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Coming home from the circus school with Eldest Son and JQ.
Apparently this is a highlight of JQ’s week: when I asked her mum if JQ would cycle home with us, she replied “She’s talked about this more than the circus school.”
Who dares drive through the depths of the mystery puddle?
This journey is 98% on traffic free roads or traffic calmed residential streets, otherwise it would be a near nightmare. As it was we delivered JQ bouncing with independence and the achievement of transporting herself home.
She wants to come again next week.
My goodness but its been a week since I wrote anything here.: as you’ve probably gathered it’s been a busy one. This week, Beautiful Wife decided it was time to master the Bakfiets, and that the best way to do this was to go out for the evening with me alongside on the Xtracycle. Even Ostfildern manages to have sufficient cycle lanes to avoid running along a road much, and we followed these to a restaurant in the next town.
Beautiful wife getting used to the Bakfiets.
Her verdict: great bike, but a bit of a pull on hills, and probably not good to ride wearing a short skirt. She also found it awkward to make corners in a hurry. This we discovered when we missed a turning and she had to do a 240 degree turn to fit into the cycle lane. This was in no was due to my bad navigation. Not at all. And the driver of the car following was very nice about waiting for us to manouvre. We made the restaurant comfortably and parked the bikes be the hedge.
Bikes onna date.
They are locked, although it’s not obvious. local bike thieves wouldn’t know that this is, let alone have a market for it, so we felt pretty safe, especially as we were sitting on the other side of the hedge. The meal was punctuated by overheard conversations like this:
“What is that?”
“Is it a bicycle?”
“Can’t be…”
The morning after. Tent still upright.
The weather has improved. This is good news. Even better is that my camera battery survived the storm in the night, wrapped up in a ziplock bag. My shoes didn’t do so well though: despite being wrapped thoroughly in a large rubbish bag, my shoes feel suspiciously heavy and before putting them on I pour enough water out to make a small puddle on the floor. Squelch to the unheated shower hoping that’s not the way the day will continue.
Dyke racing.
We leave a bit earlier than the previous day, in sunshine, and with a strong tail wind. Everything looks great although we all know we’ll probably get at least one soaking by lunchtime. We’re following dykes again. I’m fascinated by these as they are almost unheard of in the south, certainly on this scale. They provide a dual purpose of protection against the river and a flat means of communication between villages, and all we have to do is stay on the top and they bring us where we need to go. Or that’s what we think until the road stops abruptly in a farm. We see a group of walkers appear from behind a woodland, and the path they are using appears to be bikable . More to the point no-one wants to ride against the wind so we manhandle the bikes straight down the bank -I’ll say this for the Bakfiets, it has good brakes- squeeze through a wood, and find ourselves under a signpost for the Rhine bike way. Unfortunately we annoy the walkers who don’t hear the bike bells, and shout at us that we should whistle. That’s a new one.
Soaked again.
We cross flat countryside and roll through small villages with brick built houses which still remind me of the UK. We’ve learned that the showers are short lived, and we’ve been soaked and dried off so many times in three days that no-one even mentions it when a particulairly violent squall hits when we are about a kilometre away from the nearest cover. True to form, the sun emerges straight after the rain and we’re dry in minutes. I suggest to Alex I could have saved myself a shower if I’d known. He grins.
„I’m sharing a tent with you, so I’m glad you didn’t know“
Fair comment.
Blast furnace as village ornament
Duisburg creeps up on us. We’re riding through a picturesque village when we turn a corner and there is a blast furnace at the end of the street. A few kilometres later we reach the river once more and suddenly we’re in one of the centres of German heavy industry. Duisburg exists by an accident of geography. It’s where the Ruhr meets the Rhine.The Ruhr isn’t the biggest tributary of the Rhine, in fact it’s the 6th largest, but when the only option was hordes over some pretty steep hills, it made a handy route across the north of the country. The fact this link also led directly to the longest river in Western Europe, giving access to the sea and the cities to the south was an even greater bon us, so so there has been a harbour in Duisburg since records began, and probably long before. In the 19th century someone a few kilometres along the Rhur noticed that if they dug down a bit, there was lots of coal for the asking. Coal is heavy stuff, so this would have been of limited use, but with a but with a nice big river to take it away on, there was money to be made: the Rhine/Ruhr area became the centre of German heavy industry, and Duisburg, at the junction of the rivers, thrived.
Why Duisburg exists. Rhur meets Rhine.
More recently the city has become known for its enlightened approach to cycling infrastructure, as we cross the Rhine into the city we find ourselves on the sort of infrastructure that you dream about when following narrow painted ‘bike lanes’ through the door zone: segregated from traffic, bright red, wide and clean. Even better, we get a great view of the point where the Rhine and Rhur meet, so we stop for a few minutes to look at the meeting point of these two rivers which have affected the history of Germany so much.
A real bike lane being ignored by Alex.
A few minutes later I lose a foot. Not personally you understand, but from the Bakfiets. I stop to take a photo, and when I lift the stand the foot falls off onto the road. On closer examination it looks like the bolt holding the foot was overtightened and split the rubber. The bike wobbles a bit on its stand without the foot but that’s the only difference, well, that and the fact that for the rest of the journey my progress will be shown by small scratch marks wherever I stop. I’m literally making a mark wherever I go.
Edge of the Rhineland
We get a lot of time to appreciate the infrastructure in Duisburg, mainly because we get lost. I don’t know what it is with cities on this trip, we don’t seem to be able to leave without making a grand tour. After following the road we think is correct for several kilometres, we stop to ask for directions. The pedestrian we meet is helpful and gives detailed advice, but clearly can’t understand the map we’re using, which leaves us none the wiser. Finally after some more asking around we meet a restraunt owner who not only tells us where we are (on the Rhine cycleway) but also how to get out of this maze of streets and south. It doesn’t look promising. We end up on a road bordered by some pretty shabby apartments on one side and a massive steelworks on the other, but then we cross the railway, go through some woodland, and suddenly we’re in fields again. Duisburg has stopped as suddenly as it started.
And out in the fields again... Long way to Düsseldorf though.
However, all this getting lost and then finding the way means it’s now mid-afternoon and we’re a long way north of Düsseldorf, which itself is north of our campsite on the banks of the Rhine. Either we have to ride through one of the biggest cities in Germany in a few hours, or we have to try some wild camping.
Life is moving so fast at the moment I’m pushed to keep up with it, let alone blog about it. Apart from the bike tour, which I still need to write loads on, I’ve other people powered stories to tell. And I’m supposed to be writing a guest post for another blog, and…
In the meantime I’m trying to live in the real world, where both the Xtracycle and the Bakfiets are seeing a lot of use. Someone asked me to fetch and deliver an empty box which will soon find a use in a community theatre production or on some other project. Ironically the piano this box transported was made in Hamamatsu, Japan. The person who asked me to move this was convinced it wouldn’t fit on the Bakfiets, on the basis it wouldn’t fit into a car… Mwahahahaaa…
That's better...
All this schepping stuff about can wear a chap down, so here’s a new use for the Bakfiets. Shortly afterwards it was comandeered by Beautiful Wife to ride home. I was hoping she’d let me ride in the box, but she made some excuse about carrying the boys instead. I ask you…
Yesterdays post seems pretty maudlin reading by the light of today, so let’s look at something more positive, and furthermore actually on topic for this blog. I’ll Introduce you to the Omafiets.
The first thing you notice about Oma is that she’s Heavy. None of that namby-pamby lightweight carbon or chromoloy: this one is steel: great lumps of the stuff. If it didn’t have wheels you could mistake her for scaffolding. In view of this, the manufacturer fitted a stand rather like those associated with Indian bikes, a big triangle that is horizontal much of the time and lifts the back wheel clean off the ground when pushed vertical, It also locks in position. These stands are found on most single-speed bikes in Japan, which seem to be most bikes. The ubiquity of these inbuilt stands may be why I’ve yet to find a bike rack as I’d recognise one in Europe: most are just a parking space with a bike symbol. The bike is locked with a wheel lock of the sort that the Dutch use all the time, but out of interest, do the Dutch ones clamp the key into the lock when it’s unlocked?
If we get a bike for Beautiful Wife to take home, it will probably be a three-speed one at least, partly so she has at least some options when climbing up the hills of Ostfildern, but also because than I can be sure that the frame is wide enough to take a Nexus hub gear for if and when we want to upgrade. I know they are usually a standard size, but Japanese bikes seem to have few ’standard’ parts (Ironically, I don’t see a lot with Shimano components) and It’d be a real bummer to find the chain stays are the wrong width after I get a new wheel.
The back rack is next to useless as I don’t have any bungee chords and it doesn’t have a sprung clamp, but the front basket is very handy for shopping, although it’s not exactly Xtracycle capacity as I found yesterday when I had th squeeze the groceries in, and when full it does funky things to the steering and I’ve nearly landed in a ditch once when the handlebars seemed to move of their own accord because of the weight. I also find the contents of the basket tend to go airborne when we hit a bump: you hit a lot of bumps on Japanese side roads.
However, the frame is what sold me on the idea of getting a bike here: It’s curved like a Dutch Omafiets, instead of being straight like a mountain bike. For some reason it looks slightly more feminine (when my wife’s riding it anyway, my beard tends to take the edge off any femininity). It certainly looks more at home doing the shopping than an MTB conversion would, while being a bit better suited to Beautiful Wife than the larger-wheeled European town bikes.
We’ll be scouting the local bike shop, which is so eccentric it warrants a blog post of its own but which has a big range of used bikes of the sort we want. Then we have to work out how to get it home.
Anyone have any other suggestions for thngs to watch out for?
Bristol (UK) has just become the first city in the country to start a bike share scheme, and it’s getting all manner of flak for it. The main argument against seems to be that “Bristol is hilly” which is hardly an astute observation if you’ve ever been there, but apparently a shock to journalists from London.
Germany has several bike share schemes: I know this will annoy the French, but several cities in Germany had quietly embraced the idea years before it caught on in Paris. Stuttgart, which is possibly even more hilly than Bristol, has a successful bike share system run by German Railways (Deutsche Bahn, or DB). The ‘Call-a-bike’ network was launched in 2007 with 400 bikes at somewhere between 50-65 hubs around the city depending on who you ask. It works using mobile phones which has the advantage that they know who is using any bike at any time, Despite this Stuttgart is fussy about you bringing the bike back to the hub you got it from, but on the other hand the first half hour is free. The system has been an instant success and it’s been was expanded since it opened. (I guess that’s where the different numbers come from, so much for Teutonic accuracy).
Stuttgarts traffic is probably a bit safer for cycling than Bristols, but we also have tramlines on a number of streets, and other streets that are so steep they give up and become staircases. So can Stuttgarters handle hills better than Bristolians? I doubt it, especially after a few beers. The major difference in the two systems is the numbers of bikes. Stuttgart has 400 bikes in 60 Hubs. Now Wikipedia says the centre of Stuttgart (where the bikes are) is home to 590 497 people (or at least, it was on the first of June 2008). My maths is a bit fuzzy but I think that works out as a bit less that one bike per 1500 people living the centre. And you thought talking about bike parts was as boring as I can get.
‘Hourbike‘, Bristol’s foray into the brave new world of bike share, involved much fanfare and eighteen bikes in four stations. Yes you did read that correctly. Eighteen. According to Wikipedia and my fuzzy maths, if the population of central Bristol all decided to join, over 23000 people would be lining up for each bike. That’s bad enough, but the four locations don’t include the main railway station. Now call me obtuse, but if I was going to make a bike share system, I’d make darn sure it feeds the main public transport hubs. Last time I was in Stuttgart I found four hubs of about twenty bikes around the main station in the city, or to put it another way, more bikes than serve the whole city of Bristol, and there’s still 61 hubs elsewhere.
Bristol has a chance to prove everyone wrong and become a flagship city like Paris -and for the record, I hope they do- if it starts taking it seriously and stops faffing about. To get the same ratio as Stuttgart only requires 300 bikes, give or take, and perhaps a lot of publicity, and you have a prestige project begging for a politician to sponsor it. Any takers?
Contraflow bike lane. Better than nothing-or is it?
I have a train to catch in Stuttgart, and being one for a bit of adventure I decide to go to the city by bike. Stuttgart isn’t known for being bike friendly, but there are at last two online route planning services, so I log onto both and see what happens. The results aren’t promising. The German cycle club planner apparently can’t tell difference between an bike lane and a heavily used urban road. Stuttgart city is slightly better, and suggests a pleasantly bucolic way through the forest and suburbs but warns the surface is gravel in some places: at least someone looked at it. I’m told to allow 45 minutes for this run, at 15km/h average speed.
Stuttgart is surrounded by steep wooded hills. The way to the city, therefore, is on forest roads: a mix of gravel and surfaced car-free streets. A complete lack of signposts though, so much consulting of map required. The route leads to a main road and here the problems begin. Further progress means crossing an unlovely 4-lane road and cars snarl past while pedestrians and cyclists wait for signals that change grudgingly after several minutes and then change back within seconds.
Between crossings and map reading stops -still no signs- I’m getting late, and the next bit doesn’t help either. It’s an indifferently surfaced forest trail, for 500m after which I need to re-cross the highway on it’s sinuous route down the hillside. This crossing has the centre reservation shaved to a fine point for the convenience of cars turning right, leaving a gap too short for a bike let alone the Xtracycle. Of course, the pedestrian lights trap me in the middle. A rush to the safety of the other side brings a short respite in the form of a contraflow on a one-way street, then yet another crossing -yup, same highway- with all the same features as before and some seriously impatient drivers. Then, like a mirage, a high-quality bike lane appears with its own lights and a red surface. Unfortunately it’s going in the wrong direction, and I’m left following a road with tram lines and parked cars and another minuscule bike lane that sends me off into some impenetrable suburbs, delaying me further.
This pattern continues all the way into the city: steep hills, busy junctions, no signs, and and a map that takes a perverse pleasure in sending me on left-hand turns across oncoming traffic. Eventually, after cycling through a dingy underpass and the city park, I climb up a delivery road and wind up at a sign saying „Welcome to Stuttgart railway station.“ It’s at the bottom of a row of steps, and by the time I get upstairs the train has gone.
Not the greatest introduction to cycling in Stuttgart, but the good news is that the Green Party have taken a lot of seats in the local elections: in other German cities where this took place, there has been a rapid change of transport policy afterwards, so hopefully they will begin to address these problems sharpish.
At the very least they may get some cyclists to test out the website and make reccomendations.
I could do it, for example, for a reasonable fee…
Moving house didn’t allow much time for photographs so this small selection will have to be representative of the two weeks we spent shuffling things about. We did use a car and a van a couple of times as well: bed sofas don’t fit on Xtracycles (watch someone prove me wrong now) but much of the move was made with people power.
We’ve been looking for extra chairs for when we have guests, and we found this one on a pile to be thrown out. I rescued it literally with a few seconds to go before the refuse truck ate it. A bit of work with some wood glue and it’ll be a useful chair.
The handcart we used for bulky stuff couldn’t take the pressure, and the handle broke off in the old apartment, so we had to Xtracycle it over to the new one. (Well, we didn’t have to, but it was a fun challenge) We’re now debating if we should just fix it, or use the wheels to make a utility trailer.
All of the moving boxes were second-hand, and the ones that fell to bits needed recycling. It took a bit of creative thinking, and stomping, but they all fitted on the Xtracycle, and we made the four km to the recycling point with no incident, although a lot of curious stares from passing cars.
Now we’ve landed, and it’s time to give the poor abused xtracycle some maintenence: the brake blocks were worn to metal by the end of the week, I’ve got through another chain and cassette, and the tyres are developing cracks like the Sahara. Time to order the Schwalbe Marathon tyres I’ve been promising myself.
I’m blogging about bike parts. I need to get out more.
Bakfiets in Amsterdam. Image credit: Amsterdamize
It’s nearly a year since we sat at a computer, looked at each other, took a deep breath and clicked our commitment to buy an Xtracycle free radical kit to fit onto my Raleigh mountainbike. My goodness, but I’m glad we did. We’ve answered our main question of „will we use it?“: the rebuilt bike and us have covered at least 1800km since then and it’s pressed into service at least once a day for shopping, carrying arts materials, picking up the boys, and a lot of other things.
So it’s time for the next stage of living and working car-free: last week in a slightly deja-vu moment, I sat at the computer again and ordered a Bakfiets from Henry’s Work Cycles in Amsterdam. Anyone from Amsterdam will be saying: „er… so what?“ right now, as these are essentially the family saloon in many cities in the Netherlands. For everyone else, hopefully the picture gives a clear idea of what we’re getting.
This gives us even more possibilities than the Xtracycle: my wife can ride it, for one, and in normal clothes, as we really don’t do lycra. We can fit all three boys in at a pinch, maybe even take the neighbours kids to Kindergarten with us, and we’re getting one with rain cover so at least the passengers/shopping will stay dry. It’ll also become a transport for work: it’s amazing how many bits of theatre equipment you can schlepp by pedal power
The real challenge is how to get it to Stuttgart: a Bakfiets is about 2.80m (roughly 8′) long, so it’s not going to fit into a rental car. We could have it delivered but it would cost a further €700, so instead I’ve come up with a cunning plan to ride to Stuttgart from Amsterdam. Unfortunately I can’t pretend this makes me incredibly fit, as we’ll be riding at a relaxed place and following a well used bike route along the Rhine, but with a climb of 380m and about 650km door-to door it’s going to be a challenge.
On top of this we’re hoping to make a film: I’ve managed to interest a producer I worked with previously, and he’s taking on the idea as a challenge. We’re following three rivers, the Rhine, the most important river in western Europe, then the Neckar, and finally a tiny river called the Körsch. Each river has affected people down the ages to today- we’re following them because they make the easiest route through the hills- and in turn, each has been affected forr good and bad by the people living along them. Cycling along the rivers will give us a unique perspective on them and the people alongside them.
Are we going to make it cycling/filming/getting home in time? It’s a bit late to ask as I’ve already ordered the bike, and we have tickets for the sleeper train to Amsterdam. We’ll arrive there on September the third…
We’re moving to a new apartment on the edge of the village next week, and as our telephone/internet provider apparently can’t manage to change the account inside of three weeks, we’ll be without a broadband connection for that time. To make sure both of the people who come here don’t lose interest, I’ve a few photo posts stacked away to pop up automatically every few days until I return.
This seemed a good start: a sunny day, on the way to an early appointment, stopping to have breakfast on the way…
