1st Days of School and Race Day

We had TWO first days of school with F, our youngest, starting preschool last week and the twins, C & S, beginning second grade on Tuesday. We, of course, had to take first day snaps of both days, including gearing up on our bikes for the commute. Our new daily commuting set-up look like this: P takes F to school on the Xtracycle Radish while I ride the Yuba Mundo with the older fellas (with the bakfiets retired for daily commuting).

F's first day of his last year of preschool

Notice our sweet new Xtracycle Freeloaders on our Yuba. While we did purchase these sharp-looking Yuba Go-Getter messenger-style bags, we found them too big for daily commuting with boys' legs hanging over the sides. They will be great for big shopping trips, serious hauling, etc. but when we saw that Xtracycle was looking for Yuba and Kona owners to test out their 2010 FreeLoaders, we jumped at the chance and were chosen to participate in the testing, much to our delight. We will be posting a review of how these bags work on our Yuba on the Xtracycle blog, but want to get through a couple of weeks of school commutes, music lesson hauling, and soccer practice runs first to see how the FreeLoaders fit our needs. Initial reaction though = awesome.

C & S's first day-- second grade! Clearly, a chillier morning than F's first day of school.

Labor Day brought New Haven's big running race. C and S ran the kids' fun run and Peter completed the 5K. Our bikes served us extremely well as streets were blocked off all over downtown and parking for cars was hard to come by. We happily zipped straight down to the Green and found a nice tree to lean the bikes up against, U-locking them twice together. Our long-tails received lots of attention and we especially loved it when the races were over and we could get right out of Dodge, getting nods from the policemen manning the streets, allowing us to ride down roads where no cars were allowed. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. We had a vision of a world where streets were for bikes first, cars second, and it was good.