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...

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,...