I bought my first car for $600. It was a used lime-green 1972 Pinto with 187,000 miles on it. It had a rubber band suspiciously similar to something you would see in a gym for its alternator belt, and duct tape over a hole in the hose leading to the air filter. I replaced its…
Buying an electric bike was never on my radar. In fact, becoming a mountain biking enthusiast wasn’t on my radar until 5 years ago when we moved to the North Shore mountains just north of Vancouver. Interestingly, my interest in trying mountain biking resulted in me getting an e-bike. Why? Because pedaling up a mountain…
I was sure naive when I first bought my electric mountain bike. I asked the guy who sold it to me (a buddy who owns a local bike store) if I could use it with the power turned off? He chuckled and said “yeah, sure, but I doubt you’ll want to. The bike weighs over…
Without a doubt, a phone mount is now a necessary cycling accessory, whether you ride on the road or trail. And it’s not so you can text and ride unless you have a desire to face plant into a bus. If you listen to music while riding, use various health apps and/or cycling apps…
Getting lost hiking or biking or doing anything else sucks. It can be scary too. We live on the North Shore which is a series of towns and districts north of Vancouver. It’s basically along the lower part of a mountain range. Often we hear and see the North Shore Search & Rescue helicopter overhead…
At some point, whether you ride regularly or have kids getting into biking, you need to get a bike rack for your vehicle unless you have a pickup truck with a Dakine mat so you can sling your bikes’ front wheels over the rear gate. When our kids’ bikes were small, I just chucked them…
Although I’ve been an avid cyclist for nearly twenty years, I’ll never forget the first time I saw an electric bicycle. I was living as an expat in China, where bike commuting is still fairly common. Each morning, I heard a tiny little put-put, sputter-sputter sound round the corner near my apartment. By the…
When I moved across the country to start graduate school, my bike was the first item I packed. Not because I needed it for my commute, but because I needed it for my sanity. The rigors of academia could not overwhelm me as long as I could still escape to freedom on the open road…