Category Archives: Biking

Bicycles and Food Truck Friday

On Friday night, I hauled out the bike trailer for our trip to Food Truck Friday (FTF) in Tower Grove Park (since we’re not quite ready to use our new front seat).

Getting there
Mid-way through our ride to the park, Sir was so ridiculously and awkwardly slumped in the trailer that I pulled over to straighten him out.  By the time we arrived, he had resumed the awkward position.

I suspect that my modification to the baby supporter, which I thought so clever, and which is necessary to fit the harness over Sir’s head without a struggle, may be contributing to the slumping.  Argh, I am so over the trailer!

The food
We’ve been wanting to try the Korean barbeque tacos from Seoul Taco ever since they sold out before we could get them at FTF in October.  Unfortunately the line was ridiculously long, so I headed to Lulu’s Local Eatery, which was also high on my list.

Having experienced the long lines and food selling out issue at a past FTF, I went all-out at Lulu’s, ordering the sweet potato falafel, quinoa bowl, and sweet potato fries (I was bummed that they weren’t serving the soba noodle bowl that night).  Matthew and I enjoyed the food, but Sir was too distracted by his first picnic meal to eat much (we paid for this later, when he was up and crying for over an hour in the middle of the night).

Go by bike
I noticed a dad with a little one in an iBert — but it was as we were getting ready to leave and returning from the Recycling On the Go recycling and composting station, that I spotted something even more exciting — a Yuba Mundo!

After I wiped the drool off of my chin, I chatted briefly with the family and asked if we might be able to meet up sometime to take it for a test ride.  They raved about the bike and were happy to give me their phone number so we might be able to take it for a spin sometime (assuming I didn’t already lose the number).

As we left, we couldn’t help but notice the crazy number of cars cramming the lanes of the park.  To make matters worse, it appears that a car company is somehow sponsoring the event, as we biked by a big, ugly Chevrolet banner.  I think the company reps were handing out “keys” that served as coupons.  Ugh.  Can you say sell-out?

I propose that Food Truck Fridays be a car-free event.  Given the lengthy lines and food sell-out issues, FTF would really benefit from a slightly smaller crowd.  There should be enough attendees within biking and walking distance to sustain the event.

Barring that possibility, anyone who walks or bikes to the event should get a “skip to the front of the line” pass.  Until then, we’ll pack our own picnic dinners and eat in the park on lower-key nights.

Ring my bell

A week ago, I typed “iBert” into the search box on Craigslist, along with a few other front bicycle seat names, not really expecting to find anything.  Imagine my surprise when I found a recently listed iBert seat — for five dollars!

Cautiously excited (since there was no picture with the posting), I contacted the owner with a few questions.  She confirmed that it was in good shape and said she would just give it to me, so we set up a time to meet.  Wednesday night, Sir and I arrived home the proud owners of a lime green front bike seat!

The only hold up to using it?  We still need to get him a helmet.  I bought a basic toddler helmet at Target a few weeks ago, but with a starting head circumference of around 19 inches, it was still slightly too big.

There are toddler helmets that have a range that includes head circumferences down to 18 or so inches — we just need to get one.  We should have that resolved this week, but not using our new toy over the weekend was hard.

I installed the seat on Sunday afternoon and practiced getting Gabriel in and out.  I resisted the temptation to go for a spin around the block.

Initial verdict — he likes it much better than the trailer!  I showed him the bike bell, thinking it would take him awhile to catch on and figure it out for himself.  Not so much . . . .

Come back next week for the iBert test ride report.

Trailers, longtails, and iBerts, oh my!

Last week, I shared some green baby strategies, one of which was, “Wait on it.”  While I’ve done a good job on that in general, there are a few things that I wish I had waited on, one of those being the bicycle trailer.

Despite the fact that we’ve had it for over eight months now, I can still count our “biking with baby” trips using my my hands.  I need both hands, not just one, but still.

Sure, there have been mitigating factors: waiting until Sir was a bit older and had decent head/neck control, ordering the baby supporter accessory, winter weather, carrying the trailer in and out of the basement because we have no garage . . . but enough with the excuses!  An average use of once a month at most?  Not good!

Given that we found a high quality, good condition, used trailer for a reasonable price, I’m not sure it was a bad purchase, at this point it just does not seem like a good purchase, either.

Ever since I saw this post on the Momentum magazine blog, I’ve been thinking about options that don’t involve a trailer.  A longtail bicycle, like the Yuba Mondo featured in that post (and here, as well), seems like a great option.

In my excitement, I dug a little deeper into the world of longtails, and found some reviews and comparisons of various bikes including the Yuba Mondo, Surly Big Dummy, and the XtraCycle Radish.*  Based on our initial research, we lean toward the Yuba for it’s combination of features that meet our needs and being a good value.

A couple weeks after my longtail excitement, I read S’s post on front-mounted seats on Simply Bike.  While I like the idea of a longtail, I’m less excited about the price tag — far more affordable than a car up front and down the road, but still overwhelming to my frugal sensibilities.

With a front-mounted seat, you don’t sacrifice the cargo room on the rear rack as you would with a rear-mounted seat, and you don’t have to deal with the weight and bulk of a longtail (especially a factor in our case, with carrying it up and down stairs).

Also, your little one is right up front, experiencing the ride with you, which appeals to me.  While Sir does not seem to mind riding in the trailer, he doesn’t seem particularly excited about it either, and I can’t really blame him.

When thinking about biking with baby options, front-mount seats were not even on my radar, but based on the post I mentioned above, the main contenders are the Yepp Mini, the iBert, and the Bobike Mini.**

Immediately after reading about front-mount seats, I saw an iBert on Craigslist.  For better or worse, I didn’t feel ready to grab it up without more research on the various options, including which seat styles work with which bicycles, and that seat is now gone.

For now, we’ll continue using the trailer, if less often than I would like.  And I’ll be dreaming about front-mount seats and longtails.

*For more info, check out these resources:
Heavyweight Showdown: Big Dummy vs Yuba Mundo
Cargo Bikes in Momemtum Magazine
Beautiful Bicycles: Yuba Monda Cargo Bike
The Best Cargo Carrying Bikes Of 2012: A Review

**See comments to S’s post for feedback on front-mount seats:
Front mounted bike seat for a child: what are your favorite options?

Dinner & Bikes recap

After all my questioning whether or not to attend the StL edition of Dinner & Bikes on Sunday night, and time spent formulating a blog post as I processed things, the event itself was a bit anticlimactic.

But let’s start at the beginning.  I watched the weather forecast with rain and thunderstorms for Sunday and Sunday night all week, afraid that conditions would be such that biking would be inadvisable (I won’t say impossible, because you can theoretically ride a bicycle through most any weather condition, however, we try to avoid riding in severe thunderstorms).

Sunday afternoon arrived hot but dry (as in no rain — plenty humid still), and it looked like there was a good chance the rain and storms would hold off until we were safely back home.  Since we’re not acclimated to riding in the heat yet (and let’s be honest, I haven’t been riding all that much lately, period) we debated biking to MetroLink and using transit for part of the trip.

We left that as an option, but, as I expected, once we started rolling, I voted to keep going.  We were about four miles in when I started thinking fondly of the air-conditioned MetroLink cars, but by then it really didn’t make sense to reroute for that.  We continued on, enjoying the “down” part of getting downtown, and we arrived at our destination having covered eight sweaty miles in about forty-five minutes.

After being tempted by the scent of delicious food during the happy hour portion of the event, we finally got down to business, going through a buffet-style line with a variety of vegan dishes, including three or four that featured tofu, and most with Thai flavors.

The William A. Kerr Foundation hosted the event at their 21 O’Fallon Street building.  Given the mission of the foundation, and the LEED Platinum status of the building, I was disappointed to discover styrofoam plates and plastic forks in the buffet line.  Fortunately, I had my bamboo utensil set in my bag, but it hadn’t crossed my mind that I might need to bring my own plate.  Argh!

Matthew and I agreed that our top two dishes were the coconut tofu with plantain (three o’clock position in above photo) and the eggplant with shitake mushroom (middle of plate).  My compliments to The Touring Vegan Chef, AKA Joshua Ploeg, for a tasty meal.

We met some new cyclist friends over dinner, including the organizer of the StL World Naked Bike Ride, and caught up with old friends.

After dinner came the presentation portion of the event.  Elly Blue kicked things off with a talk on the economics of bicycling.  While she had some good points, from our perspective she was preaching to the choir.

Because of my work with bicycle advocacy and Complete Streets policies, I already know the stats and numbers — how expensive it is to build a mile of urban highway ($39 million on the low side, $65 million on average, even higher in some places) and how much bicycle infrastructure that you could build with that amount of money, the cost of owning and driving a car, etc.

Elly pointed out how the cost of owning and operating a car disproportionately affects people living in poverty, especially women, and how women with children face extra challenges to using bicycles for transportation, which, as a bicycling mama, had me nodding my head in agreement.

I pointed out in my pre-event post that the use of well thought-out, progressive infrastructure can be part of the solution for making bicycling more mainstream, and throughout the presentation, I noted examples of infrastructure that should be universally acceptable: bike corrals (i.e., designated, on-street bicycle parking in front of businesses), way-finding signs for bicyclists and pedestrians, and measures that slow motor vehicle traffic.

By the time we got to the video clip portion of the evening, we were both pretty beat and getting restless.  They started with some clips of bicycle advocacy in Portland, having read Mia Birk’s Joyride, this felt like more familiar territory.

Since a baby-free evening is a precious and rare thing for us, we felt we had reached a point of diminishing returns in staying longer, so we ducked out early.

On our way there, I questioned how many attendees* would actually be biking to “Dinner & Bikes,” given the off-the-beaten-path location and the heat.  Unfortunately, the pessimist in me was correct — the indoor bicycle parking was sadly underutilized.

All-in-all, it was a nice evening.  I’m very glad we biked to the event (the ride home was especially nice), as the biking, along with the food, were definitely the highlights for me.

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*I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of turn-out.  According to someone from Trailnet (the event sponsor), they sold about one hundred tickets.  It didn’t feel like there were one hundred people in the room — I’d ballpark it at 60-70, but I could be wrong.  I would have loved to see a larger turnout — more people engaging in bike-related activities and getting excited about promoting and increasing bicycle use would be a great thing.

Birthday brunch and bicycling

We filled my birthday weekend with delicious food and nice (if warmer than my ideal) biking.

We transformed a large Swiss chard harvest into this Quinoa and Kale Swiss Chard Crustless Quiche that I saw on One Hot Stove a few weeks ago, with a side of broiled asparagus to round out the meal.

I doubled the recipe and made two quiches — relatively easy and seriously delicious, all three of us devoured our pieces and went back for seconds.  Matthew said it reminded him of a grown-up take on broccoli-rice casserole.

Good thing Sir likes grown-up food!

For my birthday, I requested chocolate pudding cake, and Matthew executed perfectly (recipe coming later this week).

Later in the day, Sir headed out to Grandma’s for a sleep-over, and we pedaled eight sweaty miles (that I wouldn’t have traded for eight air-conditioned car miles) . . .

Tasty vegan food

. . . to Dinner & Bikes.*

Reflecting the flash

With the sun setting and shadows lengthening, our return ride was a bit cooler, and we further cooled things off with some frozen yogurt.

Despite reading about them for well over a year on other foodie blogs, this was my first trip through a self-serve fro-yo and topping bar — a fun ending to a fun day!

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*More on the event in a later post.