beauty of this business," Eames said. "Most of the people who show up here are coming to cycling after a long hiatus and rediscovering it as I did. They're having the same sort of transformative experience as I did rediscovering the bicycle. A heightened sense of awareness, sense of smell, sense of sound. A different appreciation, putting them in touch with where they live, and what they do."

Contact Dan D'Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DanDambrosioVT.