Aly & Bryan are always up to something…
Since last summer, Bryan and I had been thinking that a bike/walk scavenger hunt in Little Rock would be fun. Vinny’s alleycats are great fun for a handful of people, but what if somebody did a race that was a little less competitive and a little easier to navigate? If participants were given a map, it’d be easier to plan a route. If people just had to answer questions, we wouldn’t need many volunteers. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Rocktown Trackdown”
Sometime in February, a coworker from upstairs said that she’d like to do Bike to Work Day as an ’employee wellness program.’ She’s the one who does Walk Across Arkansas, and a number of other wellness things – she’s a gerontologist – and she thought we should do Bike to Work again.
In the past, Extension has done Bike to Work Day as part of the 4H program, with really limited success. LaVona and I decided that we’d do better. Against my better judgment, we formed a Committee. I hate committees. But this one was pretty good, because we picked people we liked, and every month we’d ride across town to eat lunch someplace and talk about what we were going to do about Bike to Work Day. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Bike to Work Day”
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| Photo by Judy Lansky |
In May, every year, there’s an international event honoring those cyclists killed while riding. This year’s local event saw about 75 local cyclists riding silently, in pairs, from the Clinton Library to the state Capitol. We wore white shirts, and on our backs we pinned cards with the name and age of a fallen bike rider. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Ride of Silence”
One thing I brought back from the National Bike Summit this spring has to do with women in cycling. Only 25% of cyclists in the US are women. Why is that? Because, as a group, we really do need different things than men in order to be comfortable riding bikes. Women like to ride as a social thing, I learned. Women like to feel clean and safe. Women like to feel accepted when they ride. And if women can be encouraged to ride more, more kids will grow up on bikes. It’s worth working on. I hadn’t realized it before. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Cyclofemme Womens’ Ride”
Mandy’s shaping up to be a singlespeed rigid mountain bike girl. She wears plaid and she smells bad and she says she has three speeds: pedal, pedal harder, and walk.
We spent some miles last weekend on gravel roads up near Sand Gap. Jarion decided to play SAG wagon / fisherman, which meant we could ride light and put our gear in his Jeepett. It was a great weekend of grinding up gravel hills, flying down them, wading in the creek, eating steaks in the rain, and playing cards in the middle of gravel roads. Continue reading “Falling Water Gravel Tour”
BACA, our local bike advocacy group, has been pretty stagnant for awhile. Membership’s sort of gone flat (click here to sign up). Lots of clubs and groups don’t feel represented. Lots of minor events are sponsored, without much effect. Meetings felt useless to most cyclists, and people stopped coming. The most recent board tended to get into shouting matches at their meetings.
Major local issues went unnoticed, or worse, BACA board members said the wrong thing in public and other cyclists and groups spoke up to disagree. The city and county government stopped listening because they didn’t know who to listen to. BACA could have an enormous impact, but it doesn’t.
Or it didn’t. Some of us got together to talk about it. It turned out that a lot of cycling families and groups felt the same way we did. We extended some olive branches to teams that have been feeling like outsiders. The sort of vague, leaderless group ended up hatching a group volunteers excited about serving on the board to make it a wider, louder, more active advocacy organization.
I managed to get a spot on the nominating committee, and four days after that committee was established, we had a full slate of officers to nominate – mountain bikers, road racers, blog writers, trail builders. The April BACA meeting saw that group voted in, amid angry confusion and loudish cheering. It makes me smile to watch people do what they care about, and I’m looking forward to this year. I’m looking forward to having an advocacy group here in LR. I think they’ll accomplish great things, starting right about now.
Our friend Mitch got a welder for Christmas, and ever since then, we’ve been thinking about that welder. He doesn’t know how to weld but he’s got a book. Bryan doesn’t know how to weld but he’s been around his dad who can weld. I don’t know how to weld, which makes no sense because all the guys in my family can, but they never taught me, which I’ve always been slightly offended about.
We’ve all been thinking about tall bikes for awhile. And we have this lovely welder. Welding can’t be that hard, right? You just wear a funny hat, put pieces of metal near each other, and poke them with that stick thing. Continue reading “The Tall Bike Project”
I’ve been doing a ton of work with Little Rock’s bike friendly community committee, so when they offered me a chance to represent LR at the National Bike Summit this month, I was eager to go.
At the last minute my flight from LR to Dallas was cancelled, and I was rescheduled on a flight the next day. A day’s delay would have meant missing part of the conference, so somehow, with me standing at the ticket counter inside and Bryan in the truck looking up flights on his iPhone, I managed to get on a different airline’s flight to Chicago and then to Washington DC, right on time.
In the back of my head, I’ve thought that mountain biking would be interesting to try but over the years I’ve never gotten closer than riding my Long Haul Trucker (LHT) touring bike on gravel roads near Lake Sylvia or in Newton County or riding my polo bike on a very flat beginner mountain bike trail while my daughter rode her mountain unicycle. My LHT is pretty nice on gravel roads because of Surly’s “fatties fit fine” policy that allows me to fit fenders and 50mm tires.
Our friend Vinny decided that we should have a tweed ride. He’d seen photos and stories from tweed rides in other cities, of people in old-timey woolen clothes smoking pipes and riding bikes, and he thought we should have one in Little Rock, too. Continue reading “Tweed Ride”