rachel.blog

Tag: bicycles

  • My mid-life crisis Pashley

    My mid-life crisis Pashley

    For more than half my life I have wanted a Pashley. When I lived in Cambridge as a 20-year-old I saw people cycling around on these magnificent-looking bicycles. I couldn’t afford one myself back then and later I became a parent and needed the station-wagon equivalent of bikes, a Bakfiets. I still love my Bakfiets […]

  • Bicycles

    A Swedish engineer has invented the PodRide, a fully enclosed electric bike, and has raised his goal of $30,000 through Indegogo to bring it into production. It looks great but it would be more appealing to me if there was a family version with room for kids. For this reason I prefer the Elf.   I […]

  • I’ve got a new bike

    My new bike arrived today. I could barely sleep last night I was so excited about it. It’s a really gorgeous bike and as you can see in the next pic, there’s plenty of headroom for the kids which is what I was most worried about. Here are my first impressions after having been in […]

  • My new bike is on its way!

    My new bike has left Denmark and is on its way to Aberdeen! I’m not sure when it will arrive but hopefully this week. My legs are wilting away through lack of use and I’m not sure I can cope much longer without a bicycle. A heavy-duty bike chain arrived today for the new bike. […]

  • Dressed for the destination, not the journey

    This YouTube video comparing cycling in Holland with cycling in Britain is truly wonderful and well worth watching. What is particularly interesting is that it wasn’t always this way in Holland. They used to have the same problems we have with traffic and air pollution but a spate of child deaths sparked protests and so began the start of policy which […]

  • The helmet brigade

    Once when I was cycling home from school an overweight woman yelled out to me, “Where’s your helmet, Mum?”. I might have been wearing the Hövding at the time, I can’t remember, but that’s beside the point. I could have replied with, “Why aren’t you exercising, fatty?”, but I didn’t because that would have been rude […]

  • A rant … feeling better already

    I have just read the most extraordinary articles and need to have another rant to calm myself down. A friend of mine in Christchurch hinted that there had been some objections to building bicycle paths in the city and so I searched to find out more. Big mistake that was! I should not have read […]

  • Bicycle porn

    What’s your weakness? I have several. One of them is bicycle porn. I can waste hours looking at cargo bikes on the web and dreaming of what life might be like if I could cycle everywhere without smelling car fumes and without fear that my kids might get hit by a truck or bus or […]

  • Edinburgh

    We’ve had a great day in Edinburgh today. First stop this morning was Laid Back Bikes where I got to try out an Urban Arrow. This is one slick bike. It weighs and handles similarly to the bakfiets but has electric assist and so is easy peasy to pedal. I’m in two minds about having […]

  • First-world kid problems, owls, and cargo bikes

    This morning I found Daniel sitting on his bed looking very forlorn and crying to himself. I immediately asked him what was wrong and he said, “I can’t find a good mod”. A mod is an add-on for the computer game, Minecraft. This is definitely a first-world kid problem 🙂 There was an event on […]

  • The electric car and cycling

    I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the electric car and why I couldn’t start it on Saturday night. So yesterday I booked it just for an hour so that I could figure out how to use it. I unplugged the charging cable from both the car and the charging point first go and […]

  • Cycling in Auckland part 2

    Cycling on the footpath sucks. It really does. I’ve just returned from cycling Elizabeth to kindergarten and I’ve started cycling on the road for parts of the trip now. In fact, when I’m on my own cycling home I use the road almost the whole way. Why? Because the footpath is difficult to navigate. It’s […]

  • Opinions are great, except when I disagree with them

    Opinions are great. I love listening to people’s opinions more so than the boring nothings of fence-sitters. Ok, so I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes people’s opinions rile me but there’s something challenging about that as it forces me to question what I think. For this reason, I like listening to RadioNZ’s The […]

  • Naked cycling

    Let’s see whether this title generates more traffic than my bikini photo did. The Automobile Association of Britain has launched a campaign on cycling safety and they’ve produced this video clip of a naked cyclist. It’s very good. Coincidentally, my 7 year old has been asking questions about nudity this morning. He said, “When did […]

  • Phones calls, traffic, the bridge and beards

    Daniel, who is 7 years old, got his first phone call the other day. I answered the phone and heard a young boy politely introduce himself and then ask to speak to Daniel. Completely stunned, I handed the phone to Daniel who was just as surprised as I was and then I heard them discuss […]