Bikemobile

Cycling is so much fun.  You zip along the roads, conquer hills, and feel like a kid again.  In our family, we have five riders, and three- well, we affectionately refer to them as cinder blocks.  Little people who need to be hauled.

So, now that we have only one adult, we faced a conundrum: How should we haul all three of them?  Enter the Bikemobile.

We already had a bike trailer.  (We have two, actually, but you can only haul one at a time.)  That will hold two kiddos.  Carsten is almost five, and he hasn't quite made the transition to a two-wheeler.  He's very cautious about such things.  I bought him this little Wee Ride Copilot that would allow him to "ride" along behind me.

The challenge in all of this is, of course, the weight.  I'm now left with over 150 pounds of kids and gear to pull.  On flat roads, that's fine.  Uphill, not so much.  And our neighborhood has quite a few hills.  I consider it overtraining for the cycling I do on my own.  It's going to take a few weeks (months, years) for me to build up to more than a 2 or 3 mile ride.  The leg fatigue on a 2 mile Bikemobile ride is greater than on a 20 mile regular ride.  And I'm not kidding- or exaggerating.

For the most part, Carsten just sits and enjoys the ride.  "Slow down!  Slow down!  You're going too fast!"  (Steffen, in the trailer, is hollering, "Go faster, Mommy!"  Total opposites, those two.)  Today, Carsten decided to try his hand- his feet, rather- at peddling.  "Look, Mommy, I'm pedaling!  It's helping you!"  Actually, since he has no concept of matching my cadence, it sort of feels like womp-womp-womp, with the bike lurching from side to side.  But he gets such a sense of accomplishment, that I can't crush him by asking him to stop.

Nathan, speeding ahead, complains that we're going too slow.  Hmmm, maybe I should strap the other trailer to his bike and let him haul one of the cinder blocks.  Now that's an idea worth considering.