About a month and a half in...

Well, we're about a month and a half into our "new" commuting schedule.  Whew.  Overall I have to say it's going well.  It's been a little bit of a test of my resolve as the weather has started to change.  We've had some blips and I drove the car once so I could drop it at the shop for annual maintenance after dropping my daughter at school.  It wasn't the best transition and the route from the shop to school was a bit dicey.  We had to run a few blocks on the sidewalk to avoid some traffic that was too heavy for a trailer with a 2 year old in it.  The whole time my son kept asking me "why are we on the sidewalk?".  Oh well, we worked it out and my son had a fun morning taking a new route and getting to see an auto shop.  Something that was pretty much a standard for me as a kid and which will be a much smaller part of his life if we continue on this path we're going down.

We've found that while my daughter is a great bike rider she isn't so great when there is a bunch of traffic around.  We've had some attention span issues and so we've settled on riding on the sidewalk for a bit.  Not the easiest solution when I have the trailer as well but it works.  The funny thing is she used to refuse to ride in the trailer anymore but now she like it.  The two of them squeezed into the little buggy is endearing and really heavy!  It's kind of fun having them in one place.  I can hear both of them talk and they can play together (mostly :). 

The bike discussions are weaving back towards a box bike though.  The constant hooking-up and un-hooking wears on you after a while.  My wife was the first to bring it up and I had to concur.  I'm convinced there isn't a perfect solution short of both parents riding box bikes.  The kids and the right bike are always in different places.  In reality I don't know that spending the money on a box bike is in our future (let alone 2).  We have the money from our second vehicle stashed away but it would just barely cover a new box bike (like used ones are available anyway around here!).  It's a hard balance.  Do you save the money and just deal with what you have or do you make the jump to a family bike?  I'd say it's worth getting a family bike is the way to go if you have the money.  If not, the used trailer and tag-a-long is such an affordable option it's hard to pass up.  That said, as the kids grow the need changes.  I've been doing well with the trailer, panniers and front rack for heavy hauling with one kid in back.  There are easier solutions but it's what I'm doing now.  We'll just keep at it and look to our creativity as the situation changes.  The real need right now is bike storage.

We've never had a garage.  Never really needed or wanted one.  It always seems that our friend's garages don't store cars.  They store stuff.  No one needs to store that much stuff in my opinion.  Then again, we don't tend to have that much anyway so maybe I'm biased.  We do know one family who is the exception.  Their garage has bikes in it.  Bikes and trailers and such.  It's rather grand.  They have two big bikes at work trailers they use for their business and all the other various bike stuff.  At this point in our lives if we had a garage something tells me that is what ours would look like.  Problem is we can't build one because there isn't space.  We've thought about a shed attached to the side of the house, renovating our garden shed to be weather tight and secure enough to store bikes in and we've talked about bike lockers in the driveway.  The bike lockers are the best idea but then I looked at how much they cost!  Yikes.  I'd like to just build a bike sized shed at the end of our driveway but I need to talk to the building permit people first.  The city might not like the idea even thought they should.  I mean, it's a billboard for sustainability.  The craziest idea I've had is to get an enclosed trailer and just park it on the street or in the driveway and store the bikes in that.  Simple, cheap if you can find a used one and about as weather tight and secure as anything I can build.  That and we could use it for car trips.  Just throw in the camping gear and hey, you've got your bike along too!

Somehow we need to solve the storage issue before long.  With two commuters, two kid's bikes, a tag-a-long and a trailer the little area we have for bikes is getting crowded.  I won't mention the other bikes lying around.