Christina Goes Carless

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...

I've already rhapsodized about the childlike bliss of rediscovering bike riding in a previous post , so I'll try to rein that in this time. But now that the Hubby and I have had our bikes for a couple weeks, suffice it to say I love biking more with every ride, even though I did take a few (well, three to be exact) minor tumbles as I learned to adjust to my Electra Townie Commute 8D 's step-through frame. The Hubby got the Electra Loft 7i , which suits him uncannily well. If you'd like to know more about riding that bike, let me know and I'll have him write a guest post. The Bike As always, allow me to remind readers that I am not a "serious" cyclist, just a girl trying to go carless. I am, however, a conscientious consumer and chronic researcher, so long before we turned in our 2014 Nissan LEAF I had spent countless hours researching bikes that would be best for my urban commuter/errand-running/ we're-serious-picnickers needs. But first,...