Bike trailer works a treat

Highlights of riding with a bike trailer so far:

* giggles when we go over a bump
* “weeeeee” when we go down a short fast bank
* “pedal faster, daddy!”

I’ve made a couple of short trips with the trailer, to my parents house. We can get there using off-road bike routes and quiet roads, so it’s a pleasure to do. I’m hampered slightly by the fact the bike is far too small for me, and way heavier than I’m used to, but there’s only one really steep hill round here (which I could get up easily, though I do have a nice bruise on my knee where it hit the handlebars).

My wife took our eldest daughter to the Dolphin Centre using the trailer. This is a journey which really shows up the gaps in the bike-path network. To get from our house to the town centre, by any route, is not possible to do legally without riding at some point on a dangerous bit of main road. Highlights include getting under the railway bridge on North Road if taking that route or pretty much all of Haughton Road if going that way. Where bike facilities are available they are often hard to get to; just how does someone heading into town on Haughton Road get onto the bike path which begins at Albert Road?

So, a law or two may have been broken in getting from our house to town, although it would have be a very hard-hearted police officer who ignored the Home Office advice to only act against irresponsible/reckless/anti-social cycling on pavements and issue a fixed penalty notice to a woman pulling a three-year-old in a trailer.

Some positive part of the the journey into town included the new crossing over the ring road from Russell Street, the patient bus drivers who waited while my wife rode on Tubwell Row and The Dolphin Centre for allowing the trailer to be stored in the room they use for storing pushchairs.

The car goes in 1 week!