Dinner tonight

[azziria]

The weather is so fine, we’ve decided that we’re going for a ride on the tandem this evening, then for a meal.



We bought our first tandem 9 years ago. DH had wanted one for ages, and I’d been reluctant - our riding styles are so different that I thought we’d argue too much when we were riding together. Then one day when we were in a bike shop in Cambridge I spotted an ex-hire tandem for sale for £250, which even then was cheap for a tandem. I figured that we could buy it, see how we got on, and sell it again without much loss if it didn’t work out. So we did.

Learning to ride the tandem was fun. The hardest thing is starting. Once you’ve mastered that, the rest is (relatively) easy. We didn’t row (too much, anyway!) once we’d sorted out a few ground rules - such as when the stoker (me) shouts slow down, the captain (DH, on the front, and with total control of the brakes) bl**dy well better take notice if he wants to remain a married man. Actually, despite the lack of control (although you can always just stop pedalling!) being the stoker is great - you get to look at the scenery a lot because you don’t need to look where you’re going all the time. One really good thing about tandem riding is that you are always together, and can talk to one another - you never have the situation where one person is always having to wait for the other to catch up. And you can go really fast if the mood takes you :-)

We did a lot of rides on that old tandem, including the London-Cambridge charity ride one year. It was a very well-spent £250. Then DS came along, then DD, and we didn’t have any opportunity to go out together on the tandem, which sat in the garage gathering dust.

Then, 2 years ago, we tried to buy a plot of land to build our dream house. The whole deal fell through (we couldn’t match the ridiculous price the highest bidder was offering for the land), and as a consolation we decided to buy ourselves a new tandem. Armed with a far larger budget than the first time round, we did our research, then took ourselves off to a tandem builder in Somerset to obtain our state-of-the-art new machine. The new machine was delivered to us the evening before we went to France on holiday, so we loaded it up on the car and took it with us to try it out.

The new tandem was a revelation. Neither of us had ever realised just how flexible the frame of the old tandem was until we rode the new one. The frame of our Thorn Adventure is so stiff that it’s almost like riding a solo bike, it handles so well. We had a brilliant holiday in the Dordogne cycling around on it, with the kids in a trailer pulled along behind - we made a very long vehicle, and got our photo taken by loads of other tourists!

Now DS is too big to go in the trailer with his sister, so for the time being we only get out on the tandem when we have someone to look after the kids for us. It’s a good machine, though, and built to last, so we’ve got plans for when the kids are older and can be left with grandparents for a few days - or maybe when they’re bigger we’ll put one on the back of each tandem and go cycling that way. I think that would be fun.

Comments

[mrsg.livejournal.com]

That sounds like so much fun! I hope you have a wonderful time.