Today is my first official day of not going to work. I feel a bit disoriented. I have a lot of stuff to do around the house, but I tire very easily so I doubt I will get any of it done.

The weather is starting to feel like fall and the streets around the house today were clogged with people dropping their kids off to school. Since I probably won’t be biking for much longer, I thought now would be a good time to do a quick wrap-up of my cycling experiment from this summer. The point of my experiment was to see how many trips I can do with the bike and from there to guess about my future bike usage.

The longest utilitarian trip I made was to Bushtukah on Hazeldean. The trip was just under 6 km and with only Owen on the bike it took me about 20 minutes to get there. The route was comfortable except for the tiny stretch of Hazeldean from Castlefrank to Terry Fox that does not have a bike lane. Going south, the path was mostly uphill, but at least it became more comfortable on the way back.

The longest recreational trip was to Andrew Haydon park, again with Owen. It is a bit over 10km one way and it took me a bit over half an hour to get there. The route was almost entirely on the paths.

Over the course of the summer I put above 300 km on the mamachari bike. That is nothing compared to 3000 km that, I am sure, Chris and Dan put on their bikes this summer, but you will excuse me if I carry bit more cargo.

Though I dearly love my mamachari bike, it does have some frustrating limitations. One is that it is slow and clunky when I ride alone and the other that it can only fit two kids and almost no groceries. I am looking into purchasing two other bikes for next year (or year after, not much biking predicted for next year), but it will really depend on circumstances. One would be a proper cargo bike, possibly this one as it is the only model readily available in Ottawa. The other one would probably be a vintage mixte with updated parts that one of our biking friend’s son builds. I have been looking at new bikes that might suit me, but I have to found anything currently sold in Ottawa that would do exactly what I want.

My car is slowly getting ready for the trip to the glue factory and it is only a matter of time that we decide to no longer keep fixing it. It is a good car but I am not sure it will make it though its twelvth winter (though I hope it will). Because it is highly unlikely that we will buy a new car before I get back to work next August, it would be interesting to see how we do as a five-people-one-car family. Though I have no doubt a new car will be bought soon, I am very curious to see how long we can last with just one. A factor that will make it easier with just one car is the new bus route 93 that goes between Owen’s daycare to my office every 10 minutes. Also, the bus 65 has survived the cut. While it is not feasible for Chris to use it on regular basis, it is there if we need it. I am probably not going to be able to use the bus 93 to go to work as, at this time, plan is for Markus (are we sticking this that name???) to go to home daycare in Morgan’s Grant until he is two and eligible for the local daycare. However, after that, the bus 93 is perfect for me.

One thing that I did not expect from my bike experiment this summer is that I did not save a lot on gas. Because my distances this year were so short and I rarely rode to work, I only conserved less than one tank of gas through the whole summer. That only covers the cost of half the repairs and maintenance on my bike this year. Once I am able to bike to work on daily basis (three years from now…) I hope that will improve, but then again I am not sure it will be enough to cover the cost of the “new” mixte.

One final thought for this post is that Bushtukah in Kanata is collecting old bikes for charity this Saturday in exchange for a $50 coupon. Since this is more than our bikes could fetch at the bike exchange or garage sale, it seems like a great opportunity to clean out the garage.

I have been wanting to write a bike safety post for months, but there is so much to talk about with respect to bike safety, that I could not get a post of readable length together. Fortunately, someone has already done it for me. This post comes as close as anything to how I feel about family cycling.

Then there is the pregnancy. Do I recommend cycling while pregnant? Heck yes! (Assuming that your ob/gyn approves it, which mine did). When I got pregnant with Trev, I soon stopped biking and going to the gym. I was simply too tired to do any of it. I stopped biking even before I realised I was pregnant because I just could not huff it in the athletic way I did before kids. I did prenatal yoga, which is better than nothing, but half a year of very little physical activity made it very difficult for me to recover form giving birth and thanking care of an infant. It took me a year or longer to regain any energy whatsoever. For those not in the know, a year without having energy to do all that you need to get done sucks.

With Owen I was prepared so I kept cycling in the summer and took spinning courses in the fall. By now I knew how to exercise while pregnant so I took that into the account. The endurance I’ve built up in spinning got me through the birth without drugs and I bounced back much, much sooner than the first time. So far, in this pregnancy, cycling has made me stay physically fit. This was particularly important since my hips readjusted very early (around 4 months) making it quite uncomfortable to walk (I’ve been wobbling for more than half the pregnancy). If I don’t cycle for several days I get sore, the muscles in my legs seize up during the night and I am generally grumpy. The weeks this summer when I was recovering from stomach flu or when it was too hot and humid to go outside or when my bike was broken were the worst this summer.

Are there risks? Sure, but like any other activity, you balance them out with the benefits. Car accidents are one of the leading cause of accidental deaths for children yet we still strap our little ones into the car several times a day every day. I’ve yet to meet someone who chooses to not drive for the fear of death and if I did I would think that they suffer from paranoia rather than making a rational decision. It is the same with biking. Like with the car, you make sure that your bike is in good working order and you ride in a way that you believe is safe. With biking the question really comes down to what you believe is safe and what you feel comfortable with.

With this in mind I took the CAN-bike course this weekend. The first section of the course consisted of theoretical part, then we did some drills and finally we went out on the road. We drove a bit around Centrepointe area and then hit Woodroffe, Medowlands and Hunt Club. We stopped biking about an hour earlier than scheduled because both Charissa and I were tired. This, I believe, had mostly to do with our bikes not being suited for long rides. According to the instructor’s bike computer we did about 18km, but she didn’t do the drills so I think Charissa and I must have done at least 20km if not more which is usually the limit of what I can do on my utility bike. We did all of the tasks except merging over four lanes of busy traffic to turn left, mostly because our bikes are too slow and we were getting tired. Frankly, I have no intention of merging over four lanes of traffic at this point in my life so no skin off of my nose. At least I know in theory how to do it.

Was it worth taking the course? I didn’t learn a lot of new things, which was in line with my expectations. I did learn a couple of new things and I corrected some minor impressions. Overall, I took the course to ensure that I am aware of “best practices” and to make sure I am as aware as I think I am of safety issues. In that sense the course delivered what I expected so it was worth it for me. Would I recommend it for others? If you think that you would learn from it, than it is probably worth it. I will definitely insist that our kids take the children’s version of the course once they are old enough and I would definitely recommend it for other people’s kids (because I am nosy that way…).