Tag Archives: hills

June 18, 2012 · 10:34 am

Destinations: Redwood Regional Park Girls’ Camp

At the entrance to Redwood Regional Park Girls’ Camp

A week ago we headed to Redwood Regional Park with a group of families from our son’s school on a camping trip. I had ambitions, initially, of trying to cargo bike into the campsite. Anyone who knows anything about the Oakland hills is now laughing.

The trip to Redwood goes up steep hills on roads with names like “Snake” which are meant to evoke the serpentine path they follow up a hill so steep that attempting to scale it even in a motorized vehicle involves a nauseating number of switchbacks. Redwood Regional Park’s gates are at the ridge, and from there the way in is basically straight downhill in the other direction. The paths down into the park, although portions can be ridden or driven, are not only extremely steep but deeply rutted and narrow. So yeah, we drove and walked in.

Tents up: time to explore them

Girls’ Camp is about a half-mile from the Skyline Gate, straight downhill. If you reserve the campsite, you get a code to open the padlock to the Stream Trail entrance. Only two cars are allowed to park overnight at the site, but by shuttling back and forth all of the families we camped with were able to portage down, empty out their gear, and then head back up to park at Skyline Gate overnight (you also get overnight parking passes).

Parking was near the bathroom at the far end

The camp site itself can hold up to 75 people, and with 30 or so we were nowhere near this limit. Girls’ Camp has a bathroom and cold running water, as well as tables, benches, and grills. Next to the firepit at the far end there is a shelter that the kids used as a stage and a place to run around.  This site is in the middle of a well-traveled trail, but by evening anyone not camping is gone, and we had the park to ourselves. The site itself is beautiful, and Oakland parks are almost completely free of bugs other than yellow jackets (which stung two kids over the weekend, but I think this is atypical).

Some kind of game involving balls was played, but let’s not get hung up on the details

We hadn’t been camping with our two kids before and this was a great introduction. They spent the first few hours checking out all of the tents and spotting bunnies in the woods. The tombstone family had brought a badminton/volleyball net and for much of our stay the older boys played these two games simultaneously.

For some reason it was extremely important that we carry this stick around

One of our friends is the Martha Stewart of family camping and had stopped at the Civic Center farmers’ market, where she had picked up, among other things, four dozen free-range organic eggs for $12. I had always shunned the Civic Center market because of its historic live-chicken-slaughtering reputation, but apparently the city cracked down on that and now the Heart of the City market is the place to shop. At any rate we all ate well. The first night the kids spent hours making s’mores which in the case of our kids may well have been the peak experience of their lives to date.

We had planned to stay two nights, but learned on the first night that our daughter is still too young for overnight camping. For two hours straight after bedtime she was so amped up she was yelling randomly, “I have a bike! I saw a bee! Stop bothering me! I need to sleep! Did you see the bunny! I saw a bee! Stop bothering me!” Of course she was up at the crack of dawn. Our only consolation was that the other three year old held his two-hour screaming fest at midnight, making us only the second-most obnoxious family at Girls’ Camp.

Walking along the Stream Trail

So on the second day we hiked the Stream Trail out and back, which was beautiful. We returned to head further into the park to the Roberts swimming pool, and deciding to quit while we were ahead, packed up after dinner and headed home. Both kids slept like the dead in the house, thankfully, although our son turned up in our bed and did his level best to shove both of us out of it. We still had a great time.

It is, evidently possible to ride bikes in Redwood, although not to ride them the way we do. One family had brought mountain bikes and took a side trip; mom drove them uphill to the start of the trail and then drove downhill to wait for them at the end. There is so much gender politics wrapped up in that story I can’t hope to unpack it all. But it struck me as the mirror image of much of bike commuting in the United States. Mom is the sag wagon. If people couldn’t rely on that free ride, how different would bicycling be?

Lots of families looking for shade

Sometime, when our kids are older and our daughter might sleep through the night, we will try camping again. Although Redwood is beautiful, another possibility was the destination of another family in our group the next week: Angel Island. The only way onto Angel Island is by ferry, and only walkers and cyclists can ride the ferry.  That would be a different kind of trip, but we had such a good time, we’d like to try it again once sleep is a real possibility.

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June 8, 2012 · 9:36 am

Summer time and a new commute

The day-glo orange t-shirt is issued to every wheelkids camper.

Now that school is out, our son will be spending most of June at wheelkids bike camp, learning to start, stop and with any luck, to scale some of San Francisco’s notorious topography. He had a slight edge over some other kids his age going into camp, having never used training wheels, so there were no bad habits to break. However I think I have mentioned before that his braking strategy to date has been to point the bike at one of us and yell, “Grab my bike! I need to stop!”

That’s fine at the park, but let’s draw the curtain of charity over what it was like at stop signs. The hills around our place were also an issue. Anyway, from the perspective of improved braking technique, especially on hills, so far so good. He is having a great time, and on the ride home from camp yesterday, pointed out hills he’d ridden up and down by himself, some of which were pretty respectable. Yesterday was his first ride on the Brompton IT Chair. He’s really too tall for it, but is now confident enough to climb aboard. Anyway it is very fun to have a conversation with a tall kid in an IT Chair, sort of like sitting in the corner of a coffee shop. A moving coffee shop.

One of the Presidio hills we face: Note the no bicycles sign. Go up if you can, but it’s too steep to ride down.

The only downside of wheelkids, from our perspective, was that it is in Fort Mason Center, on the northern edge of the city, nowhere near our usual commute routes. Not to mention there is that huge unavoidable hill in the Presidio between here and there. In addition, there was the issue of how to get our son’s bike to camp on the first day. I had hoped to attach it to the Brompton with the Trail-Gator we scored on craigslist, ride over with him, and drop off both kid and bike. But ultimately we were unable to get the bracket on. The Trail-Gator also wouldn’t fit over the MinUte‘s long rear deck. The Breezer seat post was blocked by rear child seats and their attachments. How could this be impossible? Late Sunday night we gave up. We drove our son to bike camp on Monday morning. Oh, the irony. It is a hellish commute by car in the morning, with unbearable traffic, and it consumed over 45 minutes. By comparison the bike ride takes about 35-40 minutes and goes through two nationally renowned parks. Driving was The Suck.

Heading out to wheelkids and the Financial District on the Kona MinUte. Note Matt is wearing dress pants for this commute; he is so hardcore that he does this route perspiration-free.

Evidently it is standard practice to drive kids to bike camp, however. Our son was picked up by his sitter and they rode the bus home on Monday, so we didn’t realize until Tuesday morning that as is SOP, the camp had kept his helmet along with his bike. After trying on other family members’ helmets for him, none of which fit, Matt had to drive him to camp again. Maybe those anti-helmet advocates have a point.

So Wednesday was the first day that any of us rode to bike camp. Matt took him on the MinUte because the trip from there to his office is relatively flat, and the camp is vaguely en route, comparatively speaking. As usual, although it sometimes takes longer than we anticipated to get everything working, the bike commute ended up being better than I’d dared to hope.

It’s hard to get a good shot of the Kona MinUte on the move.

Matt’s update: “BTW, the ride this morning was great — though one look at the Arguello hill and I wimped out.  I took Clay up to Presidio, which is a much milder slope up over Presidio Heights.  The trip from Ft. Mason to the office was a breeze.  Whole thing was ~1 hour, not including the 10 min stop at wheelkids.  Scenery is pretty unbeatable the whole way — water and bridge views everywhere along the Marina and Embarcadero.”

Back in the game!

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June 6, 2012 · 7:27 am

Upgrading the Breezer Uptown 8

That’s right, my Breezer didn’t have enough stuff hanging off it yet. I needed more.

One day when we were visiting our local bike shop, Everybody Bikes, I was complaining that it was getting increasingly difficult to get up hills as our kids gained weight every month. My Breezer Uptown 8 handles hills well with reasonable loads (like a single rider and a preschooler) but it was getting to be a slog with a 6.5 year old on the back. The shop owner suggested I gear the bike down. But it has an internal hub, I said. Oh, you can still change out the rear cog for a larger one, he said, and that would give you the equivalent of two extra low gears (at the cost of losing the two highest gears, which I never used: whatever). The cost? About $20. Whoa. Sign me up!

What’s more, the brakes were getting soft, again. This issue seems to crop up every couple of months. The Breezer’s brakes aren’t as bad as the original brakes on the Kona MinUte, but San Francisco does seem to eat through bicycle stopping power.

My new front basket, the Soma Gamoh.

I also wanted to be able to carry more cargo on the bike. They suggested a front basket. Putting one on would require rewiring the front dynamo light, but they could do that with some time.

And my kids wanted a cargo kickstand. They hated my little stock one-legged kickstand; they thought it was too wobbly, which was true. And that would argue for a front wheel stabilizer, for basically the same reason.

At last, a kickstand that is not pathetic.

Finally, we wanted to attach the custom rear rack for our new trailer-bike. And that meant rewiring the rear dynamo light, which attached to the stock rack.

This had all turned into a kind of major project, but upon reflection it seemed worth it. Two weeks ago the Breezer went into the shop for all these changes at once. For much of last week I came back for tweaks (the front light stopped working, then started again, the kickstand wasn’t in, then it came in, we had to fit the adjustable trailer-bike handlebars to our son, ad infinitum). Now the Breezer is back in action, and while some of the modifications are a bit kludgy—there was no pretty way to attach a stabilizer on my big fat down tube, and a trailer-bike always looks ad hoc—they all make the bike work better. The gearing change alone would have been worth it.

This is the Frankenstein of wheel stabilizers, but it gets the job done. Anyway no one has ever waxed rhapsodic about the Breezer’s clean lines.

Lowering the gears turned out to be the cheapest adjustment I have ever made to my bike, and the most practical. The rear cog original to the Breezer has 18 teeth, while my new rear cog has 22 teeth. It didn’t seem to me like four teeth would make a difference, but ignorance like that is why I don’t work at a bike shop. It makes a massive difference. I have had to completely relearn my gears, but the un-laden Breezer now cruises up serious hills like they’re barely there, and that’s without my first gear making much of an appearance—I’m almost always able to keep the granny gear in reserve. Laden up with a kid on the back or the trailer-bike (a bonus 30 pounds) or a heavy bag in the front basket, going up hills is significantly more challenging, so no worries: this bike will still keep me honest.

The new fork-mount for the headlight is unlovely but very effective.

The dynamo lights had to be rearranged to fit around the front rack, but this has actually increased my visibility. And the front cargo rack, a Soma Gamoh, is large enough to hold two grocery bags. It’s not frame-mounted, but it can take a lot of weight with the fork-mount. Combined with my two panniers I doubt that I’ll ever have to shuttle home after a grocery run again, especially now that the bike is geared to take the extra weight up hills. And the improved brakes will now stop me on the way back down.

Because I’m ignorant, I’d never realized it was possible to make these kinds of changes to a bike. Apparently some bikes aren’t worth upgrading, and last week I overheard a conversation with another customer in which our shop told him exactly that. Nevertheless: I used to get frustrated by the limitations of our bikes. Now I don’t bother getting annoyed until I’ve asked whether it’s something that can be changed.  It’s been enlightening for me to realize that having a local bike shop hanging with us through the last several months means that we can often remake our bikes into the rides that we need them to be.

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June 1, 2012 · 7:55 am

Parking a bike in San Francisco’s Tenderloin

It’s hard to see, but this new Tenderloin building has vertical wind turbines along the side to generate its own power–it was very cool.

Earlier this week the stars aligned and my husband and I headed out for a rare date night. Tuesday is not exactly the romantic night of choice in the city and the first restaurant we’d hoped to visit was not even open. Although riding our bikes through the Tenderloin was not our first choice, there was an open restaurant and a nearby movie theater, so to the Tenderloin we went.

The thought of parking a bike on the street in that neighborhood was unappealing. The Brompton was still in the shop. We were hoping that San Francisco’s law that all garages open to the public must provide bike parking would come through for us. It totally did.

This parklet on Polk Street was new to us. Note the electric bike parked in the racks alongside!

Riding to the Tenderloin turned out to be pretty easy; we had to cross over Alamo Square but the rest of the route was pretty flat. The main drag over is on McAllister, which goes through several blocks of public housing projects, but they are not the kinds of public housing projects that draw a lot of shootings (those are further south) although property crime rates are high. It turns out that riding through the Tenderloin feels much safer than driving through it; we both commented on this. I’m not sure why that is. The dedicated bike lanes certainly helped, but in the past driving on those same streets felt more intimidating.

The hotel had one tiny bike rack next to a dumpster, but no complaints! No one else was using it.

We went to a Moroccan restaurant in a hotel, which is surprisingly good. We hoped that we might be able to put the bikes in the bell room, as I’ve done in hotels in other cities. No such luck here, but they did have a garage below the hotel, and they did indeed meet the legal requirement for bike parking. The garage didn’t hold any actual cars; it was used for deliveries and storage. The tiny bike rack was next to a dumpster filled with rolls of carpet on one side and several dozen fold-up beds and portable cribs on the other. They closed the garage door after us, thankfully, because I realized I had forgotten my lock, a San Francisco disaster. Matt had his and was able to lock my bike with his cable, but total security fail on my part. But with the garage door locked behind us we felt we would have been safe no matter what.

The restaurant was more appealing than the garage, happily.

When we walked upstairs to the restaurant, I got the feeling we may have been the first people ever to use those racks, because the host was completely blown away that we’d ridden our bikes there, evident when we popped up through the garage door, not the typical entrance. “Let me get you some water right away! You must be thirsty after you RODE YOUR BIKES!” And then, “Do you want some more bread? You’re probably really hungry! After all, you RODE YOUR BIKES!” I appreciated the attentiveness but it started to get a little weird.

These are the bike racks at the AMC Van Ness parking garage (also unclaimed).

Feeling pretty lucky, we picked up our bikes, waited for them to unlock the garage, then headed to the movie theater. Matt really, really wanted to see The Avengers. I think this may have been the first movie we’ve seen in a theater since our son was born over six years ago. We had no idea that the theater garage now charges $17 to park a car during a movie. This is the validated rate! It’s higher if you’re just dropping by. But another score: per city ordinance, AMC Van Ness has a bike rack, right across from the staffed parking office and behind the limos. Again, this was a weird place to park a bike, and the racks themselves were crappy. But with only one lock between us, we couldn’t have asked for a safer place than next to a bunch of limo drivers waiting for their passengers and the parking attendant.  And it was free, an unbeatable price.

We both liked the Polk Street bike lanes; very mild uphill grades and lots of company.

We have found that there are often these unexpected great places to park bikes around the city, particularly in garages. I kind of wish there were a map that showed them all, because we always feel a bit uncertain. But so far so good.

Of course we had to ride home after the movie, and the eastern approach to Alamo Square is brutal, and then it’s followed by the usual slog up Mt. Sutro to get home. But it was a good night, better on the bikes that it would have been in a car, and unquestionably cheaper. It’s like a discount plan: ride your bike on four dates, and the cost of the babysitter for the fifth date is free.

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May 15, 2012 · 9:14 am

Do the Wiggle!

Here in San Francisco, we may not yet have the dedicated bikeways of cities like Portland. But we love the ones we do have, which is why the Wiggle now has its own jingle.

 

(Hat tip to wheelright.)

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May 11, 2012 · 6:16 am

Brompton M6R, with IT Chair

Brompton with IT Chair in Golden Gate Park

When I got the news of my promotion I bought a folding bike. But not just any folding bike: a Brompton. How come? Because it’s the only folding bike with a child seat, that’s how come. No bike will enter our lives for years to come unless it can haul the small.

I would advise the potential purchaser of a Brompton+IT Chair to be very sure that they are going to be okay with a lot of attention from strangers. And I do mean a LOT of attention. It’s not something that I was expecting. This setup stops traffic of all kinds. Jaws drop. People run over to see your bike. People in San Francisco are typically extremely cool in the face of the unusual. Piano bike? Sequined gold hot pants on a drag queen sashaying through the Financial District on a weekday afternoon? Bike Friday triple tandem? Naked people hiking through Golden Gate Park with fanny packs? Nothing worth noticing here! But people here gawk when they see me with my daughter on the Brompton, and yell, “COOL BIKE!”

The Brompton is both outrageously goofy and breathtakingly awesome. Even though I swear a blue streak at its makers every time I go up a steep hill (and I got the “San Francisco” gearing!), I love this bike. And although I was not really looking for practicality, this may actually be the most practical bicycle purchase a city rider could make: it’s a utility bike.

Brompton (with IT Chair) in a small shopping cart

I am sidestepping the fundamental question here, which is why I got a folding bike at all. Part of the answer is that it was cool and unlike any other bike, which fit with my desire to get a bike that could compete with a pretentious chair. But most of the answer is that it seemed like a great bike for riding in the grittier parts of the city and for taking on the road. It makes bike rides possible that weren’t possible before. I would never lock up my Breezer outside when I am visiting homeless shelters in the Tenderloin, but there’s been no problem bringing a folding bike inside to meetings. The Brompton also fits in a shopping cart at the grocery store, and when I don’t feel like locking it up, that’s exactly what I do with it. Moreover the Brompton is a clever travel bike. The Capitol Corridor Amtrak line that I took to Sacramento often runs out of bike spaces. Having been warned, I took the Brompton. The Amtrak folks recognized it instantly, but they do not count it as a bike. Later, when I hitched a ride in a friend’s car back to San Francisco, the Brompton fit in the trunk with plenty of room left over for our luggage. I may be taking an extended trip to Washington DC next year; if that happens, I will take the Brompton with me. If we lived in a small apartment again, this bike would easily fit in any random corner.

The Brompton tucked under a shuttle bus seat

The Brompton isn’t the cheapest folding bike you can buy, but it’s not the most expensive either. And this surprises me, because the incredible fold means you can put it almost anywhere. Most of the time mine hangs out in our non-functional fireplace, which it turns out is basically a Brompton-sized hole in the wall.

Home storage of the Brompton (with my sneakers for scale)

I ordered my Brompton from Warm Planet, which sells only folding bikes. They had never heard of the IT Chair before, but they didn’t have experience with any other child seats either. This may be the one bike shop that I forgive for this ignorance, as they primarily serve multi-modal commuters heading to CalTrain (they offer free bike valet parking every weekday). But they were bemused that such a thing existed, and impressed that it folded with the bike. The IT Chair had to be ordered from the UK after being hand-machined in Spain. It turns out that this takes a while, but it also takes a while to get a Brompton, so ultimately they arrived within a week of each other. This is good, because I refused on principle to pick up the bike without the child seat.

IT Chair, detached (2012 model: no folding footpegs)

The design of the IT Chair seems to have changed. Formerly it had folding footpegs, but my IT Chair does not. It makes folding the bike with the seat a little more tricky, and you have to get the sequence just right. It also is ridiculously, laughably expensive given that it is essentially just a piece of bent pipe. On the other hand, given the sporadic-at-best production line, IT Chairs apparently lose nearly zero value on resale, when the time comes that we can no longer use it. We were unable to find one used, but did find lots of desperate requests for them posted in the years when they weren’t being made.

Maiden voyage on the IT Chair

My daughter loves the IT Chair. Given the choice, she always asks to ride “mommy’s present bike.” She loves it because she can stand on the footpegs and ring (and ring and ring) the bell. I love it because a front seat is outrageously fun and makes conversation with her easy. My former experience with a front seat (the Co-Rider debacle) was not reassuring. But my brother-in-law assures me that design-wise, the IT Chair is bombproof, for all practical purposes an extension of the frame. To my surprise, he loved the Brompton, and proposed that we should get one for everyone in the family, once the kids are big enough, arguing that we could park four Bromptons in the space of one ordinary bike. In the meantime, my son has thus far refused to ride the IT Chair, as the design does not appeal to his cautious nature (no kid handlebars). But recently he realized that his reluctance meant that his sister has now ridden more bikes than he has, and evidently this will not stand.

Parked in my office on a rainy day, bag still attached

I was surprised at some of the ways that the Brompton excels. Its fenders are the best I’ve ever seen, so this is now my bike of choice for rainy day commutes. Assuming (correctly), that putting a kid on the bike would imply lots of things to carry, I also got the largest Brompton bag, the T-bag (an extremely poor choice of name). All the Brompton bags are frame-mounted, which means that they can haul massive amounts of weight. And although I find the bag sort of ugly, it is big enough to hold all four of our helmets when parked at the bike valet, plus a few jackets. With this kind of cargo space, plus the small footprint, the Brompton has also become our bike of choice for trips to the farmers’ market. It effortlessly manages a week’s worth of groceries, up to and including a half-flat of strawberries and Matt’s boxes of wine.

It doesn’t do everything well. Although there are people who take this bike on long trips, I prefer my Breezer for distances longer than a few miles, particularly given that my daughter likes to stand up on the footpegs while we’re riding. And then there are the hills. For mild to moderate inclines, the supposedly-designed-for-hills gearing I got is more than adequate, even pleasant, although the shifting itself is bizarre, as it switches between an internal hub and a derailleur, so every gear change involves both handlebars. When I hit a steep incline, however, it suddenly feels like I’m dragging a cinder block behind the bike. I’ll admit that this may be because I’m often hauling more weight at the front of the bike than it was really designed to carry when I put both a preschooler in the IT Chair and a week’s worth of groceries in the bag. (And it doesn’t help at all when that preschooler decides it would be fun to shift the gears randomly. This is a downside of the front seat. That and the endless bell ringing.) But it can be a problem even on days when I am relatively unladen. I appreciate that this problem may be unique to San Francisco. Let us say that this bike has made me stronger.

Brompton with IT Chair, folded up (I have become one of those people who folds and unfolds my bike for fun: I know, I know)

Getting a Brompton also involved the purchase of several pricey accessories. It’s a good thing that I was thinking of this as a “yay, I got a promotion” bike, because otherwise the total cost of all the extras could have ruined my mood. The IT Chair is the most obvious (price varies based on exchange rate at the time of order, assuming it’s in production), and the Brompton frame-mounted bags are expensive as well. It also turns out that it is difficult, if not impossible, to lock up a Brompton with a typical U-lock, and in San Francisco we do sometimes go places that are so small that even a folded Brompton is unwelcome. So on the recommendation of other folding bike owners I ended up getting a folding lock to go with my folding bike, the Abus Bordo Granit X-Plus. (However this lock is so fabulous that I ended up using it all the time. Matt asks to use it when we go out on rides together. So I can only really claim part of the price of this lock is specific to the Brompton.) On the other hand, the Ikea Dimpa bag that I sometimes use to carry it around was a steal at $4. Somebody at Ikea owns a Brompton.

Yet I would get this bike again in a heartbeat. It is surprisingly fun to ride, nimble and responsive. It is also fun to fold and unfold, and although it weighs are much as my daughter with all the accessories, it is fun to carry around. (I’m carrying my daughter around all the time anyway, so it’s not like a bike that weighs the same amount is a big deal.) It is safe in places where other bikes are not. It goes almost anywhere and stores almost anywhere. The Brompton may be the ultimate city bike. As a celebration of my promotion, it is infinitely better than a set of pretentious chairs.

The attention we get on the bike still surprises me a little, because riding it seems unremarkable to us now, but I find myself minding this less over time. The Brompton turns out to be the ultimate ambassador of family biking for people who’ve never thought of riding with kids before, which I find funny, because to me, my Brompton still looks like a clown bike. I think it seems less intimidating than a cargo bike; some moms see longtails and box-bikes and can’t imagine maneuvering them, but it is immediately obvious that any able-bodied person could handle a Brompton–and mine is usually hauling both a kid and two bags of groceries. (It could even haul two kids with a Trail-Gator, which another parent at our son’s school suggested.) And the Brompton, although it is by no means a cheap bike, costs less than a traditional cargo bike.

The Brompton is not my everyday bike, but I ride it every week. It proved to me that you should buy the cool bike. I keep it in the living room! And I smile every time I see it.

Update on the child seat from the manufacturer:

“About the website itchair.info it does no longer work; now, all our products are shown in www.milianparts.com

Still all our production is based in Europe –mainly in Barcelona (Catalonia, Spain)- and the It-Chair is now called PERE (http://www.milianparts.com/en/products/pere/)”

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May 7, 2012 · 9:00 am

Self promotion

Missing the point…

Have I mentioned that I am a professor at a medical center? I study health policy, specifically relating to preventable cancer risks (the big three being tobacco use, poor diet, and sedentary behavior). University faculty have an established career trajectory. After a certain number of years, your work is reviewed and you are either promoted or fired. Eventually everyone’s number comes up.

And so once a year, in early May, I end up with all of my coworkers in a windowless conference room all day, discussing each others’ activities and achievements while consuming immense quantities of caffeine, and then voting on who will be promoted. It is stressful and exhausting, but like Winston Churchill said: democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.

The university where I work, however, prefers the traditional academic Star Chamber method, so once the department makes a recommendation, candidates get to wait a year or longer, sometimes much longer, for the final verdict. And the university has, in the past, overturned departmental votes. All of this backstory is relevant to me because for over a year I have been in limbo. My university separates decisions about promotion from decisions about whether you get long-term job security (tenure). Thanks to some unusually bad timing on my part, I ended up having both questions under review simultaneously. My department voted for both, but the university kept its counsel.

This bike is too small.

Getting promoted is not a sure thing, and thus success is a cause for celebration. The traditional celebratory purchase by the successful candidate is a matched set of pretentious chairs. (Note: it is not necessary to be an alumna/us of a pretentious university to buy a pretentious chair.) I was recently informed, in writing, that my promotion was approved by the university. Hooray! I am not going to be fired! But here in the HotC household we are opposed to sedentary behavior. Tradition or not, I had no intention of buying chairs.

This bike is too big.

So I decided to buy a bike that cost the same amount instead. In any logical world, my celebratory purchase would be a cargo bike with an electric assist to haul both my kids up the ridiculous mountain we live on, which I have been dithering about for some time. However there were a few reasons to consider a different kind of bike. Most critically, I was still unable to decide what kind of cargo bike I really wanted. Another medium-tail? A long-tail? A box-bike? And I could still ride our existing cargo bike, the Kona MinUte, when Matt is away and I needed to haul both kids, even uphill. What’s more, an electric cargo bike would cost more than a set of pretentious chairs. And getting another cargo bike seemed contrary to the somewhat impractical spirit in which people buy pretentious chairs. Despite my opposition to the chairs themselves, I wanted to get into the spirit of things.

All this suggested that if I were going to get a bike, I should perhaps get a different kind of bike altogether. And so I did.

This… isn’t a bike at all.

(Last but not least: I still have another personnel action pending, for the equivalent of a lifetime appointment at this university. My mentor waited three years before getting word about her appointment, so I am not exactly holding my breath waiting for updates. The traditional celebratory purchase for people in this happy event is a house. Yet we are in the somewhat odd situation of not really wanting to buy a house, as we would be perfectly happy to remain in campus housing until we die. And so if I secure this outrageous good fortune at some future date, I will get a cargo bike—with electric assist—instead. Two new bikes would easily qualify as ridiculous excess. But then again, even two bikes are cheaper than a house, and Family Ride says you can never have too many. Who am I to argue with that kind of expertise?)

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April 20, 2012 · 8:45 am

Bellingham destinations: Kulshan Cycles

Surprise! We visited a bike shop in Bellingham! Unbelievable, right?

There are places in Bellingham that I recognize and places I don’t. It’s been about 20 years since I lived there, and like anywhere else it changes. From my jaded urban perspective many of these changes are improvements; it is possible, for example, to get a decent meal in a restaurant, if you aim squarely at the paper-napkin-but-the-heavy-kind level. With this target firmly in mind we headed one evening to a brewpub. We were not the only people who had this idea, it turned out, and the place was packed; even if the only patrons had been riders of the bicycles parked in front, they wouldn’t have been able to seat us. So they gave us a beeper and told us we could go anywhere within four blocks for the next hour. We took the kids outside because they were being raucous. It was the best decision we could have made, because a block away was Kulshan Cycles.

This is only 1/3 of the store.

Kulshan Cycles was a store that I did recognize. It turns out they’ve been in business in the same location for 37 years, longer than my family has lived in Bellingham. I had a vague memory of going in once before, but whatever I remember pales in comparison to reality. It was in some ways the strangest bike shop I’ve ever visited.

A display like this is always a good sign.

In San Francisco, bike shops specialize. There is a shop that sells only folding bikes, and a shop that only  does repairs, a couple that sell only electric bikes, and about a bazillion that specialize in either mountain bikes or fixies. Bellingham is not big enough to have specialty bike stores. Instead, it has Kulshan, which does absolutely everything. I know just enough about bikes now that I was blown away by the diversity.

We had to drag them off these bikes, literally.

My kids ran to the kids’ bike section. The display bikes in various sizes made the only practical use of training wheels I’ve ever seen—the store had attached them to boards so that kids could use them like stationary bikes. Mine spun on those bikes for about 40 minutes, and it was very easy to see which bike fit each kid. In the meantime I walked around their enormous store, increasingly impressed.

This Brompton featured my high school colors. Nice touch.

They sell Bromptons, and had a display Brompton that I could practice folding and unfolding. And speaking of the UK, they sell Pashleys, which I had only ever heard of before, as heavy 3-speed English bicycles are about as practical as Hummers in San Francisco. They’re not very practical in Bellingham either, which is hilly, but they had one just in case.

Well hello there.

They sell mountain bikes. They sell commuter bikes, and nice ones at that. And they sell many cargo bikes! An orange Batavus Personal Delivery, which I knew listed at over $1000 (later I checked: list is $1300) was on sale for $750! It’s also not a good climber, which perhaps explains the screaming deal. But if you are in the market for a Bat, I’m guessing that even with shipping it would be tough to beat this price. They had a Trek Transport, which I’d never seen in person before. They had nearly every Surly under the sun in stock, but had recently sold their Big Dummy.

Pretty commuter bikes

At this point I had started talking to the guys on the floor. One of them told me he had built his own Xtracycle-type bike the year before the FreeRadical came out, and had put a child seat for his son on it. Then he showed me the child seats they sold; a rack-mounted seat even cheaper than the Topeak (which I now think of as the finger-slicer). They stocked that particular seat because that was what had sold historically, but had ordered and installed Yepp seats for customers recently.

Unicycles: are they more or less practical than fixies? Discuss.

I told them I was blown away by the selection. “Oh, have you seen our overpriced fixies?” they laughed, pulling out a bike painted the same flat black color as cars that speed on country roads late at night with their headlights off. I know nothing about fixies except that they have no gears and that in San Francisco they are primarily ridden by people who hate children, but evidently this one was an exemplar of the genre, as it cost $3000. And this was at a bike shop willing to sell a Bat for almost half-off. In San Francisco I presume it would sell for $5000.

When I told them I was visiting from San Francisco, they asked if I had an electric assist on my cargo bike. Because it turns out that they also sell electric assists, primarily the BionX, and given the local topography, that market has been growing. They had a loaner Trek with a BionX in the back that they let customers use for a few days if they were thinking about electric bikes, and did I want to borrow it? It was very tempting, but that bike didn’t have child seats, and they’d need a day to put them on, and we didn’t have another day.

Trailers and child seats

Would they rent it to me on a future visit? They were willing to consider it. Will I be calling them to try to rent a bike the next time I’m headed to Bellingham? You bet. But if that doesn’t come through, it turns out that there are other shops that rent bikes in town: Fairhaven Bike & Ski (which is the same vintage as Kulshan, and also offers rental trailers), Jack’s Bicycles, and Fanatik, none of which I visited but all of which I will check out if necessary, because the next time we visit Bellingham, we’ll be rolling on two wheels.

My son wanted the Sumo wrestler horn. I told him he already had a horn.

In the meantime, Kulshan has unicycles. They have beach cruisers. They have Sumo bike horns. They have multiple child trailers, which make sense to use outside of major cities. They have t-shirts with bike-friendly messages in sizes down to infant. They had a balance bike displayed on a repair stand, and that made me laugh. The employees were clever and friendly and funny and happy to see kids in the store. I liked Kulshan Cycles. Not every small city has a bike shop like this, but all of them should.

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April 18, 2012 · 9:30 am

Life in a northern town

Back in the day, people in Bellingham lived in stumps. Totally not kidding.

Over spring break, while Matt was in China, I went to visit my mom in Bellingham, Washington, where I grew up. When I was a child, it was a pretty small place, mostly populated by bombed out Vietnam War veterans and hippies. I mean this literally. My high school geography teacher was deaf from his years in a bomber. We knew people who kept goats, and sometimes the goats lived with them inside.  We foraged for berries and clams a few blocks from our house. The town was, at the time, remote.

My kids loved finding bivalves on the beach

This has changed. It is now a destination of sorts, at least for retirees. The university has grown from a glorified teaching college to a desirable place to get an education statewide. There are restaurants without the word “shack” in their names. Parts of the city have expanded so dramatically that I get lost on the new roads leading to new developments with new schools. The beaches are lined with condos. There are people who actually commute from Bellingham to Seattle, although it is 90 minutes away by car without traffic. If some parts of the US are emptying out, other parts are filling up.

Bike racks outside a downtown restaurant

When I got older I became itinerant. Since I graduated from high school, I have never lived more than three years in one place. My mom has lived in Bellingham for 35 years.  We try to visit, but manage it only rarely. On this trip I realized that although I remembered how to get around the older parts of town, I had forgotten a lot about it. It is not an accident that this was the place I learned to ride my bike. Although it is hilly, it is a bicycle-friendly place, and then some.

Bike racks at the beach

Bicycle-friendly encompasses a lot of things. I regret that I was unable to get a picture of the most outlandish bicycle I saw, which was a tandem bicycle with a gas motor rigged in the stoker position that sounded like leaf blower, dragging a stripped trailer behind. Although I spotted (and heard and smelled) this bike three times in a single week, I missed a photo because it was always moving at about 25 mph in car traffic.  Less outlandish was the couple at my mom’s church with infant twin boys, who had commuted with them in a trailer almost since they were born. (Although trailers are a poor choice for kids in San Francisco, I would feel safe with my kids in a trailer in a small town.)

Life out of balance at the county museum

While I was in town I mostly drove, because my mom hasn’t ridden a bike in years, does not currently own a bike, and lives at the top of a hill far from public transit, which is pretty limited anyway. My mom has a Prius and after driving it for a week I decided that (a) I hate driving and (b) I hate driving a Prius, which has terrible sight lines and a weird turning radius, and made me feel even more like a road hazard than usual. And getting the kids into and out of the car was a huge hassle compared to loading a bike. Going to Seattle to visit Family Ride was a relief.

But I was pleased to see all the ways that Bellingham welcomes bikes for those who choose to ride them, and encourage people who are on the fence. There are ample bike lanes and extensive bike racks. Riding bikes is subsidized, more than in San Francisco. This would be a great place to live for a biking family. While I was there, the paper covered a local move by bicycle.

Full bike racks for a yoga class

Another example: while I was in town I took some yoga classes at a studio in town. They offered free mat rentals to anyone who arrived by bike, bus, or public transit, because “it’s harder to bring your own mat that way.” A lot of people took them up on that offer. The studio, 3 Oms, was a lovely place, although my limited time there meant I had a limited choice of classes, and ended up in some inappropriate ones. The intermediate class focusing on learning new postures I visited while my daughter was napping was learning Astavakrasana (“one of the easiest arm balance poses!”), or, in my case, not learning Astavakrasana. But this kind of support for alternative transit was not unusual; I saw it all over town.

Museum-1: nice ride

And again: when we visited the county museum, I spotted a lovely commuter bicycle by the entry desk. The woman working there told me that it was purchased by the city for employees to use for errands and lunches around town. The museum had only one, but the Department of Public Works, with more employees, had four, and so on. She said she used it frequently, and wished she could afford one of her own.

Museum-1 up close, with city seal

On closer look, I could spot the city logo. For obvious reasons, they did not bother to lock this bike up.

My kids love visiting Bellingham. This always surprises me a little, as there is not much to do, relative to the city, but they like skipping school and seeing their grandmother and picking up pinecones in the woods around her condo and occasionally going a day or two without eating any vegetables. Although in the past I’ve sometimes gotten bored during a week in Bellingham, I found I enjoyed myself too. And at the end of the week, I even found a place to rent a cargo bike with an electric assist. Next time we visit, we’ll be cruising around in style.

A variety of cargo bike choices

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April 11, 2012 · 7:51 am

Families ride!

We love Seattle!

When Stacy at A Simple Six heard I was headed up to Seattle for spring break, she introduced me to Family Ride (she knows everyone!) We don’t have much opportunity to ride our bikes with other families in San Francisco. We have friends who ride with their kids to school, and we see them on the playground in the morning, but there are no city rides along the lines of Kidical Mass, unless you count Bike to School Day, which I don’t, really, as it is once a year. Anyway people in San Francisco tend to flinch when they hear anything that sounds like “Critical Mass” in this city; its reputation is mixed at best. I know I do. So I’d only taken my kids on a ride with friends just for the fun of it once before, when we had the Yuba. But after spending the day with Family Ride, I wish San Francisco had more kid rides, even if they were called Spawn of Critical Mass.

All lathered up after a nice long ride in the rain

We didn’t have much choice about the day we visited; my mom works in Seattle one day each week, so that’s when we went. After scoring incredible good fortune weather-wise while in Portland and during most of my stay with my mom, my luck finally ran out when we headed to Seattle. It rained the entire time we were in the city. I grew up in the constant drizzle of the Pacific Northwest, and although generally I find any non-temperate climate appalling and think that central heat is a wonder of the modern age, I can handle drizzle. Unfortunately I didn’t think to pack rain clothes. My kids spent the entire ride in rain gear cobbled out of garbage bags. I got wet. And soapy! Evidently the rinse cycle on our washer leaves something to be desired, because after a couple of hours pedaling in the rain, my pants actually began to lather up. I was glad I packed a change of clothes.

Four little monkeys

Despite all of this, we had a great time. Family Ride was an awesome host, arranging a ride with multiple stops to dry out and refuel the kids. Mine were on what I think of as “vacation strike” and eating a diet that consisted largely of chocolate chip cookies. But a stop at Theo Chocolate led them to expand their horizons by consuming several handfuls of chocolate samples as well. Theo Chocolate was an inspired stop; the kids clambered on the bike rack and had to be coaxed inside. My son was so enamored that he spent the entire trip home telling me about his plans to open a Theo Chocolate branch in San Francisco when he grew up.  I only wish that we had taken the tour, because he has little understanding of the chocolate making process and wants to start trying to create new flavors at home, and it is difficult to communicate to him that the specialized equipment involved makes this the kind of thing you need a factory to develop. Plus I have no idea how to import cacao beans for personal use.

Let's think of some other things that start with C... oh, who cares about the other things! C is for Cookie!

The end of the line was a Dutch bike shop, complete with café and a return to chocolate chip cookies. This was the first time I’d been in a Dutch bike shop, and it was interesting—all the bikes there looked great for riding in the flats, but improbable for hills. Family Ride told me she knew a mom who actually had a bike like this and lived on a hill, and she walked it home every day. I don’t think I could live like that. From there we turned around and headed back. The official detour for the closed path was on a sidewalk, and it felt like living dangerously to ride there, as this is totally illegal in San Francisco.

My kids were both wildly impressed with the pink bike

How good a host is Family Ride? She let us ride her new pink Big Dummy for the day! It is a great bike, and although I did not come anywhere near testing its capacity to haul stuff, it carries two kids with ease. I felt very lucky, and also tried very hard not to drop it. I was successful, although the turning radius was wider than I expected. Keeping the seat down helped me maneuver it.

Guess which hill? There's no way to ride on it.

I also got a taste of Seattle hills, which are different than San Francisco’s but challenging nonetheless. Here the hills tend to be either steep and short or long and shallow. In Seattle they were long and moderate—10 or more blocks at a time of real climbing. None of it is so steep as to be impossible, but after the first three or four blocks, the prospect of going another six or seven feels very grim indeed. I’m pretty impressed that Family Ride does this every day with two kids on deck.

30 days of biking: almost as crazy as Theo Chocolate calling their World Bicycle Relief bicycle "not a bike"

Talking with Family Ride was what tipped me over the edge to try 30 Days of Biking, even though it was going to require a commitment to do some things that normal people would consider genuinely crazy, like haul my bike to Sacramento so I could ride around the block while attending a conference where I could not, this time, avoid several sessions and visit bike shops. But if Family Ride could go around the block before midnight in pajamas the first year to make all 30 days, hauling a bike to Sacramento and barely riding it seemed like small beans by comparison. She said that 30 Days of Biking was what made her the hard-core bike commuter that she is today—and she rides everywhere, at all hours. It is very impressive. I’m still a reluctant night rider and whine about hills. But with such a good example, maybe I can get better.

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