In May this year my friend Alan came to visit me in Chile. Our plan was to ride an enormous, ambitious loop through the land of volcanoes and monkey puzzle trees in the south of this long, thin country. The region is known as the Araucania. For over 300 years in this inhospitable terrain of…
This will be my last post in this forum, at least for a while. I’ve come to realize that caring for an infant full-time doesn’t leave a lot of extra wiggle room in my day to do much of anything else. The part-time work I’m doing these days from home is squeezed into the often-unpredictable…
Are cargo bikes practical? asked a denizen of Quora.com recently (a more polite version of Reddit). An interesting question, I thought, but whats a cargo bike, and whos to say whats practical? If cargo is defined as anything in excess of the human engine, then any bike that can carry a water bottle is a…
As school begins and we all are thinking about the skills our kids need as the approach adulthood I wanted to take time out of the ‘biking only’ blog. For this blog, I wanted to focus on one aspect of helping your children’s brain development and future that we don’t always focus on. This skill…
Bike touring is inherently sexy. It also involves lots of skills and dedication which have been proven by the Lampoon Spoof Scientific Research Group to attract the opposite sex. Minor inconveniences like body odor and food stains on your jersey can be turned to your advantage with a little bit of thought. And the heroism…
Adolf Hitler was a bike messenger? Yes, indeed. And a decorated one, at that. But more on that later. If the Great War had been fought in accordance with the fantasies of armchair generals, then the bicyclist would have replaced the doughboy as the symbol of gallantry and heroism.
A couple Fridays ago, I got a call from a friend in the middle of the day. I thought the timing odd given his busy work schedule, but because I was participating in a webinar, I let the call go to voice mail and sent him a text message asking what was up. The words…
Let us now praise Sweaty Men and Women; All hail the Bicycle Courier, Who is fast on feet and two wheels, Bringing us coffee and sandwiches and beer. Three cheers for the bike messengers of the world, the “cyclo-laborers.” While we cower in climate-controlled cubicles, they brave the sun and rain, the light and…
I started out with the mindset to write solely about Burley D’Lite trailer maintenance. I kept however returning to the idea that the day to day maintenance of all trailers AND bikes are some common concerns. The basic care, tools and checklist is really what is so important and not enough people discuss this other…
The deal was quick. Cash in hand. I picked up the second-hand tandem from a carpark on the London ring road in the summer of 2012. It was an oppressively warm afternoon by English standards, the break rubber toasting against the rims as I rolled the machine down to the railway station. Getting a tandem…
Croozer another one of our favorites bike child trailers! Croozer makes child trailers easy to buy because it’s a 3-n-1 trailer, it comes with everything you need to got outside! It comes with a Cycling kit, jogging kit and strolling kit. What else do you need? The new Croozer click and cruise makes this even…
When my husband and I set out to buy our first home together last year, we were pretty shocked to find out just how little we could afford in our rapidly-gentrifying city. Gone are the days in New Orleans where you could find a peeling shotgun for a steal. Despite sluggish economic times elsewhere in…
I’m in Seattle visiting family this week and getting a much-welcomed reprieve from the summer heat back home. It’s been a few years since I last visited the Emerald City, and one of the first changes I spotted upon disembarking from the ferry terminal the other day was the stations filled with lime green Pronto…
“A Bike, A Bike, My Free-State for a Bike!” The utility of any invention is most tested when it is put to war, and the bicycle is no exception. Like any invention, mankind was quick to press the bicycle into making war.
To really clear out these closeouts, we’re experimenting with a new technique. We have the closeouts for our 5 departments listed on the following 5 closeout pages: Bags Trailers Accessories Apparel Components At the start of each month, every closeout will be: increased by 5% We will keep doing this every month until all items…
So, my husband and I want to travel for our last summer hurrah! You know, in Tucson, before school starts it is HOT! We have one last chance to experience the beach and cooler weather possibly before the kids head off and life, well, gets even crazier all over again! And you definitely know you…
Surly makes a front bike rack so stout it could double as a cattle pusher on an F-450! Seriously, this is not a rack for someone wanting to save weight but rather a huge front rack that you can load up with up to 70 pounds of gear. Not only can you carry your panniers,…
An old friend from university sent me an email in mid 2014. He’d got wind I was planning a bike trip from Vancouver to Mexico and put out a feeler to see if he could come along. So, without wanting to cut him out, I did what any reasonable type A person would do and…
I live in Louisiana, a place that carries the ignominious designation of being one of the most dangerous places to walk or bicycle in the country. We’re in good company in the Sun Belt and in the Deep South in particular which, with certain important exceptions, is especially hostile to non-motorized transportation. Part of the…
Cops on bikes? It sounds like a Monty Python skit, to be sure. But what could be more utilitarian than bike cops? If the purpose of police is to protect and serve, and if the bicycle is the vehicle that allows police more contact with the community and more opportunity to fight crime, then why…
Oh my, oh my, oh my- it is a hot one out there! This is what we mostly have been hearing this summer from meteorologists across the country. Hotter than normal for the most part. Whether it is that ‘dry heat’ we have here in Tucson, AZ or the thick humidity and heat of the…
I recently overhead an American cyclist lament, “The only bad thing about cycling the Tour Divide is spending $3,000 on food.” I imagined a three-week diet of dolphin steaks and unicorn burgers. But he was using the word food more loosely than I could have guessed. What really broke the bank was his daily ingestion…
When you have kids, you want to pass down to them the things you love and the love of outdoors and bicycles is an easy one. Sometimes learning and teaching your kids to ride a bike can be stressful but balance bikes take away the guess work and tears. Strider makes riding a bike easy,…
Most anyone reading these words is well aware of The Netherlands’ reputation as a haven for biking. An estimated 30 percent of people in the country count the bicycle as their primary mode of transportation to work, a staggering figure compared to American standards, even amid recent bicycling gains. In this country, fewer than 1…
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