Every Day Adventurers

Rick Smith, creator of the excellent cycling focused cartoon strip Yehuda Moon, did this fun illustration for Xtracycle and is allowing us to print shirts to help benefit Worldbike!

Once we get 25 orders we’ll start the printing presses and get these babies in motion!

Pre-order your Yehuda Moon Xtracycle Cargo Bike Surfing T-Shirt today!.

Living in apartments allows you to see other humans’ living habits a bit closer than you’d usually like to experience. I live in a quad-plex in Oakland, in a neighborhood that’s gentrifying and has seen worse days.

Oakland, and the Bay Area in general, have always been on the cusp of the next Green/sustainable revolution. In the past two, three years we’ve gotten a cool curbside composting program going (although I’d rather see the stuff get trucked to the Oakland Port where giant digestors could capture all those high energy vapors of composting instead of letting it waft into the air as they drive it tens of miles away to rot in open fields contributing green house gases to the atmosphere) and our recycling is thorough and impressive (Berkeley just upped their investment with new bins).

I also take pride in limiting my impact on our shared environment. I don’t own a car, I ride my bikes (Xtracycle Big Dummy included), I compost all our food and paper wastes, recycle, take short showers and grow some of our own food. So it pains me to see my neighbors tossing perfectly good recyclables into the trash, or food that could easily be composted in the trash or old clothes that just need a simple wash getting dumped instead of donated. That last one just happened, and in a big way.

We have large Murphy bed closests in our building. Suffice it to say, they hold a lot of junk (mine is full of bike parts and stuff). My neighbor’s daughter was cleaning out her closet, which seemed to have been collecting things since middle school (she’s 18 now). Bag after bag was filled with clothes, shoes, books, pencils, pens, etc. All about to be trashed! Had I not had the (un)pleasure of looking at the garbage from our kitchen window, all that stuff would’ve ended up in the landfill. We have thousands of people who can use the items she was tossing out. Our economy is still shedding jobs, unemployment is through the roof, and coming from parents who lived on food stamps during Reganomics, I’m sensitive to such non-chalance.

So, I dug through her stuff, salvaging what could be donated. I encountered her as she was taking out even more items(!) and explained that almost all the stuff she was tossing could be donated. I also took the opportunity to explain that recyclables belong in the recycling container. I still need to talk with her mother and her about the needs for all of us to take more responsibility for our waste and pull as much of it as we can out of the waste stream and return, reuse, recycle it.

Here’s my load, about 80 lbs of shoes, shirts, pants, jackets, books and other odd ends that I pedaled over to the East Bay Depot Center for Creative Reuse on Telegraph and a local thrift store.

Loads of Donation Items Being Reused Instead of Dumped

Every little bit counts. :)

Providing protection from the sun and rain is easy. Just follow the steps below.

The temperature is beginning to rise in Tucson. Before long, the temperature will regularly top out at over 100 degrees every day.

As a desert rat, you instinctively learn to seek shade because it is significantly cooler and because it keeps your skin from turning the same color as the Redical Red freeloaders.

People often ask, “how can you ride in the heat?” I tell them, “it’s only hot when you stop.” This summer, though, I have to worry about more than just myself.

Because my wife and I sold our second car — you can read about why we decided to sell it on my blog, TucsonVelo.com — there will be times my daughter and I will be out in the heat. On a bike in the Sonoran Desert, shade can be hard to come by.

I wanted something to provide her with shade everywhere we went. I searched the web for a PeaPod LT cover that provided shade and allowed enough air circulation to keep the seat from turning into an oven, but couldn’t find anything that worked. In the Xtracycle spirit, I decided to create my own. This project will also provide the structure to make the PeaPod rain proof. Yes, it does actually rain in Tucson, but not enough.

Here is how to do it:

1) Pick up a Kelty FC Sun Hood ($34.95). It is designed to work with their backpacks, but works great on the PeaPod LT. Our local outdoor store, Summit Hut has them as does REI, nationally.

2) Purchase rubber grommets from a hardware store like ACE Hardware. I don’t recall the specific size, but I just took the cover in and slipped on the grommets until I found one that was tight, but could still slip on and off. I purchased eight, thinking I would put one above and below the points where it slips into the PeaPod. It turns out the way the structure is flexed you really only need one on the bottom so the poles don’t slip out.

3) Drill holes a little bit wider than the plastic poles from the cover so they can slip in tightly. I drilled mine right outside the gray part of the crossbar in front and just outside the raised half circle on the back of the PeaPod LT.

4) Insert the poles into the holes and place a rubber grommet on the bottom of each pole. The grommets prevent the structure from pulling out, or being pulled out by small hands.

To get your child in and out, just remove the front two grommets and take the poles out of the holes you drilled. You can tuck the poles up into the shade structure to get them out of the way while you buckle and unbuckle your child.

The shade screen does a great job keeping the sun off our daughter’s face and neck.

Making the PeaPod LT rain proof is a snap with the shade structure in place. I just bought a rain cover for a running stroller from Babies R’ Us. The cover has two Velcro tabs on the front of the cover which make it easy to loop around a part of the frame to keep the cover pulled down over the PeaPod LT’s foot rests. The back of the cover has other Velcro tabs that allow you to tighten the part that drapes over the back of the seat.

I think the rain cover might also be a great way to help transport kids in the winter by keeping the chilly air from blowing on them.

We had a freak rain storm last week that allowed me to try the rain cover. It worked flawlessly. My daughter was warm and dry when we got to our destination. I, however, was not.

Michael McKisson runs TucsonVelo.com, a website devoted to covering the cycling community in Tucson.

Lou and her two adorable boys brought along their new Xtracycle to hit up some rails-to-trails trekking into the Australian wilderness. This being Lou’s first bicycle supported adventure, she took it easy, exploring what it was like to carry cargo and two kids by cargo bike, something we recommend all families do before hitting the woods with family in tow.

Enjoy some more snaps from their adventure and thanks, Lou, for expanding your comfort zone and trying something new! Good luck on your other every day adventures!

Read Lou’s entire post about herXtracycle cargo bicycle camping adventure.

Bill Kiely’s Big Dummy is no stranger to sun and sand, as he and his family hit the surf via bike on a regular basis.  He shared some of his ‘Big Dummy’s Big Wednesday’ photos with us:

Xtracycle Big Dummy on Spring Break

Not only can an Xtracycle get you and your surfboard to the beach, but it’ll help you dry your towel as well!  Keep on ridin’.