home and happy.]
Allan, Carie and two year-old Cody Folz have just returned from a bike tour through southeast Asia. They pedaled the roads of Laos and Thailand on their tandem with Cody in a child seat. The photo on the right was taken just minutes after they returned to their home in North Portland.
Welcome back guys!
I’ve enjoyed Allan and Carrie’s engaging emails from the road…and now you can too. If you’d like to read some great travel writing, Ayleen Crotty has posted all some of their reports on her ORBike.com blog.
If you want to connect with other cycling families, or just learn and share tips, check out the recently launched Family Riding Forum. Someone just posted a list of great tips about how to stay safe while riding in bike lanes with a trailer. This forum will become a valuable resource as more people register and post…so go for it! And hey, I just noticed someone registered with the username “CarieWF”. Welcome to the forums Carie! We look forward to sharing in the knowledge you’ve just gained on your trip.
[Photo by Ethan Jewett/Stickeen Design & Photography]
Actually, ORBike does not have posted all our ride reports (we wrote 10 or so). Of those that are posted, a couple have been abridged. Ayleen cut them down in length and removed inside jokey stuff and other ramblings a general public would probably not be interested in.
If anyone has any questions feel free to contact us directly [cariewf _@_ hotmail.com] or just post them as a comment to this thread.
In short, I’ll say traveling with a 2 year old was great. Obviously it took more patience and a slower style of travel, but the pay-off was interacting with locals in a manner that no guidebook has ever written about. After finishing the trip, I could not imagine doing it without Cody along.
As for the tandem on an airplane. Not much of an issue, We boxed it for the trans-pacific flights. Going they waived an over-size luggage fee since everything else we had (4 panniers and a kid’s seat) was under 60 lbs for two adults and a kid’s fare. On the return, they wouldn’t waive the fee. Cost us $117. We also took two local flights: Bangkok to Luang Prabang, Laos, and Vientiane to Pakse, Laos, In both cases we just rolled it up to check-in and it was treated like any other suitcase. Actually, I suspect better than any other suitcase.
All the best,
-Allan