True to my word, I’ve spent some time over the past few weeks digging into bike-related blogs. If my recent food-to-bike posting ratio is any indication, I have indeed found the inspiration I sought.
I’ve mentioned it here before, but one NOT new to me bike blog is Simply Bike. S. and I both biked through our pregnancies, and her daughter C. is just a couple months younger than Gabriel, so I feel like we’ve been figuring out this whole biking with babies thing together.
I used S’s blogroll as a jumping-off point in my bike blog search, which led me to Hum of the City. Inspired by a vacation in Copenhagen, this San Francisco family returned to the U.S., bought bikes, and later sold their only automobile. In addition to detailing their adventures as a bicycle family (with two kids), the site contains a wealth of information on different cargo bikes.
Two recent posts that really struck a chord with me are “Yes, but . . . ” that addresses excuses for not giving cycling a try, and “Bicycles and privilege,” a thoughtful look at how, whether we ride bicycles out of choice or necessity, we are not so different.
Over at Tiny Helmets Big Bikes, the Bustamante family chronicle their adventures using bicycles for transportation (and fun!) in Sacramento. I especially enjoy reading about their travels on the Yuba Mundo, a longtail cargo bike that I’ve been drooling over for about a year now.
Sara over at Life’s a Bear added cycling to her family’s routine fairly recently. Since January, she’s been collecting photos for her #everydayonabike challenge to encourage others to give bicycle transportation a try (which reminds me that I need to snap a photo one of these days).
I would be remiss if I did not mention Girls and Bicycles (no, not a calendar with pictures of semi-nude women on bicycles, regardless of what Google thinks), a blog I read regularly before I started writing here. While “stylish cycling” is not so much my thing, seeing Miss Sarah bike through cold snowy Edmonton (Canada) winters makes winter cycling here look like nothing. And she was on her bike with her son when he was just a few months old — part of my inspiration for wanting to start early with Gabriel.
Finally, I came across this stand-alone guest post, “Becoming a Biking Family.”
While my selections thus far are heavily skewed toward biking families, they run the gamut from cyclists who became parents and incorporated their children into their preferred form of transportation to families who discovered the joy of active transportation together. Their stories and examples provide inspiration whether you have kids or not (and, heck, if you don’t have kids, you’ve got it easy — you REALLY have no excuse for not giving biking a try).
I know I’ve just scratched the surface here, but, as I don’t have all day to sit around reading bike blogs, no matter how awesome, starting small makes sense.
Her Green Life 