We just heard that fellow Cycleblazer Keith Klein passed away on July 20th at the age of 74.  An American expat, Keith was fluent in French and well integrated into small town life in France.  We met up with Keith several times as we passed by his home near Dijon, sharing meals, conversation and friendship. Keith was a wellspring of informed comments on our, and others, blogs and himself posted 18 trips on this site. If anyone has recollections of Keith they would care to share below we will ensure they get passed along to his wife, Sue.

A sad loss indeed.  I never met Keith in person but, along with many Cycleblazers, I considered him a friend.  In fact, our relationship goes back my early Crazyguy/Bicycle Life days, so he was one of my first and most enduring on-line friends.  I think that's partly due to the fact that I'm a Minnesotan and he lived in Minnesota before moving to France.  We often discussed cycling in Minnesota's harsh winters, and he offered a couple of tips that I use to this day.

Between Crazyguy and Cycleblaze, he commented on almost all of my journals, and I commented on almost all of his.  (Keith's journals had, without question, the best food pictures ever.)  I knew he had been battling cancer for several years, yet he took the time to post a message on my Kansas journal just a couple months ago.  

From our interactions, I learned about many of the places he lived because I just happened to be touring in those areas.  I learned he was somewhat of a gourmet.  His knowledge of food and wine was amazing.  He often shared information about wine making & wine tasting, and he tolerated my satiric bike touring wine reviews with good humor.   (Oh yeah, he definitely had a great sense of humor.)  He was a skilled wood worker, and he made his own furniture.  He was an educator and was highly educated.  He was versed in literature, philosophy, and science.  To me, he was a Renaissance Man.  I'll miss him.

Thank you for notifying our CycleBlaze community of this loss, Keith was very much an important journal-er and commenter here. 

Let's raise a water bottle or other beverage of choice to Keith, and may our journeys reflect the inspiration and insights he gave so freely.  

What a nice eulogy Greg.

Very sad to lose one of our own

I'm sorry to hear this. I'll raise a glass to toast Keith this evening.

Thanks for the post Steve. 
Sad news. Condolences to Keith’s family.

My recollections of Keith are all very positive. I never met him in person, but over the years his online posts were consistently informative, interesting and considered. He seems to have lived a full and varied life. RIP Keith.
Keep pedalling, wherever you are now. 

Thank you for posting this, Steve.  Like many others, I've considered Keith a friend ever since we first started posting on CGOAB.  I always welcomed his comments and local insights, particularly when we biked through the land of his upbringing on our ride from Minneapolis to the east coast.  

It was one of the highlights of our travels to get to visit him and his wife at his dream home in Burgundy, together with Suzanne, János and Susan.  Here we are posing for what we claimed at the time was a record for a CycleBlaze meetup in Europe.  Looking at the photograph  now, I'm still startled by how tall Keith was.  I realize that I've always pictured him as shorter, undoubtedly because I mixed him up with mental images of the actor Kevin Klein.

The year before that though, we were one degree of separation away from our meetup with Keith when we stopped in (as in, climbed steeply up) to a B&B in the Piemonte near Aqua Terme to check in with Guido, Keith's partner when the two of them led bicycling tours - a detail of his past I'd never heard of before.  We knew of Guido because Keith dropped a comment into one of our journals when he saw that we'd be passing near his friend's home.

It's a sad loss for all of us, but I'm comforted by the belief that he lead a full life, one that many of us would happily have traded places for, the stuff of dreams.

Very sad news indeed.  I didn't know Keith but his presence here was always positive.  

We will miss him.  Deepest sympathies to his loved ones.

A very interesting recollection. But it has something else - photos! Somehow I had assumed that Forum posts shared the unfortunate lack of a format bar, that we see in Cycleblaze Comments. I must have been blind. Now I can collect the photos that we have been emailing to each other, and some to Sue Klein, and publish them here. If others do the same, we will build a nice tribute.