Two years ago when we moved to Seattle, my sister gave us her bicycle trailer/jogging stroller. We were excited because we had moved to Seattle and we were going to be a Super Awesome Bicycling Family. I had just bought a bike and planned to ride it to school and work every day. After a couple months commuting by bike turned into commuting by foot turned into commuting by bus, and a year later we had not yet attempted to attach the bike trailer to a bike. We used it as a jogging stroller pretty frequently--it's the kind that seats two kids, which happens to be the number of kids we have--but my bike had remained chained up and unused for several months by now. FoxyJ's bike, meanwhile, was getting thrown into windows. At any rate, one day about a year ago I tried to hook up the bike trailer to my stagnating bike and discovered that we were missing an important piece--the one that actually attaches the trailer to the bike.
So now, a year and three trips to Utah later, I finally remembered to get that piece off of my sister's bike. This morning after a bit of searching through all our unpacked stuff we found that piece, fastened it onto my bike, and attached the trailer. I towed the kids to the library, the farmers' market, and the bank, then home again. Then, still on the high of Now We Live In Davis And Are A Super Awesome Bicycling Family, I fixed the wheel and chain on Foxy's bike, cleaned it up, and got it ready to go for the first time in seven years. We tested out our awesomeness tonight by taking a family ride around Davis. It was spiffy cool.
And then, to top it all off, when we got home we realized that among the old bicycle junk left on our front porch by the previous residents is one of those half bicycles for kids that you attach onto the back of an adult bike, which is exactly what we had decided we'd like to get for taking S-Boogie to school and back. So tomorrow I'll clean that up and see if it works, and next Wednesday S-Boogie will start kindergarten and we'll ride bikes there and back every day and next month Foxy will start school and every day she'll ride her bike and we will truly be a Super Awesome Bicycling Family forever and ever. Because we never let lifestyle changes like this just peter out and slip back into laziness.
Hmm . . . Now I'm torn. I thought that by putting in a greenhouse (see FoxyJ's comment board) (oh, and I'm actually serious about figuring out if we can build one off the garage—it's not just posturing), we would be a Better Family Than the Fobs.
ReplyDeleteBut now I see that I'm going to have to let Dec win the war and get me a bicycle. To think that I've succeeded in refusing all this time. D—n.
.
ReplyDeleteThose halfbikes are awesome.
That sounds really fun. We would love to see pictures. So is there a bike lane there? Where do you ride?
ReplyDeleteFUN! I've never even heard of those half-bikes, but now I want one. After I have kids. If I have kids. . . Really, I want one anyway. They just sound cool.
ReplyDeleteEdgy--You should definitely do the bike and the greenhouse. We're going to get some gardening going here just as soon as we get some money to start it and figure out how. I hope you know that I only blog about how awesome I am in order to inspire lesser people like you to try harder.
ReplyDeleteTh.--They sure are. I still haven't had time to figure out if ours works, though.
Angie--We'll put pictures up once we get the halfbike going.
JB--You can totally get a halfbike and strap a stuffed animal to the seat while you ride around town. No one will think you're crazy, really.