Every Day Adventurers

Xtracycle has graced the pages of Bicycling magazine (think the Newsweek of bike media) not once but twice in 2011.

We’ve cropped the two articles onto one page above, which you can download as a .pdf here.

You can also read the full text of the main article at Bicycling’s website here.

Almost 2 years ago, we profiled Jay Marlette, who had decided to make his home inspection business greener by adding an Xtracycle to the mix. As you can see from our photos and video, this wasn’t a small commitment.  The ladder is longer than the Xtracycle!

When people make a shift like this, it’s natural to wonder how things worked out.  So guess who I ran into the other day just as he was wrapping up a home inspection:

Two years later and he’s still going strong!  A lot of people can say they’ve gone green, but when you see Jay riding around town hauling that ladder, you know he’s walking the talk.

Some things need to be seen to be believed, so if you want to check out Jay’s geared-up Xtracycle and ask him about his experiences in going green via bike, both Jay and his ride will be at the Berkeley Earth Day celebration this Saturday, April 23rd (12-5pm, Civic Center Park).  As part of the Earth Day celebration, Jay will be fielding general home questions and can also offer advice on ways to make your home more energy efficient.

The Earth Day celebration will have free valet bike parking (which we love to hear). For complete event details, click here.

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. :)

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’.