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Featuring posts about cities, scenic vistas, gear reviews, bicycle friendly businesses, family travel tips, transportation challenges and first class experiences.
Let's say I told you that you were going to take a child between the ages of 2 and 6ish on a trip with you, and you wanted to bike around once you got there. Nothing long distance, just tooling around the city, seeing the sights, going to museums, etc. How would you do it? What options spring to mind? Would you try to check a full-sized bike and a rear kid seat for it? Or, like most people, would you start googling bike rental options in the new city?
If you’re a bike shop who offers rental bikes, there’s good news: You are the “default” model for people who come to visit your town and want to borrow a bike. That’s a big advantage over your emerging competition, namely bike shares like Citibike (NYC), and online “new economy” sharing services like Spinlister.
New Belgium are purveyors of fine, fine beers, and are located in Fort Collins, Colorado, with a second facility now in Asheville, North Carolina. We at Bikabout were fortunate enough to be able to tour the Fort Collins site this past November, and it remains the best brewery tour we've ever taken. But before I explain why this modern craft brewery so richly deserves its own Bikabout blog post, I need to put "modern" and "craft" into context. It's important to understand where we came from, in order to understand why the place we are at now is so good, and why New Belgium perhaps best exemplifies that place.
With National Bike Month (May) right around the corner, now is the perfect time for curious lodging to make the leap into the bike tourism community. Its all about the experience these days and nothing simultaneously gives the gift of elation, independence, efficient sightseeing and adventure like the bike does. Here are 5 tips on how you can provide guests with a biking experience of a lifetime.
Voted “Best Used Book Store” 5 years in a row, Blue Bicycle Books was taken over by a former employee and his wife in 2007, and continues to delight readers on King Street 8 years later. The store opened in 1995 as Boomer’s Books, and has always offered knowledgable staff, a comfortable atmosphere, and a friendly shop cat to pet. Online book sellers don’t have shop cats.
When you have kids under a certain age, you tend to spend a great deal of time at playgrounds. It's a perfect mid-day diversion... the kids gets to run wild, everyone gets some fresh air, and when it's done you feel you've all "earned" an ice cream. With all that time to sit and contemplate your surroundings each time, it's natural that many parents begin to form opinions about what makes a good playground. Here are some of our favorite playgrounds from our travels, and more importantly, why we liked them so much...
Buses and bikes ought to be a match made in heaven, particularly with long distance buses that travel between cities. Those bigger buses have plenty of room in their cargo holds for bikes – especially folding bikes – and cyclists looking to easily extend their routes make great paying customers for bus lines. Why, then, is the experience of bringing a bike on a bus sometimes a baffling ordeal, or not even possible at all?
Bikabout.com has curated this list of museums because they roll out the red carpet for people biking, they are located along a scenic and comfortable route or they're just cultural landmarks not to be missed via two wheels or otherwise. Locations include Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, New York, San Francisco and Vancouver.
With Bloomberg no longer at the helm in New York City, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has taken over the national spotlight as the most bike-progressive mayor of a major American city. And while the biking experience is not yet up to the level of the world's best biking cities, it is getting closer by the month due to Chicago's aggressive goals.
It’s Thanksgiving. You’ve probably traveled. Even if you didn’t descend upon someone else’s house, someone probably descended upon yours. The result is always the same: Come Friday after Thanksgiving, you’re ready to get out of whatever house you spent the prior day over-indulging in, and go do …something. Traditionally in America, this has meant waking up at an obscene pre-dawn hour to go wait in huge lines at big box stores to get a discount on a flat screen tv you didn’t exactly need. We at Bikabout feel there’s a better way to spend Black Friday.
Arriving in Vancouver and hopping onto a bike when you're used to places like Boston, your first thought is "this is what DONE looks like." Done arguing, done advocating, done waiting, done building... Vancouver looks and feels like a photoshopped "After" picture if you're a bike advocate. The water on all sides, the mountains tumbling over each other on every horizon, and those incredible bike paths everywhere... swoon.
To celebrate us publishing our first Bikabout route, "Artabout", we wanted to showcase the murals and other public art that graces neighborhood greenways and bike paths in cities. We hope these inspire you to wander by bike!
Seattle has a location problem. It's sandwiched between Bicycle World darlings Portland and Vancouver, both of whom have deservedly hogged the lion's share of what precious little press space there is for bicycles in North American press. Right in between these two lies relatively ho-hum Seattle, ever the bridesmaid, never the bride. Arriving downtown (by train, naturally), one would be forgiven for failing to lift a finger to challenge that viewpoint, really. It remind me very much of the most buttoned-down parts of downtown Boston, but with massive, weapons-grade, "this is not cool" hills. Picture traffic, few trees, drunken Seahawks fans, concrete, and 1st gear hills that go on for 20 blocks.
Portland is constantly touted as a livable city in the transportation advocacy world, and I finally made the pilgrimage to the Rose City for a Net Impact conference in 2011. Experiencing the city in a mere 3 days was a tease, and I knew I had to come back with my husband and daughter to fully explore it by bike. Then in 2013, with plane tickets purchased, a family vacation to Portland was happening and it was serendipitous that I would find a book that would forever influence my vacation planning and ultimately lead to the creation of Bikabout.
Getting an issue of Momentum Magazine is an event in the Ramey household. I squeal when I see it in the mailbox and immediately have to find a quiet corner so I can flip through it. The editorials, photography, and even the advertisements are inspiring for all riding levels. If you don't have a subscription, get one, you won't regret it.
Map of SE neighborhood route in Hop in the Saddle guidebook.
It was while reading the magazine that I discovered the book, Hop in the Saddle, a Guide to Portland's Craft Beer Scene, by Bike. My jaw dropped in reading the description because it was like someone wrote the book just for Kyle and I. I immediately bought the book, made lodging reservations (Tiny Airbnb house in North, Kennedy School and Jupiter Hotel), reserved a bakfiets and city bike rental at Clever Cycles, and we were set. When we arrived, it was like we had a personal tour guide with Hop in the Saddle. With the turn by turn directions, beautifully designed maps, fun descriptions of the destinations, and other resources, I barely had to take out a phone to plan anything the entire trip. We just biked wherever the three lovely authors told us to go and my husband got to drink some of the best beer in America, our daughter had fun at the playgrounds and parks, and I got my fill of the bike porn.
Because we had such an amazing time on that trip and it was so easy, I wanted other people to experience that type of vacation in great biking cities, which is why I credit Hop in the Saddle and Portland as the inspiration behind Bikabout. Please buy this book and support the ingenuity of the three ladies who put it together.
Portland and the whole state of Oregon do the most to seduce bike tourists, and it shows. In the city, you have a network of scenic bicycle paths, neighborhood greenways, and on-road bike lanes, and every major destination is signed for way-finding. Along the signed bicycle routes are unique, local restaurants, coffee shops, retail stores, and it seems you can't bike a mile without passing a high grade brewery, craft beer bar, wine room or cocktail watering hole. Even the bike corrals are well designed and plentiful allowing for last minute pull overs when a rest stop is spotted.
Lodging
Ace Hotel has complimentary city cruisers for guests and a nice, huge bike corral and green bike lane out front.
Anybody who has ever browsed the Airbnb inventory for Portland knows that there are more properties than any other city and many of them look like they could be in a design magazine. The city breathes creativity and it shows in this community of hosts.
There is also a nice selection of hotels and inns that offer bike friendly lodging like McMenamin’s Kennedy School and the Crystal, Crowne Plaza, Hotel Rose, Hotel Vintage, Riverplace and Ace Hotel. All but the two McMenamins provide complimentary bikes for guests, but McMenamin’s makes up for it with their unbelievable “club med for hipsters” amenities.
Bike Rentals & Shops
Clever Cycles rents bakfiets, Brompton folding bikes and city bikes and they have a huge selection of accessories and a kids play area!
Hands down, our favorite bike shop in America is Clever Cycles with a nice selection of rentals: Dutch city bikes, bakfiets (aka the minivan), and Brompton folding bikes.
A fun and tasty shop to visit is Velo Cult that offers maintenance, bike sales, and 12 local beers on tap.
Transportation
Amtrak’s Cascade line has the closest thing to roll-on service for a long distance train in America and connects you to both Seattle and Vancouver. You have to remove your bags and panniers and the baggage car takes it and hangs it in vertical racks. Make sure to pay the $5 bike fee in advance to confirm your space.
Portland’s buses all have bike racks and the light rail is outfitted with vertical hanging racks.
Other Resources
Travel Oregon is the machine behind all the fantastic bike tourism and their site has a wealth of resources for traveling around the state by bike.
to eat
to drink
to see
Biking to Washington Park's Rose Garden is extremely vertical, but you can alternatively take the light rail to the zoo and bike down the hill.
Out of every city we have biked, Minneapolis is by far the best biking city in the U.S. Between the "bicycle interstate highways" that get you where you need to go, water at every turn, the most bike racks per capita and normal folk riding bikes, this city provides a social, stress free and scenic city biking experience.
I am seriously biased when it comes to Madison WI because I was born in the Emerald City, also known as "X square miles surrounded by reality." This city is jam packed with everything a Midwestern girl could want: laid back ladies, farm-to-table food, theatrical thunderstorms, tasty beer, a decent Big 10 athletic department and most importantly, the lakes.
