Another year, another HBD love letter to my steel baby.
This past year was pretty typical—nothing out of the ordinary, but the ordinary is pretty spectacular with a Surly Big Dummy.
I took it bike camping twice, once with 15 WTFNB+ WeBike campers for work, carrying a bunch of extra stuff, and once with one kiddo.
The most impressive carry of the year was hauling Shift’s 7 bike racks, which I rented for The Street Trust Alice Awards.
Admittedly, this wasn’t my easiest bike for the job so I switched to my Haulin’ Colin cargo trailer to tote them to and from the venue and return them the following day. Granted, my cargo trailer got a flat, which I’m sure I would have thought was a sign from the universe that I should have stuck with my wobbly wiggly way-too-heavy original choice had it taken longer than 30 minutes to fix.
The Big Dummy had another shared job with the cargo trailer for Central Eastside Altares Y Muertos Bike Ride with Milagro and The Street Trust. New this fifth year of the ride, I got to chauffeur a mobile altar with my trailer, but I needed the Big Dummy in the morning before the ride to carry in all the stuff (including my trailer-pulling bike). At the end of the day the best (only?) way to get all the things home in one trip was to carry the Big Dummy with the trailer. I bent the fender stay so if I do that again I’ll load more carefully.
Other than those especially fun jaunts, I made one long-but-flat IKEA trip, took a million grocery runs (including tonight—gotta make a birthday grocery run!), and towed bikes around fewer than a million times, but still a lot! And various other big carries, like bringing a dog ramp to mall to give to Secondhand Pet Supply.
Read last year’s birthday post:
Family Ride 