Bike maintenance with kids is fun! (And takes twice as long.) (Photos: Madi Carlson)
Shout out to all the fair-weather family bikers! Rumor has it the gorgeous weather won’t last, but it’s lovely out right now and my kids’ bikes have lots of new company at the school bike racks.
Our Family Biking column is sponsored by Clever Cycles.
Have you ever excitedly greeted your dusty, neglected bike in the garage on the first nice day of the year only to find it has two flat tires? Fortunately your tires don’t need repairing — rubber is porous and as soon as you pump air back in, your bike will be ready to roll. Keeping the right amount of air in your tires is a relatively easy task, and it’s incredibly empowering to be able to keep your family’s fleet functional. Yeah, plenty of other things can go wrong with bikes, but flat tires are the most common woe. Plus, kids can help, and — if yours are like mine — they’re probably already familiar with your bike pump, having shot air into their mouths, noses, and down their pants.
Here are some basic tire-pumping tips… [Read more…]
Hey kids, how’s it going with those new Christmas bikes? For some of us, it takes a while to get pedaling — my younger brother started riding without training wheels long before I was able to. But fear not, I have some tips for you!
Our Family Biking column is sponsored by Clever Cycles.
➤ Remove your pedals Turn that bike temporarily into a balance bike! Even if — actually, especially if — you’re graduating from a balance bike, your new pedal bike is going to be bigger and heavier and you’ll appreciate getting used to its heft before you need to add a new skill.[Read more…]
On a rental e-bike in the summer of 2016. (Photo: Cory Poole)
Last week’s profile of the carfree Kurten family sparked some great comments about e-bikes. In the near future, I’ll write about various types of e-assists, where to test ride, rent, buy, and have them serviced. But today I’m going to write about the opposite: not having an e-bike. [Read more…]
One of the Kurten kids and one of the trusty family vehicles. (Photos: Jonathan Kurten)
This week we’ll share a profile of the Kurten family.
Portlanders Jonathan and Tracy Kurten have been able to replace tricky transit trips and car trips with joyful bike trips — thanks in part to their useful new bikes.[Read more…]
Storytime! 2nd and 4th Mondays of the month January-March. (*Thank you to Liz Holladay from Clever Cycles for the bike-riding book illustration and to Leslie Hickey of Hoarfrost Press for the graphic lettering.)
We stayed in all day Monday. The kids were out of school due to a Portland Public Schools planning day. My one bike-related chore was digging dozens of pieces of glass out of my tires while fixing a flat (more on that in a future post), but that was the closest I got to riding my bike.
The planning day got me thinking about planning something — anything — for the upcoming months to help keep the winter blahs at bay. [Read more…]
This week’s post isn’t about family biking per se, but kids often come with lots of stuff to haul around. And since parenting helps unlock one’s ingenuity — family biking goes hand-in-hand with strapping loads of crap to our bikes.
Our Family Biking column is sponsored by Clever Cycles.
This also isn’t a plug to get a cargo bike so you can carry big things — although cargo bikes certainly make carrying big things easy — all bikes are great at carrying more than just their riders…or instead of their riders: one of the best things about any bike is its ability to transform into a dolly/hand truck. It’s fairly easy to pile heavy and/or bulky things on your bike and walk alongside, pushing. The day we moved to Portland (most of our stuff came in a 16-foot PODS moving container) I still had a lot of stuff to bring with us via bus-train-light rail-bus so I used my folding bike as a luggage cart.[Read more…]
L-R: Darth Vader in rain jacket, minion in rain jacket, Wonder Woman in rain jacket, Rainier beer can adjacent to her costume in basket. (Photos: Madi Carlson)
Do you take your bike trick-or-treating? We do. [Read more…]
