Easter 2008 Cargo Bike Ride
Perhaps my favorite series of organized bicycle rides in Seattle are the holiday-oriented Cargo Bike Rides. These were started a few years ago by Val Kleitz and have grown to be well attended with a wide variety of bikes (cargo and not).
The Cargo Bike series has always skipped the spring because there wasn’t a handy holiday between New Years and Memorial Day. FieryIrie (aka Aden) realized this gap wasn’t really a good idea and started up the Easter Cargo Bike ride. I was sad to wake up to pouring rain on Sunday morning and almost talked myself out of going, but finally decided that a little rain shouldn’t keep me away and loaded up my bike and rode down to Myrtle Edwards Park.
I arrived and found 15 or so very wet souls hanging out under a roof waiting for the ride to start. I was amazed to see so many people — Seattle cyclists ride in the rain, but most give up when the rain is hard. Not the cargo bike guys, they were outside when most other cyclists were comfortably at home.
Aden wasn’t there yet, but quickly showed up with a borrowed XtraCycle full of spring flowers:
The plan was to ride north to Ballard to Honk Fest West and then onto Gasworks for some picnicing and a fire. The rain squashed the idea of watching marching bands, so we swung by Fred Meyer to pick up a rickshaw’s worth of fire wood then headed to the Gaswork fire places.
As we pulled into Gasworks another large cargo rickshaw joined us. This electric bike (it has two front hub motors) was pretty incredible and made from what seemed like half a dozen donor bikes. The owner/builder (I think her name is Segwey) has been working on it for a couple of years and is building another couple of them. She also makes a mean splitpea soup.
Full of soup, hot cross buns, warming beverages, and other food everyone congregated around the fires.
A couple of hours the sun dared to come out, leading to a dry and much warmer ride home.
This cargo bike ride probably had the least riding of any that I’ve been on, but was also one of the more fun. I hope to see more folks out for the Memorial Day ride — last year’s was the biggest Cargo ride yet.