Tag Archives: seattle

Tree Hauling Year Ten.

Posted on December 12, 2016 by | Leave a comment

 

Tree Hauling Year TEN!

After TEN years, I don’t have much more to say about tree hauling by bike. Other than TEN YEARS! Wow, we really are old. The 13-year-old hauled the tree home, then immediately set off on his bike for an afternoon D&D session at his friend’s house. Teens are busy! I will say that my family has labeled me the Scrooge because I’m sorta down on Christmas and all of the commercialism. That tree we hauled home yesterday was eighty bucks! Bah Humbug.

Thanks to Tim for keeping the Christmas spirit alive in our house! His Christmas-loving mom would be proud. Merry Christmas!

Memory Lane

Once again, I’m recycling our tree-hauling photo retrospective from years past. Last year our daughter claimed that, “our family is weird” and “this was her last year”. And yesterday she said, “Now that we’ve done ten, I’m done.” So this really could be our last Christmas tree post, EVER. We’ll see.

 Year One: 2007, look how little!

2007 Family Long Bike Christmas

Year Two: 2008, a dusting of snow

Xtracycle Tree Haulin 2008: The happy family

Year Three: 2009, the year we frozeXtracycle Tree Haulin 2009

Year Four: 2010, the year it rained a lot2010 Xtracycle Tree Haulin

Year Five:  2011, kids on their own bikes!

2011 Xtracycle Tree Haulin Family

Year Six: 2012, looking so grown up!

2012 Xtracycle Tree Haulin (Year Six!)

Year Seven: 2013, Kids hauling trees. (She’s almost as tall as me)

Foggy Xtracycle Tree Hauling (year 7)

Year Eight: 2014, whoa these kids are tall, but still shorter than me.family and tree_DSC8705 (Large)

2015: Year Nine. We’re almost all the same height (except for Tim)
Family Christmas Tree Xtracycle 2015

2016:  Year Ten. I have places to be. Can we go yet?

Tree Hauling Year TEN!

Happy Holidays, everyone. Looking forward to checking out your tree-hauling adventures.

– Anne and Tim

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Posted in alternative transportation, Bicycle Christmas, BIG Loads, bikes, Everyday Biking

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reBertha: What To Do With Our Very Large Hole

Posted on January 24, 2014 by | 9 comments

photo modified under Creative Commons. Original available on flickr from the WaDOT (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/8260834957/in/set-72157631880763139)
As you’ve probably heard, our tortured tunneling titan, Bertha “the world’s largest and most expensive tunneling machine,” hasn’t moved in more than a month.

Armchair speculation says she’s likely over budget and certainly behind schedule.

I think it’s safe to say things are a mess.  Many of us alternative transportation nerds advocates have been against this mega project debacle since the beginning.  A mere $2.8B to move some cars at roughly the same speed and efficiency as if we tore down the doomed Alaska Way Viaduct and did nothing? “Sure that sounds like a great investment (air quotes over the great),” was my reaction all along.

Tweet: Bertha's Budget Busted

Nobody official wants to speak publicly about the growing quagmire, probably because the State and the contractor, Seattle Tunnel Partners, are busy lining up their litigation teams for the lawsuit(s) of the century.

Meanwhile the same state leaders glady supporting the motor-vehicle-only tunnel also think that investing in bike and transit infrastructure is too expensive and/or too socialist. Right….

So it’s tempting (oh so tempting!) to play I-told-you-so and draft an initiative to require all State Legislators to write suitably conciliatory, daisy-scented, “I’m sorry” notes to hero tunnel obstructionist/former Mayor McGuin.

Bertha's Junk. A creative commons photo from the Washington State Department of Transportation http://www.flickr.com/photos/wsdot/11828410274/in/set-72157631880763139/lightbox/

Bertha’s Junk

As much as I’d like to see how a liberal Tim Eyeman-style effort would play out in Ephrata, we’re instead going to join the moral-high ground freshly shoveled in by Tom over at the Seattle Bike Blog. In a post Thursday morning entitled “We can do better things with our new downtown tunnel,” he’s calling for a positive spin to install on our sinking Titantic. Continue reading →

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Posted in alternative transportation, bicycle neglect, Human Powered Politics, mass transit, seattle

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Tree Hauling, Year 7: Kids Hauling Trees

Posted on December 17, 2013 by | 7 comments

Foggy Xtracycle Tree Hauling (year 7)
Happy Holidays! It’s time for our seventh-annual Christmas-tree hauling post. You’re probably bored of our tree-hauling exploits at this point. But it’s a tradition so we’re sharing anyway!

Last year our friend, Charlotte, suggested that the kids need to start hauling the tree. And since our daughter now fits Anne’s bikes, Tim floated the idea by her a couple of weeks ago. As a new 13 year old, she’s lukewarm about even riding bikes, let alone hauling trees on bikes in public, where, you know, like, her friends and, like, the whole world might see her!

So we weren’t surprised then with her less-than-enthusiastic response.

Continue reading →

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Posted in BIG Loads, bikes, family cycling

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9 to 5: Register Now for the All-Night Bike Scavenger Hunt

Posted on June 8, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Go ahead and register, you know you want to. It’s the most fun you’ll have on a bike in the middle-of-the-night all year, I guarantee it. Continue reading →

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Posted in bikes, Events, extravehicular activities, xtracycle

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Xtracycle Reader (the video)

Posted on May 22, 2012 by | 5 comments

2820642182_ae39a4f07cBy now you know that the Car Free Days family isn’t always prompt about posting to our blog. We have the very best intentions to keep it from getting old and moldy, but often life gets in the way and we push those blog updates aside.

We’ve officially taken procrastination to new heights. I’m more than a little bit ashamed to admit that this video edit is almost 4-years in the making: we’ve been saving this un-edited footage since August 2008. I started to edit it a few times but I just never got around to finishing it (kinda like Tim’s plan to finish his kid bike series). Continue reading →

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Posted in bikes, extravehicular activities, family cycling, kids, longbikes, xtracycle

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Talk about Walk & Bike to School programs Thurs!

Posted on April 11, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Walk.Bike.Schools!
Walk.Bike.Schools! is a blog,  meeting (7pm Thursday @ Bryant Elementary library) and (hopefully) a movement to support and encourage parents and kids walking and biking to school.

Our mission (though calling it such seems a little grand right now) is to build a network of parents, neighbors, members of school communities, and yes, students, who can share ideas and energy around the goal of encouraging more kids and families to bike to school—at least some of the time.

Our loose group of ~6-8 parents has been reasonably successful—Bryant won SDOT’s Golden Shoe award for the largest number of students regularly arriving on foot or bike last year. But we know things could be so much better if we could tap into the collective intelligence of other bike and walk programs in our city and learn what as worked (and not worked) elsewhere. Continue reading →

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Posted in bigger than here, Events, family cycling, School, seattle

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Seattle Neighborhood Greenways Action is Afoot (and a-Bicycle, for that matter)

Posted on March 21, 2012 by | 10 comments

(edit:I’ve been told that a shared definition of a Neighborhood Greenway would be helpful for some readers. We’re working toward  our “ideal vision” but in the meantime check out the “What is a neighborhood Greenway” section in this post by Sally Bagshaw for the basics. -Tim)

The Carfreedays family is jumping into the hotbed of Seattle Greenways grass-roots activism and joining up with our neighbors in NE Seattle on the NE Greenways project!

Greenways fit with the kind of riding we do (parent and kid-powered transportation), and c0uld really be the key resource for making it safer and easier for kids all over this city to skip the minivan and ride bikes or walk to school!

Bike Train to Bryant ElementaryWe don’t claim to be Greenways experts but we have some strong feelings, nonetheless. We’ve been riding around Seattle for longer than we’d like to admit. We know this city pretty well. We know the terrain and the people and the baggage that comes with both. And we’ve been avidly riding the streets of PDX on visits for the past five years or so. We aren’t Stumptown natives by any stretch, but we have more than a passing familiarity of what it feels like to ride the Green Streets of our fair neighbor. Continue reading →

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Posted in bikes, Human Powered Politics, neighborhoods, seattle

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Fall Basket = Smiles

Posted on November 17, 2011 by | 5 comments

Fall Leaves

I followed a cyclist down Eastlake the other day. We yo yoed for a few miles as we both climbed and descended all the hills heading North. He passed me, I caught up, he pulled way ahead, I caught up again.

The only reason he kept getting so far ahead of me is he was running red lights. As in, not–even–a–question the light was red, it was R E D. Continue reading →

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Posted in alternative transportation, bikes, xtracycle

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Weekend Bike(tastic) Events

Posted on November 16, 2011 by | 1 comment

Julian posted details for November Kidical Mass over at Totcycle. The ride includes the opening of the Ship Canal Trail and ends at Fremont Brewing.

What’s not to like about that route? Continue reading →

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Posted in beer, bikes, Events, extravehicular activities, family cycling

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Soccer Mom, Hold the Mini-Van

Posted on November 1, 2011 by | 24 comments

Soccer without a car question from TwitterCan a kid participate in soccer if their family doesn’t own a car?

Tim and Maddie had a conversation about that very subject on Twitter today…she was surprised to learn that our kids play soccer and we don’t have a car. (She knew about the car part, she just didn’t know about soccer). Continue reading →

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Posted in alternative transportation, bikes, kids

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