Pointless Ingenuity

There have been a few times when I’ve wanted to haul one bike with another. It’s never been a real need but more a stunt--just to do it. Like If I worked on a bike for a coworker, for example, and needed to deliver to them at the office, I’d imagine hauling that bike with mine in order to maintain my own bicycle commute. Sure I could drive to the office, and probably save myself a lot of time and hassle, but that’s no fun. I’ve had some ideas about how best to do this but never came up with a very good solution. I’ve seen it done with cargo bikes, the easiest method is just strapping or bungy-ing the front tire and cockpit of the towed bike to the side of the rack of the cargo bike. But I don’t have a cargo bike or rack big enough that I could safely lash another bike to it. I had another idea at one point of mounting a fork mount (like you find for a car roof or truck bed rack) onto the top of my cargo rack on the back of my bike. It’s got a wooden skateboard style deck so sinking a few bolts into it would be no problem. I bought a cheap fork mount but before I even got very far I quickly realized that solution was not going to work. It puts far too much stress on the connection and the fork would pop off if it didn’t tear the rack apart first. Oh well.

This last weekend a buddy from work wanted to go riding with me. He has a mountain bike that he recently bought. He’s been getting a fair amount of mileage out of it too, mostly exploring the forestry roads that are so numerous in East King Co (jealous, there are relatively few of them nearby in Snohomish Co..or at least they are far away). Anyways, he wanted to ride a road bike, see what that was all about. He’s been hearing me talk about it (I talk about bikes sometimes, you may not know this about me) and wanted to see what drop bars and skinny tires had to offer. We planned to ride the length of the Centennial Trail starting in Snohomish and back (we actually rode all the way to Arlington) a little over 20mi each way? Not bad for his first time out!

Again, I should have just driven the car, but Skirtsteak mentioned she might want to hit the swap meet this weekend and I was going to leave her the car as an option. At some point I came up with the brainstorm of trying to mount the trunk rack I have for the back of the car on top of the kiddie trailer (that the kids are too big for now anyway). Well, it worked. I didn’t snap any photos of the details for the mounting as they were messy and questionably stable at best. But it even held two bikes just fine and I rode it all the way to the Snohomish trailhead (8mph average, fuck yeah), then back home when we were done. Metric century for me!