There’s a picture of my bike in the current issue of Seattle Magazine! I bought the issue because I knew there was a picture of my friend, Leya, and her Madsen bucket bike in it, but I didn’t know I’d see my bike, too! The caption with the photo is “Ready for anything on the Easter Sunday Cargo Bike Ride, April 8.”

Today we were ready for more than anything with the same load, but quadruple the amount of beach toys, non-beach toys, picnic blanket, swim suits, towels, extra layers of clothing, and our new sun shelter.

I’m very excited about my new Shade Shack Instant Pop Up Family Beach Tent and Sun Shelter. It pops up quite big and comes with stakes for grass and pockets to fill with sand to keep it weighted down at the beach–the other family with a sun tent had theirs tied down to a couple logs.

And it folds up to about the size of my wheel–duh, I should have thought to photograph it next to my wheel, rather than next to a balance bike. Despite not practicing at home five to six times as the instructions suggested, it was easy to get back into the sleeve…even with four extra hands trying to help.

We decided to take the West Seattle Water Taxi to the beach again today, but I timed things horribly (I didn’t even check the schedule before leaving the house and we decided en route to take the water taxi) and we ended up waiting 45 minutes for the next boat. But the kids were cold and hungry so it worked out well. I need to get some sort of handlebar bag to hold snacks for the five-year old, but as it is now, he can’t easily eat while we’re on the way somewhere since he’s so new to holding the stoker bars. I think he’d balance fine if he were only holding on with one hand, or even no hands, but he’s not ready to try that yet.

By the end of the day I decided I probably won’t take the west-bound water taxi again. It’s hard to time my arrival to pier 50 and to pay $3.50 to cut five miles off the trip, but the worst part is the ramp up from the pier up to dry land. It doesn’t look ominous in this picture, but it’s almost too hard to push the Big Dummy (gear on it, but kids walking separately) up.

On the way home we just missed the water taxi so I ended up wheeling the bike down and up the ramp an extra time. That really helped solidify my opinion of the up-ramp. Since it was Friday, the taxi runs every 30 minutes in the afternoon so we didn’t have to wait long for it to come back. Also since it was a weekday, we watched the Vashon Island Water Taxi speed by a couple times. I’m not sure if Vashon is flat enough for me to bike around on, but it’s an idea…

Today’s miles: 22.6
May cumulative: 342.1 miles