Tag Archives: travel

May 19, 2016 · 11:47 am

Stay these couriers

My mail carrier is an asshole.

We live on a street in San Francisco that has unusually wide sidewalks, and, not coincidentally, unusually narrow lanes for cars. It is also a bike boulevard, and connects directly to two of the separated bike paths in Golden Gate Park. Thanks to the narrow lanes, cars find it difficult to pass each other and avoid cutting through our neighborhood. These things are all great for us, as it means we live on one of the quietest streets in San Francisco, despite the fact that the streetcar runs one block parallel to us and we never have to walk more than a block to get on transit.

The wide sidewalks apparently serve as an irresistible temptation to a certain type of driver, however. My neighbors and I have learned to call the city to ticket drivers who decide that in the absence of a sufficiently convenient street spot, why not park on the nice wide sidewalk? It is apparently the same offenders over and over again, because word like us has gotten around, and our block now stays pretty clear.

A few blocks over, however, it’s a different story. My arch-nemesis in the sidewalk parking wars is unfortunately our mail carrier. Despite personal requests, calls to the city, calls to USPS, tweets to USPS, and in-person complaints at our neighborhood post office, he is an inveterate and unapologetic sidewalk parker. Every day his truck blocks it, leaving me, my kids, neighbors pushing strollers, etc. to fend for ourselves in the street. He parks on the sidewalk even if there is an open parking space on the street right next to the truck. I loathe that guy.

Eventually I will prevail—if nothing else, he is older than I am and thus will retire before I die—but in the interim it’s infuriating.

Me, saying something forgettable at the cancer prevention meeting.

Anyway, as a result of all this, I have mixed feelings about the US Postal Service. So earlier this week, when I attended a meeting addressing cancer prevention strategies held by the National Institutes of Health, I was vaguely depressed to realize it was being held at the Bolger Center in Potomac, Maryland, which it turns out is owned and operated as a retreat by, yes, the USPS. (The meeting itself caused me intellectual whiplash, which is another story altogether.)

This plant is brought to you by USPS.

The Bolger Center is extremely trippy in its own right. It contains a hotel, a conference center, a dining hall, and bar, and is set up like a college campus. It is labyrinthine and seriously confused multiple taxi drivers. Moreover literally everything on site, from the rooms right down to individual plants, was labeled with signs reading “USPS,” which frankly began to seem excessive. I was tempted to chase down to the squirrels and rabbits wandering around the lawn and woods to check them for tags as well, but they were too fast for me. Other than the 20-odd other attendees at the NIH meeting, the entire center was occupied by USPS middle managers on some kind of retreat. Perhaps recognizing the nature of their core constituency, the Bolger Center lacks sidewalks per se, although there are separated walkways, which are placed far away from the roads designed for cars.

Authentic mail bike: Now we’re talking.

All that said, I did discover something new and interesting among the various mail-related paraphernalia posted in the hallways. At the entrance to one building is a display of a postal bike! The sign, which is too small to read in my photo, explains that the USPS bought bikes like these from military surplus in 1944 and used them and their equivalents to deliver mail as late as the 1990s. How cool are these bikes? Amazingly cool! Why on earth did they stop using them? I have an offer for you, USPS: bring back the bikes; in return, you’ll never have a complaint about sidewalk parking again.

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Filed under cargo, San Francisco, travel

Tagged as cargo biking, travel

June 12, 2015 · 5:22 pm

A city without cars

Waiting for the vaporetto

Over spring break we went to Europe. This was a long-delayed trip, in honor of our son’s request, years ago, to visit a city without cars. There are parts of multiple cities that are car-free, and we have visited some of these (including, on this trip, in Bordeaux and Paris), and there are a few car-free places that are more bucolic (like Mackinac Island in Michigan) but there is only really one city that has (virtually) no cars, and that city is Venice.

Venice is both an easy and a hard city to love. The easy part to love is the beauty and the incredible sense of safety and comfort that comes from being someplace that is truly car-free.

We’re on a boat!

Our kids acclimated almost immediately and after a week, it was an unpleasant shock to step off the water taxi to walk to Marco Polo airport and discover a crosswalk. They were not prepared for passing cars despite our warnings and tried to run across as they would have in Venice proper. Less appealing is that Venice has been loved almost to death. Venice hosts more tourists than it has permanent residents every day of the year, and it is packed with people, all of whom seem to be hauling wheeled suitcases (which are, incidentally, almost totally useless in a city that uses bridges with stairs to allow people cross canals every few meters). What’s more, the city is riddled with tourist traps and it can be a challenge to find services that normal people use, like grocery stores, laundromats, and pharmacies. Also, unlike in the rest of Italy, we ate some of the worst meals of our lives in Venice. We are as guilty of doing touristy things as the next family, of course: we took our first gondola ride while we were there, and it was awesome. I do not dismiss all things touristy out of hand.

This is a Venetian handtruck: pull it up the stairs and the load stays steady, then flip it around and bounce it down.

I have become kind of obsessed with transportation over the last few years, so I was fascinated by how Venice worked. I took pictures of garbage boats and ambulance boats, and checked all the squares for the water cisterns, which historically were filled by filtered rainwater. You can still see the cache drains, although the cisterns have all been capped off and water is now piped. On the way out, though, sewage still drains right out into the canals, yeeargh. I digress. Goods and people in Venice move primarily by boat. For deliveries, one boat worker ties up the boat at the nearest dock to the destination, and the other grabs a hand truck to make deliveries. The hand trucks have two large wheels and two small wheels, so they can be dragged up steps on one side of each crossing bridge, and bounced back down on the other side, without tipping. I found the whole process fascinating to watch. Sometimes they cut out the middleman: we spotted more than one boat that served as a floating market.

Cement trucks on a barge! Words fail me.

The inability of Venice to handle any auto traffic whatsoever becomes surreal at times. We watched a barge pull up to a construction site carrying two cement trucks, which proceeded to mix and pour cement while tied up to the edge of the canal. It is patently ridiculous to use a truck to mix and pour cement in a car-free city, but this is pretty much the only way we have anymore to make large quantities of cement, so that’s what they did. It was moments like this that made me understand that what it really means to live in a completely car-dependent culture; I realized that certain things cannot be done any other way.

“Accessible” Venice, sometimes.

I spent a fair bit of time wondering whether the way that Venice worked could be exported to modern cities, given that is still the only car-free city in the world. And my conclusion was: sort of. One thing that makes Venice wonderful is the complete separation between different modes of transit, and this could and should be done everywhere. It is safe to walk anywhere (assuming you don’t walk right into a canal; this is Europe and governments don’t bother with safety rails) because the only motor traffic is in the water. In lieu of buses people ride the vaporetti, which honestly completely trump both buses and trains for unrelenting coolness. And unless they are on strike, they come every few minutes; it’s not like they’re going to get stuck in traffic. One thing that could never be exported is the relentless use of stairs, which makes the city totally inaccessible to the non-able bodied. The entire city is like Escher’s Relativity lithograph. There were occasional ramps, but only on the largest bridges, because most places there simply isn’t enough room for them. Riding bicycles is completely out of the question. We saw a few kids on scooters, but only those who had parents patient enough to carry them up and down the stairs every 100 steps or so. Strollers are basically nonexistent. Even so, I understand why people dream of living in Venice, despite the mostly-terrible food and the madding crowds and the near-impossibility of washing the clothes our kids threw up on during the plane ride. A car-free city is peaceful, and quiet, and beautiful. Even though the sewers dump right into the canals, the air is clean. We could let the kids run free. It was hard to leave and return to places where we always have to be alert, just to keep from being killed. After just a few hours in Venice it becomes clear that doesn’t have to be that way; we could redesign cities for people. And yet it is.

This is everywhere in Venice.

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Filed under car-free, destinations, travel

Tagged as car free, travel, Venice

December 2, 2014 · 4:52 pm

Family bike shops that I like

I get asked questions about family biking a lot (Always welcome! Feel free to email! I will be painfully slow to respond, but it will happen eventually). One of the more common questions I get from people is where I think they should shop for bikes. This can be an awkward question to answer. There are thousands of bike shops and only one me. Admittedly there are far fewer family-oriented bike shops, but still. I live in San Francisco and mostly travel north from there, because that’s where my family lives. There’s no way that I could ever be truly objective, let alone offer advice to people in say, Minnesota.

That said, at least I have no conflicts of interest. I am a professor of public health and health policy at a university medical center with an extremely strict policy about any kind of giveaway that could be even vaguely construed as professionally-related. Although my primary work is in tobacco control, active transportation could easily be viewed as related to public health, because, well, it is in fact related to public health. Under the terms of my contract, I can’t be compensated for anything I say on this blog or accept any discounts or freebies (loaners are okay, but I have to give them back). So if nothing else it’s safe to say that my wildly subjective opinions are based solely on my wildly subjective experiences.

So anyway, below is a list of family-focused bike shops that I’ve liked and would visit again. It is a short list. First, as mentioned, I haven’t really visited THAT many bike shops, plus I only included shops that would actually call themselves family bike shops (which excludes our local bike shop). Second, I only listed places where we’ve made two or more purchases. My apologies to all the other family bike shops—I’m sure you’re great, but I have no way to know. Third, to the extent that you can trust anonymous reviews, they all get great reviews.

Shops are listed in order of their distance from my house. I admit that this is a totally useless organizing principle to anyone but me, but hey, it’s my blog.

Ocean Cyclery (1935 Ocean Avenue, San Francisco, California)

“The Enablers”

Family-friendly hit list

Changing table in the bathroom: Not that I saw
Kids’ play area: No, but noodling around on kids’ bikes is encouraged
Customer seating suitable for nursing a baby: No
Cargo bikes: Yuba (Mundo, Boda Boda)
Assisted bikes: Yes, BionX both for the Yubas and as an after-market addition
Kids’ bikes: Yes, and a buyback program to help afford bigger bikes as kids grow!
Child seats: Yes, and a lot of expertise with them
What we bought there: My old Breezer, Bobike Maxi, Bobike Junior, accessories, service
Other: Ocean Avenue is a nice commercial strip with places to retreat when the kids get antsy, like the burrito shop next door. Transit access is excellent (it’s on the K line) and the former hippodrome around the corner is an outstanding place for test rides, especially for kids.

Ocean Cyclery is the first real family bike shop I ever visited, and they made it very easy to start biking for transportation. It is the shop where I often send people who ask me about different kinds of child seats, who want to buy bikes for their kids, and who tell me that they’re not sure they’re up for this “riding for transportation” thing that we’ve got going on but still want a bike, something inexpensive so they can ride with the kids on their new bikes in the park on weekends. Ocean has the widest selection I’ve seen in San Francisco of what I consider traditional family biking goods: child seats, trailers, and kids’ bikes. One Christmas they had a bike in the front window with a Bobike Mini on the front and a Bobike Maxi on the rear ready for test-rides, the only time I’ve ever seen such a thing in a bike shop. They offer a buyback program for kids’ bikes to make it easy to upgrade as your kids grow, and also have a great selection of bags and accessories. On the cargo bike side, they carry Yubas (assisted and unassisted). The owners, Jeff and Sabina, support the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and they are incredibly nice. As a bonus, Ocean has possibly the best location for test riding bicycles in all of San Francisco: it is a block away from the city’s former hippodrome, which is now a sleepy flat oval road surrounded by homes. Even little kids can safely try out bikes there. If you’re interested in family biking but not sure where to start, Ocean Cyclery is your bike shop.

All the pretty assisted bikes live here.

The New Wheel (420 Cortland Avenue, San Francisco, California)

“The Curators”

Family-friendly hit list

Changing table in the bathroom: No, but older kids will adore the tools and parts hung on every square inch of the bathroom walls; our son had to be forcibly extricated
Kids’ play area: No; however younger kids can play with kids’ bikes and older kids will gravitate to the shop’s iPad
Customer seating suitable for nursing a baby: No
Cargo bikes: Xtracycle EdgeRunner
Assisted bikes: All their bikes are assisted, and they will put after-market BionX assists on other bikes
Kids’ bikes: Yes, plus, unusually, a good selection of helmets for infants
Child seats: Yes, the Yepp rear seat
What we bought there: Our son’s Torker Interurban (20”), Xtracycle EdgeRunner, our daughter’s helmet, BionX upgrades, accessories, regular service visits
Other: Cortland Avenue is a quiet and increasingly upscale commercial strip so there are restaurants and shops, plus the Bernal Heights library about a block away if the kids lose patience. Getting there is a serious haul by bike but the 24 Muni line will drop you right in front of the shop.

The New Wheel is out at Sunday Streets offering test rides, FYI.

The New Wheel comes out to Sunday Streets to offer test rides of assisted bikes, FYI.

The New Wheel is a focused bike shop. They carry only electric-assist bikes (okay, and unassisted kids’ bikes—it’s illegal for kids to ride assisted bikes in California). They’re actually even more focused than that: they carry extremely reliable assisted bikes that anyone can ride. The whole electric assist market is still pretty nascent, and has only recently become more than a private enclave for the do-it-yourself set. For someone new to the idea of riding a bike, let alone riding an assisted bike, the obsessive hobbyist end of the market can feel completely overwhelming, to put it politely. It felt that way to me. The New Wheel is not set up like a traditional bike shop, with mystifying parts and accessories piled up on every surface. Instead they have bikes in front to test ride, and some reasonably identifiable accessories mixed in with actual art. It is a very non-threatening place for a new rider to visit. If you want an electric-assist bike, you should go to The New Wheel. Their expertise with assist systems is in a class of its own. Plus, they always have the most recent BionX software upgrades and know how to tweak the system to maximize the torque for hill-climbing. They also reset our BionX so that it kicked in at 0.5kph instead of 2mph, which has been a total game-changer for us. Many of their commuter bikes have mid-drive assists, some of which could probably scale anything short of a vertical wall. Also, they have the prettiest assisted bikes, with none of the hulking beasts that anchor (literally) the less expensive and less reliable end of the market. In keeping with the curated feel, they offer one family/cargo bike: the EdgeRunner (assisted, obviously), as well as one kids’ bike in each size. Everything in their shop promises years of trouble-free riding. Brett and Karen, the owners, are kind people who have immense patience with my wild ideas, and they are also big supporters of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. Their service is top-notch, way beyond expectations (you can bring your unassisted bike here for service too). Because The New Wheel is an all-assisted bike shop, it is located in Bernal Heights, among the steepest hills in the city, including Bradford Street, with its 41% grade. That’s kind of inconvenient for me personally, but hey, why not?

There are so many bikes it’s tough to get a good shot.

Blue Heron Bikes (1306 Gilman Street, Berkeley, California)

“The Aggregators”

Family-friendly hit list

Changing table in the bathroom: Uh, we didn’t visit the bathroom. Sorry.
Kids’ play area: Yes, a Lego table in the back corner, plus an extensive collection of kids’ bikes that they’re encouraged to try
Customer seating suitable for nursing a baby: No, although you can sometimes use the deck of a Bullitt for this
Cargo bikes: Brompton, Bullitt, Surly, Xtracycle, Yuba, and more
Assisted bikes: They carry assisted cargo bikes and will add after-market BionX kits to other bikes.
Kids’ bikes: Yes
Child seats: Yes, including the elusive Brompton Pere chair
What we bought there: Brompton accessories
Other: Gilman Street is a small commercial strip with some options for food and entertainment. The shop is right on the Ohlone Trail and easily accessible from North Berkeley BART.

The Lego table

A question I get a lot: “I want to try a lot of different kinds of cargo bikes. Is it worth traveling to Blue Heron in Berkeley?” My answer: Yes. Yes it is. They have all the bikes. They have cargo bikes I’d never seen or heard of before, and after the years I’ve spent obsessing about cargo bikes this is a rare experience for me. So if you want to compare riding a Bullitt with a Brompton with an Xtracycle with a Yuba with an odd-looking longtail that just came off a container ship from Japan, all in both assisted and unassisted versions, well, now you know where to go. It’s pretty obvious that Berkeley real estate is less expensive than San Francisco real estate, because they also have piles of commuter bikes and dozens of different kids’ bikes. As a result, Blue Heron Bikes is the Bay Area’s one-stop family bike shop. Even better, it is located along the Ohlone Trail, a shared bicycle-pedestrian path that runs past the North Berkeley BART station, and it has a large flat paved area in the back, which allows safe test rides for all ages. The owner, Rob, is passionate about family biking and patient with families who come in and are understandably a little overwhelmed with all the options they find. I’ve now met more than one family who bought a Bullitt there and made an adventure out of getting it back to San Francisco by ferry or BART, carving out an ad hoc Silk Road for family bicycles. Nonetheless, I feel resentful that Blue Heron is located in Berkeley and not in San Francisco.

Why not test ride in the shop itself?

Clever Cycles (900 SE Hawthorne Boulevard, Portland, Oregon)

“The Experts”

Family-friendly hit list

Changing table in the bathroom: Yes, and diapers too. Like Ikea! But cooler.
Kids’ play area: Yes, a large corner with a couch, toys, and books, plus kids’ bikes out the wazoo to try
Customer seating suitable for nursing a baby: Yes
Cargo bikes: Babboe, Bakfiets, Brompton, Metrofiets, Nihola, Surly, Workcycles, Xtracycle, Yuba, plus we spotted dark horses like the Kidztandem and Onderwater—seriously, it’s unreal
Assisted bikes: They carry assisted cargo bikes and they developed and sell the Stokemonkey assist.
Kids’ bikes: Yes
Child seats: Yes, yes, yes
What we bought there: rental bikes, accessories
Other: Hawthorne Boulevard is a commercial strip featuring distressingly fast car traffic with some options for food and entertainment (basically a nearby bar as I remember it). Head back onto the nearby quiet and leafy streets of Ladd’s Addition for test rides instead.

Why not a hot tub?

Clever Cycles is the drag queen of family bike shops: it’s faaaaaaabulous! Honestly it’s difficult to describe, let alone oversell, Clever Cycles’ raw, unadulterated family biking appeal. I say this even though the first time I walked in, the bike at the front door had a huge growler full of beer attached to it. Honestly this seemed a little off to me for a family bike shop, but that is only because I do not live in Portland. Portland is so beer-crazy that I assume local hospitals give it away to new parents in lieu of formula. Clever Cycles is a venerable institution in the world of family biking, as its owners were importing, designing, and selling family bicycles and electric assists before we even had children. There was clearly unmet demand back then, because the shop has expanded through its various incarnations to the point that it’s now gigantic, at least to my eyes. It does not look like any other bike shop. It looks more like a bike museum (admittedly I have only visited one bike museum, in Davis, California). In the front showroom the box bikes look almost petite, and the kids’ bikes are parked in long rows on oriental rugs. There is so much space that the mechanical parts of the shop are tucked away in back, with rows of even more bikes. Their accessories are so extensive that I would embarrass myself with the omissions if I tried to give details. However they were the first U.S. shop to discover and carry the Brompton child seat, back when the idea of carrying a kid on a Brompton sounded roughly as plausible as throwing a kid all the way to the moon. In the realm of family biking I suspect they have accumulated more firsts than even they can remember. Clever Cycles has the largest selection of rental bikes that I have ever seen, including Bromptons and family trikes. The shop also rents out portable hot tubs that it delivers to customers by bike, because this is Portland. I mean, obviously. Unusually, Clever Cycles sells some clothing too. My only frustration with Clever Cycles is that it is so well-suited to its locale (as it should be) that it is rather less well-suited to mine. Nonetheless, at least one owner is a former resident of San Francisco, and so even if their stock doesn’t reflect our issues—it’s hard to imagine a shop making a go of selling unassisted bakfietsen in San Francisco, although one shop tried and moved to Sausalito—they have the expertise to speak intelligently about them. Even some of the offhand comments they made back in 2012, when we first bought our Bullitt, turned out to be more prescient than I had hoped (they were skeptical about adding the Patterson). At some point I realized that I was not totally ignorant about family bikes anymore, but I know enough to know my limits. The people running Clever Cycles are experts.

Bullitt line-up at Splendid Cycles

Splendid Cycles (407 SE Ivon Street, Portland, Oregon)

“The Visionaries”

Family-friendly hit list

Changing table in the bathroom: Uh… once again we neglected to check the bathroom.
Kids’ play area: Yes, a corner with a bench and a basket of books and toys
Customer seating suitable for nursing a baby: Yes, plus the deck-of-a-Bullitt option
Cargo bikes: Bullitt, Butchers & Bicycles, Xtracycle
Assisted bikes: They carry assisted cargo bikes.
Kids’ bikes: No
Child seats: Yes, various options for the Bullitt and Yepp seats for the Xtracycle
What we bought there: our Bullitt, rental bikes, Bullitt parts and accessories
Other: Splendid Cycles is located on a weird little corner underneath the freeway and near some industrial/construction companies, which I offer as a warning because when we first got there, we thought we were in the wrong place. The shop is also directly adjacent to a lovely bike path that runs along the river. Portland, I sometimes find you kind of schizo. Who zones this way?

The kid zone

I first visited Splendid Cycles after we realized that we might actually be able to stop using our car in San Francisco if we had the right bike. The BionXed Big Dummy that they had available for test rides was the first assisted bike that I ever rode, and after hauling my extremely patient friend Todd on its deck up the hills around the shop I couldn’t stop grinning and thinking, “This could totally work!” Joel and Barb, the owners of Splendid, imagined a world full of crackpots like me and decided they could help make it happen. And so they did something that I would never have the courage to do: they opened a shop that sold only cargo bikes. And holy smokes, they were right: there really were a lot of crackpots like me out there. Splendid is best known for selling Bullitts (and in fact it serves as the source for all the Bullitts sold in the family bike shops we visit, as it imports them). But there are lots of good reasons to ride longtails as well, and Splendid had child seats on Big Dummies long before the EdgeRunner made its debut in less forward-thinking shops. They rent bikes as well, which is very helpful when learning to maneuver cargo bikes—in some cases (mine) there is a learning curve. I’m still awed by the sheer bravado involved in opening up a bike shop that doesn’t carry any “normal” bikes, but you’d never guess it was anything out of the ordinary from talking to Joel and Barb, who are down to earth and incredibly helpful and also know way more about cargo bikes than, like, everybody. When they started their shop cargo bikes were pretty much a boutique niche and everything was somewhat customized. The rain cover for the Bullitt was their development, and getting it made riding with our kids in all weather conditions completely unremarkable. Both the covers and the larger wooden boxes that hold more kids are accessories they developed with local Portland businesses. When we bought our Bullitt we had the option of getting a larger wooden box but declined in favor of the standard box both because we couldn’t get a rain cover for the wooden box and because we wanted a narrower bike. Not long after that, they’d developed rain covers for the larger wooden boxes and now they have 3-child Bullitt boxes and rain covers for those too. They are already selling Bullitts with the super-powered BionX D on them, which is not an option yet here in San Francisco, no matter how often I call. (One of the problems of being an early adopter is that now I’m always envious of the latest innovations.) They never stop coming up with new cool things, many of which are so popular that they stop being innovations. Then they put the only-slightly-less-cool older bikes on the incredible sale page of their website. Honestly, I didn’t really catch on to how impressive it all was at first because Joel and Barb are so mellow. They put their bike shop on an industrial corner and concentrate on the bikes rather than the bling. Splendid has all the right things without any unnecessary extras, and they are always coming up with more awesome ideas that make family biking (and the somewhat-less-interesting-to-me cargo biking) easier and more fun. Whenever there is discussion about adding bike lanes in San Francisco, there is always blowback from some people about how it’s only for hipsters, and that you can’t shop for groceries or carry kids on a bike. These people are wrong. Splendid Cycles is building a world where people can carry anything and everything on bikes.

The G&O logo is a family bike.

G&O Family Cyclery (8417 Greenwood Avenue N, Seattle, Washington)

“The Tinkerers”

Family-friendly hit list

Changing table in the bathroom: Yes
Kids’ play area: Yes, a train table right in front, plus some balance bikes that kids can ride
Customer seating suitable for nursing a baby: Yes, stools by the counter (and the deck of a Bullitt), not to mention a La Leche League sticker in the front window
Cargo bikes: Brompton, Bullitt, Metrofiets, Soma Tradesman, Surly Big Dummy, Xtracycle
Assisted bikes: They carry assisted cargo bikes and will add after-market BionX, Bafang, or Stokemonkey kits to other bikes.
Kids’ bikes: Cleary bikes (all sizes), Soma BART
Child seats: Yes, including the elusive Brompton Pere chair (in stock!)
What we bought there: Brompton parts and service, Xtracycle EdgeRunner accessories (frame-mounted front rack, Rolling Jackass center stand)
Other: Greenwood Avenue has great options for food and entertainment when the kids start to lose it, including the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Company (formerly the Seattle outpost of 826 Valencia)

The train table

G&O stands for Tyler Gillies and Davey Oil, and while their shop is less than two years old, I knew Davey well before then, when he had his own blog, Riding on Roadways (now folded into the shop blog). I love G&O because it has and does all the things that people learn they want once they start riding around with kids. It’s a bike shop that grew out of family biking. Almost all the bike shops we visited when we first started riding talked about family biking as something extra, “oh yeah, we’ll do that when we have time, later.” In most cases, of course, later meant never, but even shops that pick up family biking sometimes do it half-heartedly. But not here! This is a shop that had a changing table in the bathroom and a La Leche League sticker on the front door the day that they opened, and that puts the kids’ play table right out in front with the bikes. You can tell when you walk in the door that no one is going to freak out about your trying out a Yepp seat by actually putting a kid in it, something that happened to us (twice, in fact). G&O has launch parties when customers come to pick up their new bikes. They make a point of keeping accessories in stock that don’t necessarily make money, like the Brompton child seat, because “why should you have to wait for us to order it?” You want obscure kid-hauling stuff, like a helmet sized for a toddler? They’ve got your back. Despite the huge increase in family biking lately, things like toddler helmets are in fact considered obscure, and cargo bikes don’t necessarily have all the things families want yet. I think of Davey and Tyler as tinkerers because I know that there is nothing you can dream up that they won’t try to make work, as long as it’s safe. When I visited their shop last year, they were installing a Yepp mini front seat on a giant mountain bike with a telescopic fork, and the whole rig was covered in mud. It was the weirdest combination I’d seen in a while, and I stopped dead and said, “Really?” And Tyler smiled and said, “It’s what they want.” That visit to G&O is also where I found the frame-mounted front rack that now graces my EdgeRunner (maybe grace is the wrong word there, I concede that it’s not pretty), when I test rode Davey’s own personal EdgeRunner, which has the same rack. G&O also tested the first true pedal-assist Stokemonkeys, and have put more kinds of assist systems on a Bullitt than I knew existed. And of course they’ll take care of non-family bikes too. Servicing family bikers is like building for accessibility—what’s good for people in wheelchairs is good for everybody, and what’s good for families on bikes is good for all riders. Seattle is lucky to have G&O.

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Filed under bike shops, car-free, cargo, destinations, electric assist, family biking, kids' bikes, Portland, reviews, San Francisco, Seattle

Tagged as bike commuting, cargo biking, electric assist, family biking, Portland, San Francisco, seattle, travel

September 2, 2014 · 4:47 pm

The summer ends, the summer begins

Heading out on the first day of school, all of us on our own wheel(s)

In the middle of August, we headed up to San Francisco’s family camp in Yosemite, Camp Mather, to finish off the last week of summer before the kids started school. This year is a year of big changes, because our daughter just started kindergarten. For the first time ever, we have a single drop-off. And we have finally gotten both kids riding to school. Our daughter will be on the Roland add+bike for a while, because she has no traffic sense, but our son is on his own bike. This was a logistical challenge that took us a couple of years to solve, because he takes a bus from school to after-school and it lacks a bike rack, meaning we have to find a way to get his bike from school to after-school without him. It’s also a physical challenge, because his travel speed is approximately 3mph after a full day at school. However he’s building up stamina already.

Hanging out on the dock at Birch Lake

But Camp Mather! Berkeley and San Jose also had family camps, but theirs burned down in the Rim Fire. Camp Mather was set up for workers building the O’Shaughnessy Dam at Hetch Hetchy, so there was water to save it. San Francisco families can enter the lottery in the spring for a weekly slot, in either a cabin or a tent site. There is no internet of any kind while you’re there, and the only connection to the outside world is an unreliable pay phone, possibly the last of its kind in California. Our stay at Camp Mather was the most disconnected we had been in years.

This is one side of the bike parking outside the dining hall.

Even better from our perspective is that there is no driving at Camp Mather. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, rides bikes everywhere—to the dining hall, to the lake, to the pool, to the play fields, to the bath houses. There are no cars. The littlest kids ride piled up on rear racks and on blankets wrapped around their parents’ top tubes. The bigger kids go feral and ride off to play ping pong or develop talent show acts for hours at a time. Our daughter’s bike skills became truly extraordinary. If it weren’t for the annoyance of cars, she could ride anywhere in the city now. Her lightweight single speed was even able to overtake other kids’ geared mountain bikes on the (very minor) hills around camp.

Halfway to the lake with Brompton + Travoy and a ton of gear.

I brought the Brompton and our Burley Travoy (have I mentioned that we’ve had a Travoy for a couple of years? Wonderful trailer, and yes, I should review that too). It was evidently the first Brompton anyone had ever seen at Camp Mather, but it was a great choice. Apparently I was inadvertently representing Cycle Chic roaming around camp in a sun hat, bikini and silk wrap skirt on the Brompton, as I got approving, “Looking awesome, momma!” hollas from other moms. The Travoy made it easy for me to haul our load of beach chairs, towels, lunches, and pool toys to the lake and back every day. I had the Pere chair for the rare occasions when our daughter didn’t ride her own bike, which only happened after dark, because we didn’t bring her lights.

DIY archery (they tie-dyed those shirts themselves)

Anyway, we had a lovely time, even though we had to drive up there. I was saddened to learn that a couple of decades ago, no one was allowed to drive at all—there was bus service to Camp Mather, and an area dedicated to families that biked in. All this is no more. I would have paid a lot to have someone drive us there in a bus. As vegetarians, we had some initial concerns about the food, which comes on a giant truck from Sysco, but we were basically fine, although we ate a lot of salad (Here is the Camp Mather menu). So we spent a great week relaxing at Camp Mather. We would do it again.

We returned to San Francisco and the start of school. But here the summer weather is just beginning, so in a way, we have a lot more summer yet to come. There is so much to tell, still.

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Filed under Brompton, family biking, kids' bikes, trailer-bike, travel

Tagged as Brompton, Burley Travoy, Camp Mather, Camp Mather menu, family biking, travel

May 5, 2014 · 9:26 am

Around the world in 80 days

Things have been crazy, so my husband is picking up the slack for this week. (And if I’m really lucky my friend Nancy will also weigh in her recent trip to Cuba and the bikes there.) Enjoy!

Guest blogger Matt aka, the Bullitt pusher, here. So, Dorie always asks me to take pictures of bikes whenever I travel and then sits on the photos for ages – understandably, since she wasn’t along for the journey, she doesn’t always know what to say about the images. I thought I would pre-empt that here and inject my own narrative for once… thanks for letting me hog the mic, hon.

Grocery bag bike

During this long, cold winter, I had the questionable pleasure of going back East several times, including a one day trip to lower Manhattan in the midst of a freezing rain and snow storm in mid-February. One of the things you notice about bike culture in New York, especially in winter weather, is that it is predominantly a practical thing – working bikes deliver not just legal documents, but lots of ordinary goods – Chinese takeout, groceries, etc. — that people would drive to buy at stores in any less urban place with more ample parking – and where it’s not a half-hour trek through slush filled gutters to get some decent lobster chow mein.

If you ignore the thumbs up you can kind of see the t-shirt.

While walking along, I happened upon a hipster bike shop in the Village, where I picked up T shirts for the kids and proclaimed the gospel of family biking to the bemused staff.

At the beginning of this month, I went to Australia for the first time for work, and visited three cities during a busy week – Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne – that have decidedly different infrastructure.

“Watch out for the bus on the right, dude.”

Sydney, like New York, has an older, densely built up downtown. While the weather was nice (April is late summer there), the bicyclists I saw clearly struggled with the narrow, one way streets and congested interchanges that are just ill-suited to bike commuting.

Note the “no pedestrians” sign (which I personally would appreciate having in the Golden Gate Park bike lanes.)

Only in the greenways along the central park section did I see dedicated (raised/separated) bike lanes that actually looked inviting… not unlike Central Park in New York (or the Panhandle/Golden Gate Park in SF), more of the bikers here appeared to be tourists or exercise cyclists, rather than hardcore commuters.

By contrast, Brisbane (a city of 2 million on Australia’s tropical Gold Coast) and Melbourne (a cultural hub and Sydney’s rival to the South) are both modern, planned cities, with wide, open thoroughfares, and thriving commute bike cultures, as well as the omnipresent bike share.

The increasingly ubiquitous bike share of total awesomeness, in Melbourne

Interestingly, both are river cities – whereas Sydney is a natural ocean harbor and commercial port. I think this matters in terms of infrastructure, as well, as coastal waterfronts tend to box a city in – inhibiting sprawl and promoting upward urban development – whereas riverfronts create promenades, lower density development, and a longer, more linear pattern of urban/suburban connectedness that lends itself better to bicycles (here I think of our experiences in Portland, versus SF).

Matt was definitely in Sydney

Finally, a word about non-bike culture, since I have the rare podium here on what is normally Dorie’s soap box. As an opera buff, I was excited to take in a show outdoors at Sydney’s harbor steps on a stormy, overcast night – with the iconic opera house as backdrop. The production of Madame Butterfly was not only dramatically and vocally compelling, but took full advantage of the setting – with real fireworks going off over the water during the wedding scene and ship borne cranes assembling the second-half set in full view of the audience during intermission… if only our real contractors could build a house that fast! Ahem.

Anyway, it was a thrill to add a fifth continent to my resume of world travel (and great opera houses). If I make it to Africa (or Antarctica), I promise you’ll hear about it here… but until then, this is Matt signing off. “Dovunque al mondo, lo yankee vagabondo… “

Hills v. hills: San Francisco and Seattle

Mugging for the camera at the airport

Last week was our spring break, and the kids and I headed north to visit my mom while Matt flew to Australia for work. This kind of thing is why I make no pretense that our car-free, zero waste schtick is carbon neutral. That said most of our travel is for business, and I believe I speak for both of us when I say that a tax on business travel that would ensure we did far less of it would be pretty awesome.

Anyway, we took the Brompton, which in circus-mode can carry both me and the kids. Flying with the Brompton was an unrelieved nightmare, due to Allegiant Airlines. They are dead to me. Their motto should be: “We will terrify your children.”

Madi demonstrates the two-kids-on-a-Brompton option.

Nonetheless it was nice to have the bike once we got to Seattle. However I was surprised to find that despite the photos I have posted, even people who know family biking were impressed that it is possible to carry two kids on the Brompton. It’s fun, although not something I would do regularly on long rides. And I asked my son to run up the hills because I’m not the rider I used to be. And this brings me to: hills. Seattle is a hilly city, but hills in Seattle are different than hills in San Francisco.

A lot of San Francisco was built on landfill, which means that there are large chunks of the city (e.g. the Marina, the Financial District) that are perfectly flat. San Francisco doesn’t have a fixie culture because everyone is a masochist. It has a fixie culture because it’s possible to live without ever leaving the Mission. However once you want to go somewhere else, it gets tricky. The hills loom like walls, and although it’s possible to thread the needle sometimes using routes like the Wiggle, eventually people like us who go to work in offices (in Laurel Heights) and have kids in school (on the other side of Lone Mountain) have to start climbing. And San Francisco hills take no prisoners. Once we load 1-2 kids on deck, even with an assist we’re working hard. So riding in San Francisco is often: la-la-la-la-OMFG-OMFG-OMFG-wheeee!-la-la-la, etc.

Seattle is hilly in a more consistent way. In comparison to the totally-in-your-face hills of San Francisco, Seattle’s hills feel almost passive-aggressive. They meander up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down. I kept wondering where the steep hills were, because from my perspective there weren’t any. However the relentless low-key up and down is not the kind of terrain I’m used to riding and it wore me out (this has happened before—I got smoked by Madi from Family Ride on a deceptively mild-looking but seemingly endless hill in August 2012, while being fried by the equally foreign 80+F temperatures).

Bullitt-surfing is understandably more of a San Francisco thing.

From the hill perspective, if riding in San Francisco is like occasionally ripping off a band-aid and screaming in agony, then riding in Seattle is like slowly peeling band-aids off by the dozen while feeling the adhesive tug on every single hair. Except that riding bikes is way more fun than that, of course. There’s nothing wrong with having to make an effort, it proves I’m alive and makes me stronger. I’m sure that if we lived in Seattle I would get used to Seattle hills and find them normal. Admittedly sweating on the way to work is a non-starter in my life, but this is why the universe has provided electric assists.

And speaking of assists, on this trip we stopped by the newly-opened G&O Family Cyclery, which had the Holy Grail of assist comparisons available for test rides: a Stokemonkeyed EdgeRunner and a BionX EdgeRunner. I love EdgeRunners (I-will-not-buy-another-bike-I-will-not-buy-another-bike-I-will-not-buy-another-bike) but had never tried an assisted version before. They are even better than the unassisted versions. We took the stoked and BionX EdgeRunners up and down the hills of Seattle, and if it wasn’t the same kind of challenge we face in San Francisco, it was still a fascinating experience.

My dissertation advisor had five mottos. One of them was, “Whenever you go away on a week of vacation, there’s always two weeks of work waiting for you when you come back.” Alas, this is painfully true, so coming soon: BionX v. Stokemonkey.

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Filed under bike shops, Brompton, EdgeRunner, electric assist, San Francisco, Seattle

Tagged as BionX, EdgeRunner, electric assist, family biking, hills, San Francisco, seattle, Stokemonkey, travel, Xtracycle

March 14, 2014 · 3:29 pm

Destinations: Blue Heron Bikes

This is what you get when you go to Berkeley: wild turkeys. It’s not safe crossing the Bay.

I’ve been disappointed for years now that San Francisco has no family/cargo bike shop. Things are certainly better than they were a couple of years ago, when we started looking for our 2-kid hauler, but shopping around for a family bike in the city still involves a lot of “around”: wandering from bike shop to bike shop, none of which are necessarily on the same transit lines (and none of which, pretty understandably, have any parking for cars.)

Welcome to Blue Heron. Let’s ride some bikes!

Back in 2012, it was a no-brainer to tack a train ride to Portland for cargo bike shopping onto our summer trip to Seattle to visit my mom. At the time Portland had three cargo bike shops that seriously considered the needs of family riders. Last year, however, I started to hear from other families about Blue Heron Bikes in Berkeley, which opened shortly after we returned from Portland in 2012. They said it was a real family bike shop. They were right.

These people think of everything.

We didn’t make it over to Blue Heron until early 2014, but it was worth the wait. Having visited a few family bike shops already, we knew what to look for: kids’ bikes, cargo bikes, and a Lego table. Check, check, and check. (Clever Cycles in Portland, which represents the pinnacle of family bike shops in the United States, also adds a large play space, inexpensive rentals of many of the bikes it sells, and FREE DIAPERS IN THE BATHROOM to that mix, but this is the result of years of practice.)

Hi!

I no longer patronize bike shops that give me attitude—and anyone who’s walked into a typical bike shop with kids will know what I’m talking about here—so the other critical attribute of a family bike shop is being nice to anyone who walks in the door. I’m no longer the best judge of that personally, given that my husband likes to walk into bike shops and announce, “This is my wife and she writes a blog about family biking!” However on our first visit to Blue Heron about half a dozen novice family bikers stopped by, and Rob (the owner) and his staff were lovely to all of them. Those poor families also had to endure us talking their ears off about the bikes they test-rode, but you can’t blame Blue Heron for that. Check Yelp for the many five-star reviews from people who showed up on other days.

The family bike corner

What kind of bikes can you get at Blue Heron? Lots of bikes: they stock Bromptons, Bullitts (sent down from Splendid Cycles), EdgeRunners, and Yuba Mundos. I’ll admit that Bromptons aren’t usually considered family bikes, but that’s how we ride ours, and Emily Finch is now hauling four kids on a Brompton + Burley Travoy, so I think they qualify. Blue Heron also has some quirky stuff like a Japanese cargo bike that they’ve rigged with a rear child seat. I haven’t ridden that bike, because I figured we’ve tried their patience enough. My kids wanted to ride all the bikes they had in front, and my son announced afterward that he wants a mountain bike. My daughter cried all the way home about our decision to not buy her the purple bike she rode while we were there, because “It’s near my birthday!”

Swoopy looking EdgeRunner

The kids did not stop with the bikes in their own size. They also asked to ride the Bullitt with the large box, so we did, and I haven’t stopped hearing about how we should upgrade to that box since. And they also wanted to ride the EdgeRunner. The last EdgeRunner I had ridden was a pre-production model, but the 2014 EdgeRunner was significantly more awesome. We loved that bike. I haven’t stopped hearing about how we should get an EdgeRunner either. We’re going to try the assisted version next, and hopefully a Kinn Flyer and a Workcycles Fr8 too (more reviews!)

Although Blue Heron is located on the Ohlone Greenway in the flats, which makes for lovely test rides, Berkeley is not without hills, and they will also assist your family bike. They had BionX versions of a number of the cargo bikes they sell ready for test rides. Fortunately they didn’t have a BionX EdgeRunner in stock when we were there or we might not have escaped without buying another bike.

There’s a largely unused parking lot behind the shop, great for kids’ test rides

From my perspective, Blue Heron has only one dreadful, depressing flaw, and that is that it is in Berkeley. Getting to Berkeley is an all-day commitment for us, even now that our kids are older. However I understand why families in San Francisco are making the trek across the Bay. Getting a cargo bike from Berkeley to San Francisco is a real adventure—one dad took his new Bullitt on BART, which meant carrying it on the stairs, and another family rode theirs down to the ferry to get it home. I’m not sure I’m ready to commit to that kind of adventure, but we’ve been there twice now and I have no doubt that we’ll return.

For us, a trip to Portland was the only way to compare the different possible bikes we could have bought. We wouldn’t have to make that same trip now. I’m glad we did go, of course, because if we hadn’t we would never had met the family biking crew in Portland, and we would have had to wait much longer to ride our bike. This is difficult and unpleasant to imagine. But if we were looking now, we’d start in Berkeley.

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Filed under bike shops, Brompton, Bullitt, destinations, family biking, travel, Xtracycle, Yuba Mundo

Tagged as Berkeley, bike shops, Blue Heron Bikes, Bullitt, EdgeRunner, family biking, travel, Yuba Mundo

April 3, 2013 · 10:11 am

Spring break

California uber alles

Last week, for our kids’ spring break, we headed to Monterey and Santa Cruz to visit the Aquarium and the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. You don’t have to go too far south to get to better weather in the Bay Area. Probably we could have seen the sun just by heading east past the fog line, but our kids wanted to try salt water taffy. So why not south?

Dennis the Menace Park

Monterey is a weird place, with a nice aquarium and beautiful scenery and not that much else. When our kids tired of sea otters and the madding crowds, we headed to a playground we’d spotted on the way into town. It turned out to be Dennis the Menace Park, a truly unbelievable playground with everything up to and including a hedge maze.

Grocery store parking: giant beach cruisers

From there we headed up to Santa Cruz. California is full of college towns like Santa Cruz, and virtually all of them are lovely, bike-friendly, and flat. Last year we visited Davis, which has the largest share of bike commuters of anyplace I have ever been in the US, and San Diego, which despite its serious car culture has many people hauling surfboards on bikes. Santa Cruz is also a beach town with lots of surfers, and I hadn’t seen so many beach cruisers since San Diego. Every time we visit, I want to move to these college towns, with their quiet streets filled with single-speed bicycles moving at a stately pace. It all feels so friendly and easy-going. Sure, there are drivers who go too fast in these places too, but despite the vast expanses of parking lots, I didn’t feel like they were cities owned by cars.

Santa Cruz beach boardwalk

The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk thrilled our kids, even though our daughter is still too little to go on any of the terrifying rides she wanted to try. Our son, who is now tall enough, remains uninterested in rides with names like “Tornado” so they both ended up trying every kiddie attraction. And while we were there, we ran into friends from Rosa Parks, who were visiting for the day, which was awesome.

The bike racks at the boardwalk were packed.

Having come from San Francisco, we were traveling by City CarShare, but it was clear that many locals skipped the expensive car parking and came by bike. There is a railway converted to a multi-use path running along the beach, and the bike racks near the entrances were packed. Even the guys working at the car parking lots rode around on beach cruisers. Our kids loved the beach and were awed by all the ape-hanger handlebars on the bikes we saw. They asked if we could move to Santa Cruz. It’s a good thing we love the city too, fog and hills and traffic and all.

We’re not yet at the point where we’re ready to try bike touring with our kids, but it’s getting closer. When Matt went with our son to Tahoe to try snowboarding earlier in the week, they took the bus rather than deal with the nightmare of driving through ski traffic. Our kids love the train, especially the part where they get to run around. And our son has, unfortunately, developed a bad case of motion sickness that left him violently ill on the drive down and mostly ill on the drive back—it’s not a problem on a bus, but it is in a car. So while I’m okay with driving out of town now and again, having now tried other ways to travel, I’m finding I like them better. Maybe it’s time to figure out where the train (plus a couple of bikes) could take us.

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Filed under travel

Tagged as San Francisco, travel

March 8, 2013 · 9:25 am

Yes, but…

They don’t always fight.

A couple of years ago we went to Copenhagen and rented bikes. The first day we rode with our children through the city was one of the best of our lives. They were single speed bikes and they were as heavy as boat anchors, and we got lost more than once, and it rained. I did not care. We could go anywhere we wanted, and the kids were screaming with joy and hugging us from their child seats behind us, and sometimes the sun came out, and it was glorious. We have had many memorable days with them since, and a surprising number of them were on our bikes, but that was the first. With the memory of that day and that feeling it seemed impossible not to return to San Francisco and buy bikes and ride them everywhere. Most days it is as good as we had hoped it would be, some days it sucks, and some days it is better than we could have imagined.

We stayed near these gardens, one of the few places no bikes were allowed.

There are lots of reasons that people tell me it doesn’t make sense for them to ride bikes (not that I ask). I think of these now as the “yes, buts.” They are all the reasons that we didn’t think it made sense to ride our bikes before that day changed our lives. It’s too hard to ride with kids and groceries. San Francisco has too many steep hills (and we live on the side of a mountain). The city has too much car traffic to feel safe, and the roads are so terrible that they destroy bikes, and bike theft is rampant. For parents, there’s the loneliness of having so few families in San Francisco anyway, with even fewer of them on bikes. Yes but, yes but, yes but. Our reasons not to ride made perfect sense and they kept us in our car until that day in Copenhagen when suddenly they no longer mattered. We came home and we started saying: we can and we will. And we did.

Yes, but San Francisco has hills!

I hear the “yes buts” all the time when we talk about our lives now. In San Francisco people say the same things that we used to say. When they come from people outside the city the things people say are different and yet they’re still the same. Yes, but you can ride your bikes everywhere because San Francisco has nice weather (after a fashion) and here it snows. Yes, but there are lots of bike lanes in San Francisco and there aren’t any here. Yes, but the drivers there are friendly to bikes (if sometimes clueless) and here they’re aggressive. Yes, but the city is so small that nothing is very far away. Yes, but you can live without a car because San Francisco has great public transit and two car share companies and all those ride share services.

Everyone’s life is different. There are families riding in hilly cities with worse weather and less bicycle infrastructure than San Francisco. There are families riding in smaller cities that go massive distances or face bigger challenges. There are families that deal with snow and aggressive drivers.

Walking is exhausting. Let’s ride bikes instead.

Personally I don’t care if people want to drive everywhere, although I love having company when families join us on their bikes. I do have issues though, with the claim that our lives enjoy some magical convergence of necessary possibilities. There are things that make it easier for us to ride our bikes and we are grateful for them, and there are things that make it harder for us and we deal with them. There is a man in San Francisco who rides a tricycle up and down the Embarcadero with the oxygen tank he needs to breathe in the basket. I have been passed more than once on the Panhandle by a man with no legs, whose bike is powered by his arms. Who knows what’s really possible? We didn’t know until we tried.

Change feels hard and scary and unnecessary until something happens and it becomes impossible not to change. Before our children were born it seemed impossible to live without sleep for over a year, and after each of them was born we learned to live with it. It was unpleasant but it was possible and they were worth it and now we couldn’t imagine life without them.

Some changes are impossible to miss or to avoid. And some changes could slip away without grabbing onto them. We could have spent that time in Copenhagen and come home and despaired that San Francisco will never be anything like it–San Francisco, for example, will never be flat–and felt the loss of it at some level forever. Instead we came home and bought bikes, and less than a year later, sold our car. Standing over The Pit and watching garbage stream out of the city I could have returned to living and shopping the same way and pushing away a nagging sense of guilt. Instead we embraced zero-waste (which is a work in progress). And it has been… fun!

When I think of what I’m most grateful for about that trip, it is that it started to break me of the habit of saying, “Yes, but…” We tried something new to us that seemed crazy to everyone at the time and it worked. I’m still not really a big fan of change, but change and I are working it out. We can and we will, and we do.

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Filed under Copenhagen, family biking, San Francisco, travel

Tagged as family biking, hills, San Francisco, travel

March 1, 2013 · 9:50 am

A weekend in the country

We stopped at Sonoma Train Town en route. Even the kids had a moment of disconnect about driving to the train.

Last weekend we went to visit cousins in Santa Rosa while Matt and our son attended a martial arts tournament. It’s been a while since we left the city and it’s always interesting. All of our cousins shun life in the city, choosing instead to live in homes that range from exurban to aggressively rural. These particular cousins live way, way out in the country, which is a good fit for their interest in activities like developing their own orchard, building a deck larger than our entire living space (with integrated bocce court), keeping goats, and collecting rural-type things that I can’t identify and that must be explained to me. In turn, they stare in disbelief at the news that we no longer own a car. We like them very much.

However it is an unbelievable haul to get to their place. We rented a car, as they are nowhere near any kind of transit (when I asked for a transit route on Google maps the final step after four hours of proposed bus rides was: take a taxi for the last 20 miles) and riding a bike would be about a 12 hour trip each way in the unlikely event that the kids didn’t melt down, which they totally would.

We loved the quiet at their house, which sent us all packing to bed before 10pm. Our current place is great in many ways, but now that we are going to have to move anyway, we have been thinking a lot about what we want in a new place to live, and the main thing is quiet (although we are also looking for a neighborhood that does not have the word “mountain” or “heights” in its name). Our old apartment was in the back of its building and the only noise we ever heard was an occasional fog horn. Now we live right on a street with five bus lines running down it, and we are next to the hospital, and all day and all night we hear the howling of ambulances and the WOOSH of bus air brakes and everyone gunning their engines to get up the steep hill and cars whizzing back down. I don’t even want to talk about the neighbors with the gongs. Surely they have a special place in hell reserved for them already. Anyway, we loved the quiet up there.

The entertainment value of dressing up in sparring props lasted less than an hour.

We didn’t love the time we had to spend in the car. It seemed like a 40 minute drive to get from any place in Santa Rosa to any other place (cousins’ house to martial arts tournament, martial arts tournament to farmers market for our daughter who rapidly lost patience with the competition, martial arts tournament to lunch, etc.) There are a lot of bikes in Santa Rosa, which is beautiful, sunny, and incredibly flat. But the distances seemed daunting. The riders who commuted despite them impressed me. One stopped by the side of our rental car (which was emblazoned with the City CarShare logo), very excited, to ask where we’d picked it up. When I told her we had come from San Francisco she was crushed. “I was afraid of that,” she said. “I wish they’d come up here!”

I like Santa Rosa, but we are used to living in the city, and it seemed empty to me (although the novelty of being able to park everywhere we took a car was amusing). Even the farmers market seemed small, as well as more crafts-oriented than food-oriented, which surprised me given that it’s an agricultural area. There was also a new-to-us hostility to organic food there. All of the market vendors were happy to report that they did not use pesticides and discuss their farming methods, but the Ron Paul yard signs and “Live free or die!” ethos apparently meant that getting certified by the government as organic was not high on their to-do list.

When we came home we were all sore from sitting for so long. I got on the bike to pick up some cheese and crackers and hummus (in our own glass jars, more to come on this topic), just to get moving again. Our local cheese shop is definitely not the kind of place to try to visit by car, as even when I’m on the bike I have to dodge double-parked cars all the way. But there’s always bike parking right by the front door. It’s so cold in the city in February that my fingers always freeze, even under two pairs of gloves, but it’s still a pleasure to ride again, every time I go out.

We were happy to return to San Francisco, but we’ll be back to visit again. It was nice to get a good night’s sleep.

[Last but not least: Thank you, internet! We’d been asking JCCSF to install new bike racks for months, and were being blown off as recently as Tuesday. After Wednesday’s post, I got an email that evening saying that they’ll be installing 6 new custom bike racks that will hold 12 bikes. In addition, they’re going to try letting parents have keycode access to a locked courtyard with an additional bike rack for preschool and after school drop-offs and pickups. We are thrilled! I know that some readers wrote to to JCCSF on our behalf and it is very much appreciated.]

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Filed under destinations, travel

Tagged as Santa Rosa, travel

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Hills v. hills: San Francisco and Seattle

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