Bike Wheels Keep on Turnin’

Last Tuesday, John called me about half an hour before the start of his workday to tell me that our car – our one and only vehicle – had broken down. He was stuck on the side of the road and the car wouldn’t run anymore. It turns out a part in the fuel pump is broken. After John did some research at home, we found out that our car, a 2001 Nissan Xterra, had been recalled in 2004 for this very issue. After dealing with Nissan Europe and Nissan North America, we seem to be on the right path toward getting this fixed.

We were finally authorized a rental car that John picked up this morning – hurray! It’s been weird living without a car. John had no way to get to work if he didn’t get a ride from someone else, and we had no way to get to the commissary, because there’s no public transportation that goes out that way.

On Friday, after a few days of mulling it over, we decided to buy bicycles. (Not knowing how long we’d be without a car, we decided this was a good choice. Plus, we were both wanting bikes anyway.) As I mentioned when describing our trip to France, I’m not an expert biker. I’m not even an intermediate level biker. I’m, quite frankly, a novice. I never really had a bike growing and so I didn’t get practice. That said, I was willing to give this bike thing a shot. We ended up finding a great deal at a bike shop that was closing down (just one of many locations for the store). We got our bikes 30% off and were exempt for the 19% VAT, so we ended up saving about 150 Euro or approximately $190 per bike. Good deal, right?

We bought trekking bikes, which is sort of like a cruiser (or what the Germans call a “city bike”). The city bikes have a hand brake and foot brake and only have 7-9 speeds. The trekking bike just has hand brakes (which I prefer), and I think they have at least 12 speeds. As I recall, our bikes have 15 speeds.

This is basically what my bike looks like. (Image taken from preisvergleich.org)

We have already used the bikes a great deal. We rode out once on Friday, two or three times on Saturday, twice on Sunday and I have taken mine to work yesterday and today. John is the real rock star, though. He joined me on all the weekend rides and then ended up riding his bike 10 miles each way to and from work yesterday!

From Friday to Sunday, we logged 18.29 miles on our bikes (29.44 km), which saved us 17.9 miles of driving, $3.48 in gas and $6.38 in parking. We each burned around 1000 calories. The benefits just keep rolling in! If we were to continue at this rate for a year, we’d bike about 951 miles (1531 km), save 931 miles on our car, $181 in gas and $331 in parking. John would burn about 53600 calories, and I would burn about 44500.

I just have one predicament: I had a basket on the front and back of my bike to hold my purse and anything we bought while out. On my way to work this morning, the clips on the front basket broke. Apparently the basket is only capable of holding up to 4 lbs, which isn’t practical for the uses I desire. Does anyone have any experience with bike accessories and have any suggestions, advice, warnings?