Sometimes when something does all that it was meant to do its all too easy to take it for granted, but sometimes the capabilities are just so exceptional that its hard NOT to take note. Xtracycle's and Surly's Big Dummy frameset are just like that.
My wife and I had been researching the best solutions for ourselves as a car free family with kids, and it seemed obvious that at one point or another an Xtracycle was going to be a part of that picture. Last spring when we were about to pull the trigger on an xtracycle kit, the Big Dummy framesets finally came available and we jumped on one.
This bike is simply tremendous it what in makes possible by bike. Most of the time its what you don't have to think about or plan ahead for that makes it great, those daily errands before that required juggling who had the kid trailer and needed to make which trips. For most folks these would be car days. This bike made a tour possible through the rocky mountains this last summer that I simply don't think would have been possible any other way. We took such extensive measures to bring gear weight down, and make our setup as efficient as possible, and I can promise you relative to towing two kids in a trailer this thing is a huge improvement and it can carry the gear too :)
The load at the top of this post is one of those perfect examples of when this bike is simply too cool not to take note. My wife and I were riding over to her parents place a couple towns away, myself with the Big Dummy and the trailer with our younger child(we had our kidseat on the bike but they had picked up the older child and dog earlier for a playdate and sleepover).
My wife had been fighting a bad cold and was short on sleep so a couple miles out of town she was one sad puppy running out of steam. I asked her if she wanted a ride over to their place. After much reassurance that it was possible, we pulled over to the side of the road and began shuffling things around and strapping stuff on in creative ways. We moved our younger child to the trailer, put the kid seat setup on the wide loader, our stuff on the other side, lashed the other bike's fork to the rear of the trailer, had her hop on the back of the Big Dummy and away we went.
The amazing thing about it was how easy it actually was to make this all possible. The whole xtracycle concept truly is the swiss army knife of bikes.
5 comments:
but Will It Blend? That is the question.
I either need to buy that attachment or make one ;)
So you towed your kids, your gear, AND your wife with her bike. You're buff, dude.
and the blender works peachily :)
... oh, and since it's an Oster set up, you *can* get a food processor thingy to work, too. It *can* dice.
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