Santana Arriva: A Second Chance -- Crusty Tandem Bike Restoration 

While making this video I asked my dad to write a short summary of his and my moms travels on their tandem. I ended up getting an email back with a story several pages long. Thanks dad! He did write a summarized version which is bellow. Unfortunately this is not actually the tandem that my parents rode all over the world, but is actually a replacement. Near the end of my parents travels, they sent the tandem, they called "Big Red" to Denmark, but the crate never made it. There are more details below but my dad spent a year contacting the shipping company and never got much info where the tandem ended up. Some time later their insurance covered the loss and replaced it with the Arriva seen in the video in the early 1990's. It never got used like its predecessor, and spent many year of its life hanging upside down in a breezeway at my parents house gathering dust, spider webs, and no memories.
During the COVID-19 lock down, my buddy Jeremy and I breathed some new life into her and is now frequently used! The end aerial shots were filmed about 3/4 of the way up Gibraltar, one of Santa Barbara's most infamous climbs. HUGE shout out to Jeremy for filming and all the help with this project!
My Dad's summarized travel story:
• We flew next to Fiji, pedaling along the amazing tropic beaches there. We went out to a small no-roads island of Yanuca in time for harvesting of Coral Worms. 195 miles
• In New Zealand, we rode some of both the North and South Islands; beauty of peaks and green forests and rivers. Randy Largent met us and we pedaled and camped together for a week or 2. 1141miles
• We went to Papua New Guinea next but our tandem just sat in its cardboard and duct tape shipping carton while a family of cockroaches moved in.
• We pedaled down Australia's east coast, nearly run over by a semi-trailer truck. We met many cane toads and had hot sweaty days of cranking it. To get from Sydney to Perth we took the 2600 mile 3 day India Pacific train ride. I don't know our miles here as they're in a journal, maybe in the garage! 1000+ miles?
• On to Bali and Java in Indonesia. Bali is tropic beautiful, pedaling past the greenest green of rice terraces. Java was beautiful but populated and had scary traffic. At Whitings' place in Bandung, I packed the tandem in a wooden crate that I constructed w $5K of stuff and wished it off to Denmark via Indonesia's fine fine Jumbo Shipping. It never made it to Denmark. I don't know where it made it to, actually. Farmer's Insurance, though, gets a plug: we filed a claim when we got home a year and a half later and they covered it. And I'm glad you're enjoying that tandem now!