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If you work at a bike shop, I'd like to have a word or two with you. Feel free to e-mail me if you want more. If you've done detailed market research and determined that you can't make money serving people like me, and my intended audience here, I'm interested in learning about it.
If you love bikes, believe bike shops are the home of the gods, and are trying to get someone you love on a bike, think about this.
If you have never ridden a bike, assuming you are relatively normal neurologically and physically, you can learn. If you are neurologically or physically unusual, you should probably seek assistance from someone with relevant expertise and knowledge of products out there to help you. I know just enough to know there's a huge amount of stuff out there that might help someone, somewhere.
If you don't own a bike, or you don't ride your bike because you can't see where you are going, get stuck in high gears when you stop, have hurt your tender bits on the bike frame, fallen while clipped in, hate your bike saddle, had to bring your bike into the shop repeatedly because the gears don't shift properly or otherwise find yourself intimidated by your bike and bikes you have access to, you can buy an easy to ride bike.
Once you can ride a bike, and have a bike to ride, you may want to find places to ride your bike other than the parking lot and quiet subdivision streets you learned on/in.
You may want to run errands on your bike, with or without children. Remember to get an adequate kickstand. The day you successfully get kid and cargo (totalling 40 or more pounds) home under your own power (even if it's a mile or less), is the day you realize that bicycling is not about lightweighting and going fast. And being able to put your feet flat on the ground, mount and dismount by stepping through the frame rather than swinging a leg over, see and be seen while huffing up even tiny hills, and having gears that are forgiving is worth every penny you spent on them.
Whatever you think of their real effectiveness, you should wear a helmet, and put a helmet on each of your children riding in a seat, or on a trailing bike, or riding in a trailer. You should do this because if you don't, random strangers will feel it is their duty to give you ungodly amounts of crap over it.
Put a bell on your bicycle and use it! That cheery little sound will cut through conversations being carried on by the stroller brigade on multi-use trails in a way that no amount of "on your left" ever will. Feel free to chat with people, too, but that bell will get and hold the attention of other users of the road, trail and sidewalk in a way that virtually nothing else can.
Don't let the bike shop waste your money on stuff you don't need.
A bit more about bicycling with babies.
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Copyright 2009, Rebecca Allen Created: July 10, 2009 Updated: July 11, 2009