Hauling Stuff

I spent a couple of decades working in the bike business and I used to say that I was good at selling bicycling and bad at selling bicycles. One of my beefs with the bike industry is that they always want to sell you something new and I am big on keeping old things going and adapting what you have. Bike manufacturers in general (companies like Rivendell Bicycle Works are the exception) like to sell you a machine specialized for a specific purpose. Hell, one of the biggest brands in the bike world is called Specialized. So you should have a road bike for riding on the road, a mountain bike for riding in the mountains, no wait you should have a couple of mountain bikes, one optimized for downhill riding and one for cross country. And maybe you have a touring bike for, well, touring. But if you’re going to be riding on gravel, you need a gravel bike. And so on. Every year there is some new thing you need.

A few years ago cargo bikes were the big deal. A lot of bikes aren’t made to haul stuff, but that’s the whole idea behind cargo bikes. I worked in various shops that sold cargo bikes and I’ve lived for decades without a car. You would think I’d be the target market for a cargo bike, but dedicated cargo bikes tend to be big and heavy and a pain in the ass to store. Now days most of them are also electric. But I always set up my various bikes to haul a bit of cargo and when I needed more carrying capacity I use this amazing device called a trailer. It works really well.

When our sons Peter and Eric were little, they got hauled around in bike trailers. When they got bigger they graduated to a thing called a Trail-a-Bike, which is like half a tandem that attaches to the back of a bicycle. That let me put their leg power to work. And then before too long they graduated to their own bikes.

Today, as part of our spring cleaning and downsizing, I hauled a bunch of records and a typewriter to the Northland Estate Store and then I hauled another trailer load of stuff Christine no longer needed to the Goodwill. My little trailer was all I needed.