"There's No Such Thing....

as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing" or so says the quotation I just Googled to see is attributed to one Sir Ranulph Fiennes.  Since I heard that some years ago, I've always liked that saying, although I do believe that yes, there is a such thing as bad weather, just perhaps less of it than we may complain about.


So when it was time to head out yesterday with the morning temperature still below freezing, we were faced with the question you car-free folks don't have-- Should we take the car or the bikes?  It was not much of a debate as the air was clean and crisp, the roads were clear, and we had plenty of time to make sure we were wearing well, appropriate clothing.


I contain to maintain that the best winter bike purchases we made were Bern helmets with fuzzy inserts for all the boys and a pair of ski goggles for each.

 We snapped some photos on our way to church.

When we arrived, we were greeted by a lovely Jamis commuter, letting us know we were not the only ones to cycle there this morning.

Wondering why only the cable was looped around the rack.
I worried about the cable being clipped.
Do bike thieves work at 9AM on Sunday mornings?

And here: a lone wheel locked to the rack. Did someone U-lock the wheel, and not the frame, and have the rest of the bike stolen?  Sad to consider.

We stopped at the grocery store on the way home where the boys asked to stay outside, playing with the camera, making faces at their reflection, and introducing a stow-away stuffed lemur, R.T., to the joys of cold weather.

Later friends came over for a soup lunch.  They headed home on their bikes, their Xtracycle Freeloaders laden with cut wood from our large backyard pile.

And yes, that IS a gorgeous baby bump she is sportin' .

It's a rare day we ever regret choosing the bike.

2011 Tree Haulin' by Bike

Yes, we were so excited that we pulled this off this two years ago.

Gotta say that it was just as exciting this year.  We now live farther away from Edgerton Park so the trip involved a longer bike ride.   Lately, on weekends we've been working on the twins riding themselves on the city streets, and they happily took on the challenge to ride across town.

For his part, F was glad to be back in the bakfiets (with a few friends along for the ride).

We used a combination of street riding and, at times, had the boys go up on the sidewalk.

When we reached the park, we noticed how fee trees were left.  Luckily, there was a great one waiting for us.

 We loaded it on the bakfiets, well prepared this year with bungee cords.

Then we headed back home.  F and I switched over to the Xtracycle (boy, it's nice to have more than one cargo bike).

Over-the-shoulder shot

This is a holiday tradition I hope our fellas will remember in all their years to come.  I know I will.

Guest Post : I Love a Parade

I could not be more excited to present this post by guest blogger Lynette Vann.  Lynette and her family are from the States but live and cycle overseas, currently in Kazakhstan after some years in Malaysia.  Many thanks to Lynette for sharing this post with us and I hope we get to learn more of her family's bike riding ex-pat adventures over the years.  You may contact Lynette directly here.

Guest blogger Lynette and her older daughter while bike touring near Kakanui, South Island, New Zealand 

"I Love a Parade" 

Last month, we were at the end of our first full family bike-to-school morning.  We’d had a lovely ride despite some wet, cold, and muddy conditions.  I was so proud of my oldest daughter who had left the nest/cargo box and was riding on her own.  We turned off of the highly protected pedestrian path to finish the ride on two blocks of city streets that also happen to lead in front of my husband’s office. 

Everything was going great.  It was a bit muddy and sloppy but we were holding tight in form with the bakfiets shielding our young solo rider and my husband bringing up the rear.  The work buses were plowing down the street, there was some morning traffic honking and jostling but we were doing it and then I heard my husband mutter, “I like to ride but I don’t want to parade.”  Oh, so quickly did my spirits sink and all of our calmness in the traffic slipped away and before you know it the last block was a miserable, stop and go, bump into each other slog into school.  The girls didn’t seem to notice it and all in all it was a tiny hitch in our ride to school morning but it got me thinking about parades.

Let me introduce myself.  I’m Lynette.  Mom to two lovely little girls, A (4) and L(6).  We’re an American expatriate family that recently moved to Kazakhstan with my husband’s work after living four years in Malaysia.  And we love bikes.  Always have.  We started biking as a family when L was six months old.  Our fleet of bikes has grown and changed along with our children. We started with one Burley trailer, then two trailers for an additional child or touring gear, then the Bakfiets, next a family touring package with coupled bikes and tagalongs, then a Babboe Bakfiets, and, finally, a Surly Xtracycle is soon to arrive. 

The school run in Atyrau, Kazakhstan 

It’s been an evolving process.  We’ve done a lot of things well but generally only after lessons learned from some pretty horrible rides.  We've done unsupported family touring through Australia, Portugal, Spain, and our favorite, New Zealand - three times in the winter!  With our new location we hope to do more touring through Europe. 

But what really keeps us going is the day-to-day biking.  Here in Kazakhstan we aren't allowed to drive so it's a bit of a necessity for maintaining some personal freedom.  So we bike.  We bike to the grocery, the market, the parks, the coffee shop, and our friends’ houses.  We bike to explore, to play, to relax, and to burn off some frustration when I can’t remember my Russian numbers at the market. 

And, as in all the other places we've biked in, we find that biking with kids generally brings out the best in people and opens doors that were not previously visible.

 

A frosty woman's face automatically brightens and opens and we find ourselves talking in broken language for five to ten minutes with her on the street as she tries to figure out how the bakfiets works. 

The husband and wife at the fruit stand pick out the perfect apple for the girls while they sit in the bakfiets so the girls don’t have to unbuckle and buckle again.

The old man who follows me for a block and then watches to make sure I lock my bike up.  Giving me a thumbs up when he deems it secure.

We are on parade.  We are on parade because we are foreigners in this country.  We are on parade because we choose a form of transportation that is uncommon.  And at different times in our family biking life we’ve had to tackle the uneasiness that comes with being on parade.  There are detractors everywhere, many towards biking in general but more towards biking with children.  Sometimes those detractors even come from the inside the family and, now quietly, sometimes even me. 

But one of the joys of riding together is that on the day that I don’t feel like parading, my husband might, or my daughters might.  The family ride pushes us to let go of some of the parental paranoia so we don’t pass that baggage on to our girls who see it as an adventure – helmets properly adjusted and strapped, of course.  The family ride requires my spouse and I to work together and rely on each other in a way that spouses often don’t have to anymore. 

The family ride also overcomes detractors on the outside.  The woman on the street, the couple at the market, the man on the path?  These four people in my town were strangers who I’m certain wouldn’t have normally paid me any attention; these four now watch for us on the path, at the market, and on the street.  We’ve fast-tracked our settling period by making connections with our neighbors and townspeople.  Which is great wherever you live but particularly great when your home is in a foreign land. 

So we sit up tall with our helmets on snug and the girls return the waves of people as we pass by.  I love a parade.  And I’m pretty certain you would too.

Author Lynette Vann and her family with their Dutch Bakfiets back in Colorado for vacation.

Dashing Young Cyclists

Look who got some new cycling caps.

Originally the plan was to roll them up and put them in the boys' stockings. Whoops. Looks like I couldn't help myself.

Kidical Mass New Haven Takes Off

We had planned and publicized October's Ride for weeks.  We were excited to wear our costumes while riding and two of the boys' costumes actually involved bike helmets (even though they were not bicycled-themed).

Praying Mantis-- C was pleased when he realized that its head was shaped a bit like a bike helmet. Good thing we are a nutty family who happens to have uh... an extra bike helmet in the garage to spay paint and affix large eyes.

S was an android. That's a salad bowl on his head but to keep it up, we cut out a circular piece of foam and then taped a Nutcase helmet inside of it.  

And then came the snow. And the power outages throughout the state. We had been holding out hope that somehow the freak early storm would not dampen our Kidical Mass dreams, but at 8am that morning, we had to call it. While we usually are always willing to go for a bike ride, snow or no snow, we recognized that for our area, Kidical Mass is about trying to attract all different families to ride together, even those who are less zealous about it than we. We thought it best for the kick-off ride to be on a non-snow day (shout-out, of course, to Chicago's Kidical Mass that rides year round).  We still rode over to the Farmer's Market and hang out just in case folks did not get the news about the KMNH October ride cancellation.

We were lucky that we only lost phone and internet for a couple of days.  Some people in the state were without power for 11 days. 

This looks like an ad for Bogs boots to me. Yup, we each have a pair.

  On  the up side, we did still get to participate in the Giant Puppet Parade a few hours later.

Recognizing the importance of getting a group ride in before the real winter started, we sent a quick poll to some committed local family bicyclists and it seemed that November 13 suited most. Without weeks and weeks to publicize the new event, we got word out best we could.  With little idea just how well it would be attended, I was feeling a bit stressed and tried to squash the "I forgot to study for the exam" dreams that kept awakening me for numerous nights. We took advantage of a day off from school to ride and time the route ourselves.  Come Sunday morning, while the sky appeared clear, might I admit to some less-than-stellar parenting moments as I tried to get the boys dressed and out for the ride early?  Thankfully, my husband was still speaking to me as we saddled up and pedaled off to the meeting place.

We rode up to find one dad and toddler waiting. My boys greeted them enthusiastically and introductions were made.  Over the next 20 minutes or so, 50 more participants arrived.  That's right! Much to my extreme gratitude, we had over 50 riders for our hastily-rearranged inaugural KMNH ride.  We had bicyclists, bikes, and wheels of all sizes.  There was a nice array of kid-carrying velos from kid seats, cargo bikes, and trailers. We enjoyed the route that had us ride on a paved park path, a few urban streets, and one lovely residential one.  We ended up back in Edgewood Park, many of us indulging in the most incredible almond croissants from SoNo sold at the Farmer's Market, and looking forward to our next KMNH Ride.

Our friends just purchased this Madsen from our local bike shop but are waiting on their bucket.  Isn't it great that they ordered Madsen Cargo Bike Love t-shirts???

Here we are waiting for the next group to get through the green light.

Thanks to V. Balbarin for these last two snaps.

No, we do not make our kids wear helmets when climbing trees. It just happened to be a favored activity after the ride before helmets were shed.

kidical mass new haven november ride

CARGO BIKE LOVE models

I could not be more thrilled with the quality of Spreadshirt's printing of our Cargo Bike Love t-shirts.  The shirts came just days after we ordered them and the printing is clean and bold.

Each fellow chose his own design. You can see that my older guys have custom designs with printing colors they picked out (not currently offered as choices in my shops).  If you would want a shirt with custom printed colors, let me know and we can do that for you.

The teal printing on the royal blue shirt doesn't pop, but the orange really is brilliant.

Visit Cargo Bike Love at www.cargobikelove.spreadshirt.com.

introducing CARGO BIKE LOVE t-shirts

Folks who know me or who have been visiting this blog know that one of the things I like best outside of bikes is making t-shirts.  I started simply with freezer paper stencils and moved on to a low-tech, at-home screening system.  Some years ago, I used Zazzle.com for a series of t-shirts called Boys Like Pink, Too that still manage to sell a shirt here and there.


I enjoy my professional life, however, there are times when I would love to stay home and just make shirts.  I have never had any training in the graphic arts but love lettering by hand and messing around on the computer.  Recently, some of my favorite bike bloggers, Laura and Russ, from The Path Less Pedaled started posting their own shirts on a site I had not previously known.


This got me inspired.  With a bit of direction from Russ, I downloaded a free trial of Adobe Illustrator and started messing around with cargo bike designs.  Today, thanks to snow, yes SNOW in October, we had to cancel Kidical Mass New Haven's October Ride.  While we still got out by bikes to the Farmers Market and the Giant Puppet Parade (another post on that this week), the afternoon was spent at home.   I took advantage of the time and opened my very own Spreadshirt Store Front.


After contemplating various names, I decided not to name the storefront "Full Hands" and went with a name that specifically 'calls it like it is,' (and hopefully allows folks on search engines to stumble upon it).


Drumroll, please.


Introducing CARGO BIKE LOVE.

We have longtail designs, bakfietsen, Madsens, and cargo trikes.

  

Some of the great points about this website is that you can choose your own color and size shirt.  I also think the pricing is quite good, especially for a print-on-demand service.

Do contact me if you want any of these designs printed on anything else: baby onesies, hoodies, etc.  Also, if you there is some design you want tweaked a certain way (two kiddos in the bakfiets, perhaps or a different tagline), I would be open to that discussion as well.

Finally, if you like them and would be willing, please help spread the CARGO BIKE LOVE by posting the storefront on your Facebook page, Twitter account, or blog.  Many thanks.