So, Mona (the administrative deity at my work) called us on Saturday morning (!) to tell us that, having come in randomly to pick something up, she noticed that our bike was here.
BIKE!!1!
Of course, our lazy morning swiftly became excited morning jumping around with one pant leg on, with one hand brushing the teeth. We flew (read: drove obeying all the traffic signs, officer!) to the Italian department…
…to find that I’d left my keys at home. D’oh.
Luckily, Simona the Visiting Prof was just getting in to do some work, so she let us in.
Two boxes. In them, two suitcases. In the suitcases, which convert into a trailer, a deconstructed tandem. W00t!
We happily got brunch at Whole Foods, intent on going to Providence Bicycle and getting saddles and some other stuff. Chattering like sparrows on the first day of spring (and what do you know, it was sunny and warm!), we ate gorgeous salad and drove over to the store…
…to find out that it was “closed for Sabbath.” D’oh.
Ethan laughed and laughed. He has this maniacal laugh whenever something happens that’s just the classic “nyah-nyah” from the multiverse. I love that laugh, it’s infectious. Undeterred, we went home and put it together. Without the saddles.
Sunday, lo and behold, was another Good Weather Day. We went to PB, got everything we needed….
…back up a little, because this is germane to the story. We deconstructed the tandem in order to fit it into the car. Even with it taken apart almost completely, it was a bit of a pain to put it in the car, and it took up all of the back seat. (It would’ve probly fit in the trunk if we’d taken it All the Way Apart, but we were trying to figure out the most efficient way to deal with the bike on a regular basis.)
We got the stuff, got some munchies, made sure the water bottles were full, and headed off to a nearby state park.
Mmmm, pretty park. We parked and put the thing together. It took about 10-15 minutes, and it was getting hot, so we were eager to go go go. We went!, and…
Oh wow. Ow. Tandem riding is HARD.
Especially if your pedals don’t spin independently. You pretty much have to be, like, a SINGLE PERSON.
Plus, of course, we had to fiddle with seat height and bar height and the clip pedals were weird. Have you ever tried to clip into a pedal while it was being spun by your partner’s efforts, and simultaneously attempt to assist those efforts with your other foot? It took us probably about half an hour to cease seeing our parked car when we looked behind us. And the trail is a loop.
We laughed, we panted, it was fun and frustrating as all hell. The hub gear shifter wasn’t working correctly. When we stopped, we kept trying to dismount on different sides. We’d been planning on picking up a bike-only trail, but didn’t find it, and cars kept passing us on the main park road.
At one point, I told Ethan: “This is like marriage-cooperation bootcamp! If we make it on this thing, we’ll get through anything together!”
Okay, so there were grumpy moments. But really, it was mostly fun. By the end of the long loop, we were already learning to work together. It felt good.
And yet, we’re returning the thing. For a bike whose very idea is compactness and ease of [dis]assembly, it’s a surprisingly clunky process to get it to the point where it fits anywhere in the car. Sadly, given our purpose (among other things, biking Denmark on our honeymoon, which will probably involve several bike rides to train stations followed by the folding/packing of said bikes), it’s impractical for us to keep it.
We’re gonna get singleton folding bikes. They’ll still rock, but I’ll miss the tandem experience.
Aww, bummer :P
Great story though!
That’s been my issue with a lot of foldable/transportable thingies… Scooters etc… Unless you can unfurl them by essentially pulling one cord the repeated state changes needed to use them with other modes of transport get annoying quickly.
Do they have single folding bikes with matching trailer-suitcases?
Yay biking stories. Just this weekend, we were in New Orleans. Yesterday, it being my birthday, we rented bikes for the day ($20 each, we could have kept them til the following morning, and the bike shop was amazingly cool. Yay Michael’s Bikes in New Orleans), and asked the shop guy where he recommended. He took out a map and spent about 10 minutes illustrating various ways we could go to various parks, so we opted for a trip to Audubon Park which other friends had recomended we see. Long story short, 13 miles and three and a half hours later we made it back, returned the bikes, and collapsed, but man was it a nice trip. I am buying a bike next weekend (my birthday present! Also yay!) and will be going over Brooklyn like a maniac all summer. Feel free to bring down the bikes and we’ll have fun!
Sean – yeah, they do actually have single folding bikes that fit into the trailer-suitcases. The problem is, they need to get them to us, and it is looking as though they’ll be aiming for 5/15, and we leave on 5/17. This makes me more than a little nervous. I dunno.
katre – cooool! Whenever this bike thing actually works itself out, and when we’re not galavanting all over the continents, maniacal Brooklyn bicycling sounds like great fun. :)
Wow, a folding tandem. It is extremely cool that such a thing exists, even if the reality didn’t quite live up to the potential of the thing.
(Also, now I’ve got HAL 9000 singing ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’ in my head.)
The folding thing that I lust after is, of course,
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Er, what happened to the link there? Anyhow:
http://www.foldingkayaks.org/
I shall be lame and share an IM conversation from this morning:
Sam: veek and Ethan got a tandem bike and discovered why nobody rides tandem bikes
Jacq: They are crazy kids. And crazy in love.
Sam: can we not get a tandem bike?
Sam: they sound really crap
Jacq: You shatter all my dreams.
Sam: I do not want to have to prove my love by falling off a bike lots
Jacq: I think having a canoe we can easily capsize is the royal flush to a tandem bike’s three of a kind.
_____
All that having been said, I’m still sort of sad you’re returning it.
Ah, there’s a trick to getting used to a tandem – you do it first with someone who’s experienced riding one! Seriously (though I suppose a well-written book might be almost as good).
There’s all sorts of tricks and routines involved in making it a smooth experience. So you start out as the Stoker because there’s nothing to do wrong except in the pedaling, and the Captain keeps clueing you in, all the while being incredibly patient (hopefully), and in a mere several hours of riding you almost have the hang of that much of it. Yeah, the toeclip part is a real trick to learn.
I can only imagine the fun of two novices trying to learn at the same time.
Maybe you can rent or borrow a tandem for a little while in Denmark, to supplement the overall cycle touring experience.
I just bought a folding tandem bike from 1962. It’s a graziella. I’m hoping to get my boss on the back of it today… hahaha
i just got a folding graziella 2 seater, do you know where i can find some info on it?? Don’t know the year but its really old.
Thanx so much
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