Category Archives: bike touring

Hungry? 21 Go-To Family Bike Touring Foods

Posted on March 21, 2013 by | 10 Comments

slurpees!Disclaimer: In general, food is a polarizing subject. Add bike touring, small town grocery options and it can get even more divisive.

I’m an omnivore. And so is my family. For those of you who don’t eat meat or processed food, just know I’m not trying to offend your food sensibilities. Same goes for those of you who can’t imagine bike touring without energy drinks, freeze-dried food and power bars. Sometimes we eat some pretty gross stuff on tours that we wouldn’t consider at home (gas station deviled eggs, 7-11 hot dogs and mystery meat burritos). If the mere idea of any of that makes you ill, you may just want to skip this post!

Kids and food

For all the parents out there: Do you agree that feeding the family is one of the most high maintenance tasks on your daily list? I like to cook but feeding a family day after day quickly turns into a chore.

A few years ago,  I was trying to figure out what to make for dinner one night when I remembered this site a friend had recommended (if you’re swear-averse, don’t click.) They said it was funny and that it would cure my dinner making blues. I ended up procrastinating for quite some time one afternoon clicking links and laughing. F-bombs and dinner resonated with me at that time in my life. It just didn’t get old.

In all seriousness, kids can be such a pain in the ass when it comes to food. They don’t {ahem} like that, or they say they like it but won’t eat it when the time comes. Or they won’t eat vegetables. Or they’ll eat only raw vegetables. Or they’ll only eat white food. The worst is when they tell you that the meal you just slaved over is gross. Ack! Help!

Add bike touring and meal planning gets more difficult

Grocery Store BBQ, YumYou think feeding two adults and two kids is hard at home? Try feeding them on a bike tour! Three times a day, for 22 days. After pedaling 50-60 miles a day, we all get hungry. And since we’re far from our favorite local organic grocery stores, we have to make do with small town stores that sometimes offend our high-brow-gourmet-food sensibilities.  We might even sink so low that we’ll {gasp} scrounge for anything remotely edible in nasty gas stations! But everyone must eat, so we roll with it.

If you’re interested in family bike touring and food, read on! Continue reading →

→ 10 Comments

Posted in bike touring, bikes, family cycling, Pacific Coast Bike Tour

Tagged , , , , ,

Lies we Tell our Children (or how to get kids to go bike touring)

Posted on January 25, 2013 by | 16 Comments

Pacific Coast Bike Tour Day 1

When Tim and I recount family bike adventures to friends and strangers, a typical response is, “What do the kids think”? “Do they like bike touring?”

If we were being completely honest, we’d reply, “of course not”. You’ll soon ascertain that we have a slight problem with stretching the truth.

We get kids on board and excited about these trips by over-emphasizing the potential highlights and skipping the parts we know the kids won’t like.

And sometimes we tell all out lies. Continue reading →

→ 16 Comments

Posted in bike touring, bikes, family cycling, kids, Pacific Coast Bike Tour

Tagged , , , , , ,

Winter: A time for Planning Summer Family Bike Tours

Posted on January 17, 2013 by | 8 Comments

What sort of winter hibernation do you enjoy? The Car Free Days family tried to escape the cold and dark by hunkering down at home; reading, drinking gallons of hot tea, cuddling up around the fire, and occasionally getting out-of-town to ski in the Cascade range.

But a few winters ago we started doing something even better with the short, sucky days: dreaming about and planning epic summer bike tours.

Coping with Winter Blahs

With just over 8 hours of daylight during the winter months, Pacific Northwesterners (and Scandinavians, and Russians, and ….) must come up with some way to preserve our sanity day after dark sodden day from November through March. Residents of these northen climes rely on many different methods for coping with winter dreariness. Some use light therapy, others make regular pilgrimages to day spas; soaking in hot pools and sweating away sorrows in saunas. Still others escape altogether with vacations to warm sunny climates. For some reason the historic, go-to strategy of heavy drinking has fallen out of favor. At least in our circles.

A new twist on beating dreary days came from family biking media darling Emily Finch this past December. I spent a good part of my early Christmas vacation living vicariously through her highly entertaining winter indoor-painting-therapy-program:  Continue reading →

→ 8 Comments

Posted in bike touring, bikes, family cycling, summer

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Day 1: Starting off on the wrong foot, but at least starting

Posted on September 19, 2012 by | 10 Comments
bolt bus tandem loading

photo by David Clifton

If you’re bored with trip stories, you’ll just have to sit tight and wait a little longer for our excitement to pass. Because here at carfreedays HQ we’re not done talking about our Pacific Coast Bike tour.

Bike touring is one of those life changing experiences: you’re not quite the same after returning from an extended tour. But it takes a few weeks and months for those lessons to reveal themselves. Even though we’ve been home for 51 days, we’re definitely still processing the experience. And finding meaning and life lessons in the most mundane parts of the tour. Continue reading →

→ 10 Comments

Posted in bigger than here, bike touring, bikes, extravehicular activities, family cycling, Pacific Coast Bike Tour

Tagged , , , , , ,

We’re back: “I miss our trip”

Posted on August 27, 2012 by | 20 Comments

Pacific Coast Bike Tour Day 6
Our Pacific Coast Bike tour is O V E R . We’ve been back for a while now but it’s taken me this long to process the trip and figure out what I wanted to say about the amazing experience of riding 946 miles in 22 days with 2 tandems and 2 kids under 12.

Can I just say Wow and leave it at that? Continue reading →

→ 20 Comments

Posted in bigger than here, bike touring, bikes, extravehicular activities, family cycling, Pacific Coast Bike Tour, summer

Tagged , , , , , , ,

Pacific Coast Bike Tour

Posted on June 21, 2012 by | 7 Comments

Testing DIY stoves Our Home for the Next Month

We’re getting ready to head out on our  Pacific Coast Bike tour. We still have lots to do to get ready for the trip but we’re slowly making progress. Gear is piled up around the house, the new tent has been seam sealed and we’re slowly checking items off our to-do list. Even if we have to stay up all night, we’ll eventually get everything done and be ready to roll out-of-town. Departure may be a few days later than we planned, but that’s OK. Continue reading →

→ 7 Comments

Posted in bike touring, bikes

Tagged , , , , , ,

Motivating the Stoker

Posted on May 7, 2012 by | 6 Comments

The airplane stoker The Silly StokerThe Serene stoker  We’ve been busy this spring getting ready for our Pacific Coast bike tour in July (even though we’d love to do the whole thing, we only have time for Seattle to SFO).  We’re buying light weight camping gear, planning our route, getting the bikes set up and doing lots of tandem riding on the weekends. The whole family goes for at least one long ride every week – usually between 20 and 35 miles. We’ll slowly build up to 50 miles by the time we’re ready to roll out-of-town in July. Continue reading →

→ 6 Comments

Posted in bike touring, bikes, family cycling, kids

Tagged , , , , ,

Family Bike Touring: Character Building on Wheels

Posted on February 9, 2012 by | 4 Comments

Yesterday I began a post about our summer bike tour. As the post progressed, I realized it was becoming bigger than just recounting our trip. It was more about the lessons we all learned. As parents, Tim and I want to teach our kids about character and grit, and bike touring is a great way to accomplish that.

(continued)

…How many of the character traits have I covered so far?

Riding into townWith two kids along for the ride, bike touring is even more challenging. Because bike touring involves some suffering and grit and our modern-day, middle-class kids aren’t accustomed to that.

Karen Fierst, a teacher who oversaw the character program  at Riverdale, reflected in the aforementioned NYT piece:

“Our kids don’t put up with a lot of suffering. They don’t have a threshold for it. They’re protected against it quite a bit. And when they do get uncomfortable, we hear from their parents. We try to talk to parents about having to sort of make it O.K. for there to be challenge, because that’s where learning happens.”

Yes! I completely agree. Suffering is OK, it’s where learning happens. Continue reading →

→ 4 Comments

Posted in bigger than here, bike touring, bikes, family cycling, San Juan 2011

Tagged , , , ,

Bike Touring with Kids (building character one pedal stroke at a time)

Posted on February 8, 2012 by | 2 Comments

Too many months have passed since we returned from our family bike tour last summer to justify a trip report. But I think just enough time has passed to allow me to reflect on the experience and look forward to the next one. 

IMG_0006Last summer we loaded up Tim’s Big Dummy (with most of our gear), the tandem (equipped with 3 Ortliebs and a bucket pannier) piloted by Anne and the 8-year-old and the 10-year-old’s bike (toting her clothes, sleeping bag and thermarest) and  pedaled away from our house on a sunny Saturday afternoon in August.

We ended up in the San Juan Islands 5 days later.

SunsetThe family spent 5 more days camping, relaxing, reading, playing on the beach and enjoying the tranquility of Lopez and San Juan Islands. We then hopped on the Victoria Clipper and motored back to downtown Seattle (covering the same distance on the passenger ferry in a few hours that took 5 days on the bike).

The trip came to an end after a 5 mile ride back to our house in North Seattle on a quintessential Seattle summer evening.

Sounds nice, huh?

Recounting the trip in that manner makes it seem like a piece of cake. We pedaled, arrived 5 days later, hung out on the Islands for 5 days and took a ferry back to Seattle.

Truth be told, there was plenty of suffering mixed in as well. And some grit and definitely some character building.

This  NYT education piece about education, failure, building character and ultimately success reminded me of bike touring.

(stay with me for a bit). Continue reading →

→ 2 Comments

Posted in bigger than here, bike touring, bikes, kids, San Juan 2011, sustainability

Tagged , , , ,

10 days, 3 Bikes, 2 Adults, 2 Kids: A Family Bike Adventure

Posted on September 20, 2011 by | 7 Comments
Note: the following is the initial account of our summer family bike tour. If we were good bloggers we would have shared with you along the way. But instead we chose to be good bike tourists and (mostly) disconnect. And then we returned home and started the “back to school” cycle. So we’re a little late (and as you’ll see, there’s nothing unusual about that), but we think worth sharing anyway. We’ll add more installments over the next couple weeks.

The boy is readyIt’s 4:00 PM on August 13th and we’re finally ready to head out on our first substantial (multiple days, 200 mile) family bike tour.

Starting point: our house in Northeast Seattle
Destination: the San Juan Islands, eventually.
Bikes: 1 tandem with front and rear paniers, 1 kid bike with token rear paniers, and a Big Dummy loaded down with most of the gear
Transportation modes: Pedal power, assisted by state, county and private  ferries.

After several days of bike upgrades and maintenance, endless laundry and packing, we were finally ready to roll. Our dog/house sitter arrived and settled in for her week+ stay.

We planned to ride 13 miles to Edmonds, catch the ferry to Kingston, then pedal 12 miles to Kitsap Memorial State Park. We said our goodbyes, then pedaled out of the driveway heading in the direction of Edmonds.Geared up and ready to ride Sure, our departure was about four hours later than planned, but so what. We were on the road.

And we made it about a block and a half. Seriously.

Though we thought we packed light, our bikes felt like RVs.  The kids were moving even slower than usual. Uh-oh. Was this such a  good idea?

That one long block made us realize 5-10 MPH would not get us to Kitsap Memorial before dark, especially with the threat of rain and darkness. Had we been kid-less (or just hauling them on the Xtracycles) we could have made it in time, even with the late start. But as a full pedaling family? No way.

Consider this reset expectation number one.

So now we’re not even out of the neighborhood and we needed a place to sleep that didn’t feel like defeat. Because our dog sitter was at our house, we couldn’t tuck tail and go home even if we wanted to. We had to go forward. Somewhere. Continue reading →

→ 7 Comments

Posted in bike touring, family cycling, San Juan 2011

Tagged , , , ,