Bike configurations for the 2007 Street Scramble season
For the past two Street Scramble seasons, we’ve been riding with one child on the pedal trailer and the other in a bike seat. This year, our younger child is ready for riding on the pedal trailer, so a few months ago we started talking about what we wanted to do. We settled on getting a tandem for me and our eight-year-old, but didn’t find much time to get out and look at tandems.
Fast forward to last weekend. We visited a couple bike shops and came up with the idea of renting a tandem so we could try it out and see if it worked for us. I was a little nervous about trying out a tandem on a three hour Street Scramble, but with kids’ baseball and soccer games, there wasn’t a lot of other time to try one out.
Yesterday, we went to a few bike shops to actually rent one and it turns out that none of the rental tandems are designed for a child to ride the stoker position. We finally ended up renting a second pedal trailer, which I thought would be great because we already had lots of experience riding bikes with pedal trailers.
Unfortunately, when I tried to hook up the pedal trailer yesterday evening, the plastic sleeve designed to fit around the seat post was not the right size and the trailer was not stable (and the shop was closed and didn’t open until noon on Sunday). I tried it with our five-year-old and she was not at all comfortable riding it (and I wasn’t comfortable riding with it like that for three hours). I tried a couple of different ideas for filling the space between the sleeve and the seat post, but nothing was satisfactory.
(It turned out that our eight-year-old was sick and couldn’t participate in the U District Street Scramble, so the loss of the additional pedal trailer was okay.)
In the end, though, we decided that the best configuration for us, for now, is two pedal trailers. The kids can pedal at their own rate, transporting the bikes is easier, and we have lots of experience with pedal trailers. Now, we just need to find that second pedal trailer…