Christina Goes Carless

Hold on to your helmets, folks, this is the post you've all been waiting for: today we're going to talk about bike insurance! Chances are your home owner's insurance (or renter's insurance)  isn't  giving you  as much coverage as you need (for those of you who didn't know, yes, your homeowner's insurance might cover some bike losses, even away from home. They do, however, have to know you own a bike, so even if you don't get bike insurance after reading this post, make that call at least). Why do I need bike insurance?  Because crippling medical debt is a soul-sucking albatross that hangs around your neck for years. It ruthlessly quashes any viable chance of achieving aspirations or upward mobility. Even if you're right where you want to be in life, trust me, the health care system in this country guarantees you will owe it more money than you have. Sound overly dramatic? It's not; I know because ten years after my husband's (not bike ...

If anything proves the folly of hubris, it's riding a bike again after nearly 20 years. Sure, my confidence has improved since those first rocky weeks , and I've begun to think of my bike not only as my main form of transportation, but a perfectly natural one as well. I'm confident enough to kind of tilt a bit for fun when coasting (because I'm basically still a 10-year-old, in case you couldn't tell), often ride with just one hand and am far more confident about stopping. Still, that's not to say I'm not still adjusting. About a month and a half ago (Life's been busy, so obviously I'm way behind on my blog) I got cocky and paid the price. So did WheelieSchatz. I was riding off a mini-curb that couldn't be more than three inches high into a parking lot. The parking spaces had curb stops but I thought, " Pshaw, I can slip through those, easy. I'm like a master bicyclist now, right? " Except not. Perhaps inevitably, I missed t...

There’s no denying it: if WheelieSchatz* were a woman she’d be a big, curvaceous, sexy beast. And like all beautiful women, this makes her just a bit more high-maintenance, though worth the extra effort. While not a fat tire bike, the frame of my beloved Electra Townie Commute 8D   is quite a bit thicker (and heavier) than the frame of most bikes, at least from what I've observed. When faced with obnoxiously thick bike stand rails, locking my bike securely becomes quite the challenge. Granted, my bike came with a pretty awesome Arbus frame lock , possibly because the designers (engineers?) at Electra saw this dilemma coming. It’s a snazzy device, too. It works by locking the wheel so that even if someone did take the bike they couldn’t ride it.    For most people that’s probably enough, especially considering I don’t park my bike at particularly high-risk locations. Still, I spent enough years as a crime reporter and currently spend enough time on Nextdoo...

It’s surprisingly difficult to find a basic bicycle maintenance class in the greater Phoenix metro area. Even before we got our bikes, I asked several shops if they offered or knew of one and was mostly met with shrugs or vague allusions to classes that apparently “used to be put on.” Undaunted, I uber-Googled and eventually found Bike Saviours , a nonprofit bike shop, tool share and all-around phenomenal cyclist resource in Tempe, Arizona. From spare parts to a weeks-long workshop during which you can build your own bike from scratch , Bike Saviours has just about anything a cyclist in need could want. That includes answers to questions, too. Not surprisingly, Bike Saviours also offers a four-hour long basic bicycle maintenance class usually held on the last Saturday of the month .  And so on a beautiful Saturday morning in January, the Hubby and I rode our bikes to a bus stop, rode the bus to the light rail, rode the light rail to Tempe and finished the trip wit...

What this blog IS This blog chronicles the (mis)adventures of an unathletic, overweight, clumsy woman in her mid-30s going carless in Phoenix, Arizona. That may not seem like a blog-worthy big deal, but I haven’t ridden a bike in any real sense in at least 20 years and haven't had to use public transport since I was a teenager. I'm also not great at reading maps and by "not great" I mean "totally incompetent". I am  pretty handy, being a fountain pen tinkerer and take-apart-the-toaster kind of gal, so I'm actually looking forward to learning about bike maintenance, but I suspect there will still be plenty of surprises in store. I'd like this blog to be useful to other people considering going carless who may not already be an avid cyclist. Whatever I learn, and how I learn it, you'll learn too by reading this blog. To prepare for this rather major transition, I’ve been doing a lot of research. That in and of itself has been an ey...