What possessed you to....?
...decided to ride tandems 500km ???
A very good question indeed... and I'm not quite sure where to start.
Because we can?
In terms of tandems, Marc used to ride one with a mate when his family spent weekends at their holiday house in the Blue Mountains. It was owned by the other guy, so I'm sure he used to think "One day, I'm gonna get one of them..." (We certainly get kids, especially boys, around our neighbourhood going "That's sick.. I WANT one")
In terms of other 'mad' adventures:
When I met him when we were in our early twenties, he was in a canoeing phase, and we ended up buying a double racing/marathon kayak (a TK2 with a trailing rudder) and started paddling canoe marathons together. In that time I also bought a mountain bike (the first time I'd ever ridden a bike with gears!), and we did a couple of trips.
The first was, not long after I got the bike, the Sydney to Gong bike ride. A mere 90km in one day (with stuff all training!) One was in the Snowy Mountains (which my old photo albums recall as a "pushing" trip because a lot of the tracks were unrideable!!) and the other notable one was our ride, with panniers carrying camping gear, from the Gold Coast to Byron Bay, across to Mullumimby, back to the coast, west again to Murwillumbah, and over the range through Currumbin and back to Burleigh.
I was pretty impressed with myself after doing that.. though you wouldn't have wanted to hear the names I was calling him as we rode over that range!
Other weekends and holidays we'd be canyoning, bushwalking or cross country skiing... so riding from the Gold Coast to Byron Bay and back didn't seem like anything that batty to us.
Our outdoor exploits took a dive after we got married (although I think the Byron Bay ride happened after that)... mainly because we took on another challenge; building a kit home from the ground up.
Then along came the babies and that REALLY cramped our style, although we bought one of those MacPac Possum back pack carriers, and managed to do a few little bushwalks, and as the girls were older, 'blooded' them on a mountain each. (Caitlin walked up Pigeon House Mountain when she was 3. Alison's mountain is Mt Warning, when she was 4. And Zoe has laid claim to Mt Rangitoto in NZ (a volcanic island in Auckland Harbour).. when she was 5.)
Somewhere in that time Marc sold his mountain bike, with a view to buying a better one.. and then took about 10 years to upgrade. (Typical!) In that time he had a road bike, and went in a couple of "Winter Classics" in teams events where he did cross country ski and bike legs.
We bought a 'you-beaut' child seat for the back of my bike, but as he didn't have the mountain/hybrid type bike during the time the first two were little, we didn't do much family riding.
We moved up the coast the year before Zoe was born; he FINALLY bought a bike, and we'd occasionally get out on the weekends to ride up the beach at low tide. Alison was always a strong little bugger on a bike, although we'd get the tears when she couldn't keep up because of her 16 inch wheels and no gears.
By the time the older two had bigger wheels, with gears, it was obvious that Zoe (at 3 years younger than Alison) was going to take a while till she could keep up. Add to that the fact that she was less a 'natural' on the bike, so we were wondering if we'd ever get to ride anywhere as a family.
Enter the concept of the trailer bike... We did some research, and in 2004 we bought an Adams Trail-A-Bike and we did a few rides up and down the beach...
plus I took it on a trip to Sydney where we went bike riding around Bicentennial Park and Olympic Park with the grandparents and the cousins.
In January 05, Marc bought a second hand tandem on eBay. He'd been hankering for one all those years! .. fuelled by a chance ride on one a few years ago. When he picked it up from Sydney, the seller offered him the other one she had on the Gold Coast. He decided to buy that too, and we hiked up there one weekend. Suddenly, if we counted the trail-a-bike, we had instant family bike riding!!!
We did a few rides locally, with the trailer bike hooked on to the back of Marc's tandem, and we were hooked. In October we entered the Sydney Spring Cycle (50km), thinking that if we all enjoyed that, we'd think seriously about one of the Big Rides. (We'd heard of them years ago.. in fact a friend went on the Vic one, met a girl, and subsequently married her, riding off from their reception on bikes.)
It took us into November to decide 'what the hell, you only live once' and we signed up to do the NSW Big Ride, after extended consultations with the kids. I originally tried to do the recap of it as blog entries, but it didn't work doing the retrospect thing, so it's all on a website
Meantime, I'm going to try and turn this blog into a family contribution affair... stay tuned....
A very good question indeed... and I'm not quite sure where to start.
Because we can?
In terms of tandems, Marc used to ride one with a mate when his family spent weekends at their holiday house in the Blue Mountains. It was owned by the other guy, so I'm sure he used to think "One day, I'm gonna get one of them..." (We certainly get kids, especially boys, around our neighbourhood going "That's sick.. I WANT one")
In terms of other 'mad' adventures:
When I met him when we were in our early twenties, he was in a canoeing phase, and we ended up buying a double racing/marathon kayak (a TK2 with a trailing rudder) and started paddling canoe marathons together. In that time I also bought a mountain bike (the first time I'd ever ridden a bike with gears!), and we did a couple of trips.
The first was, not long after I got the bike, the Sydney to Gong bike ride. A mere 90km in one day (with stuff all training!) One was in the Snowy Mountains (which my old photo albums recall as a "pushing" trip because a lot of the tracks were unrideable!!) and the other notable one was our ride, with panniers carrying camping gear, from the Gold Coast to Byron Bay, across to Mullumimby, back to the coast, west again to Murwillumbah, and over the range through Currumbin and back to Burleigh.
I was pretty impressed with myself after doing that.. though you wouldn't have wanted to hear the names I was calling him as we rode over that range!
Other weekends and holidays we'd be canyoning, bushwalking or cross country skiing... so riding from the Gold Coast to Byron Bay and back didn't seem like anything that batty to us.
Our outdoor exploits took a dive after we got married (although I think the Byron Bay ride happened after that)... mainly because we took on another challenge; building a kit home from the ground up.
Then along came the babies and that REALLY cramped our style, although we bought one of those MacPac Possum back pack carriers, and managed to do a few little bushwalks, and as the girls were older, 'blooded' them on a mountain each. (Caitlin walked up Pigeon House Mountain when she was 3. Alison's mountain is Mt Warning, when she was 4. And Zoe has laid claim to Mt Rangitoto in NZ (a volcanic island in Auckland Harbour).. when she was 5.)
Somewhere in that time Marc sold his mountain bike, with a view to buying a better one.. and then took about 10 years to upgrade. (Typical!) In that time he had a road bike, and went in a couple of "Winter Classics" in teams events where he did cross country ski and bike legs.
We bought a 'you-beaut' child seat for the back of my bike, but as he didn't have the mountain/hybrid type bike during the time the first two were little, we didn't do much family riding.
We moved up the coast the year before Zoe was born; he FINALLY bought a bike, and we'd occasionally get out on the weekends to ride up the beach at low tide. Alison was always a strong little bugger on a bike, although we'd get the tears when she couldn't keep up because of her 16 inch wheels and no gears.
By the time the older two had bigger wheels, with gears, it was obvious that Zoe (at 3 years younger than Alison) was going to take a while till she could keep up. Add to that the fact that she was less a 'natural' on the bike, so we were wondering if we'd ever get to ride anywhere as a family.
Enter the concept of the trailer bike... We did some research, and in 2004 we bought an Adams Trail-A-Bike and we did a few rides up and down the beach...
In January 05, Marc bought a second hand tandem on eBay. He'd been hankering for one all those years! .. fuelled by a chance ride on one a few years ago. When he picked it up from Sydney, the seller offered him the other one she had on the Gold Coast. He decided to buy that too, and we hiked up there one weekend. Suddenly, if we counted the trail-a-bike, we had instant family bike riding!!!
We did a few rides locally, with the trailer bike hooked on to the back of Marc's tandem, and we were hooked. In October we entered the Sydney Spring Cycle (50km), thinking that if we all enjoyed that, we'd think seriously about one of the Big Rides. (We'd heard of them years ago.. in fact a friend went on the Vic one, met a girl, and subsequently married her, riding off from their reception on bikes.)
It took us into November to decide 'what the hell, you only live once' and we signed up to do the NSW Big Ride, after extended consultations with the kids. I originally tried to do the recap of it as blog entries, but it didn't work doing the retrospect thing, so it's all on a website
Meantime, I'm going to try and turn this blog into a family contribution affair... stay tuned....
posted by Tracey at 7:35 pm
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