Another year, another love letter to my now teenage mamabike! Although maybe she needs a better descriptor since she doesn’t do any kid toting these days. (Ideas welcome.) She’s not ready to retire, though. I carry oodles of non-human stuff with my Big Dummy–mostly weekly groceries, but those tiny, mundane trips are still the best!
The most exciting “groceries-plus” trips I took with the the Big Dummy over the past year were beginner-friendly bike camping trips for The Street Trust’s WeBike program that inspires trans people of all genders, gender non-conforming people, Two Spirit, and women (both trans and cis) to incorporate a bike into their lives. This year we took two trips–first west to Stub Stewart State Park and then east to Oxbow Regional Park. These are the only two true beginner-friends campgrounds near Portland, but I’m still holding out hope Dodge Park will reopen for camping one of these days–it’s definitely the easiest.
I’ve turned into a bit of a cargo hog. I brought nine campers on the Stub Stewart trip and carried all the food, some extra tents, and seven camp chairs.
For the Oxbow trip (pic below) I brought 16 happy campers and left the camp chairs behind, but still carried all the food, six tents, and a bunch of sleeping bags and pads. You know I love carrying all the stuff so I can feel useful, but I don’t like making a spectacle of myself so I am toying with the idea of distributing the food and gear a bit.
I hesitate to say there’s nuthin’ the Big Dummy can’t carry, but some things are easier with a regular bike + Haulin’ Colin cargo trailer so I left the teenager to home quite a few times over the last year to carry bulky and super heavy things. Let’s just say it’s easier to dump those sorts of cargo loads into the trailer rather than more carefully arrange them on the Big Dummy.
As always, I did a ton of bike hauling because longtails with cargo sling bags are so good at that! I mainly bag-and-dragged bikes (see below), but I also did quite a bit of toting broken or precious bikes up off the ground–often upside down, because that seems to work best (see below below).
I was sad to think I may not have carried Pixie with the Big Dummy at all over the last year, but in looking back I found one last basket trip just a couple weeks after the Big Dummy’s 12th birthday. It was a visit to the urgent care veterinary clinic so not what I’d call a joyride, but a very necessary one.
As is the tradition on the special day, it’s time to forget about those other 364 and talk about today! Today was not eventful. I only carried my laptop and only went to the office and back–12.5 mostly flat miles (268 foot elevation gain, says Strava). I was worried it would get dark on my way home before I found a good spot to take the annual glamour shot (sunset was at 4:28 p.m. today, ugh!), but I was greeted with the most Portland sight ever early in the journey–a cat tree U-locked to a bike rack outside a Stumptown Coffee. Say cheese! *click*
Read previous birthday posts:
Family Ride 