Pumpkin Patch Pedal

We took Emily on her first organized bike ride today! We went an hour south to some flatter country for the Pumpkin Patch Pedal. It was a great day for riding. We decided to ride the 25 mile option. Pre-Emily, we would never have traveled for a ride of that length (50 used to be our lower limit), but we thought it would be fun to do with her. Emily was really good in the trailer and even managed to snooze a little bit.

With riding a tandem, there are certain comments that we have learned to expect. We always expect a lot of looks and nearly always get told "She's not pedaling back there." Haha, our pedals are connected, I have to pedal. Of course, we didn't get any of those comments today. In fact, in the first few minutes, we could already tell what the comments would be about pulling a trailer behind a tandem. Tops on the list was people asking if they could ride back there. Next was comments about the family being out together and how great that was. Nearly all of the cyclists noticed us which is good and most had some sort of comment or said how cool it was. We passed several different parents and older kids whose parent said that's how their kid got their start. When the 25 mile ride joined back up with the longer rides, we got a lot of comments from those riders. It was pretty funny, most were telling us how great we were doing and to keep it up. We got a kick out of it because 2 years ago we would have been doing one of the longer rides. The funniest comment was from a British guy who was riding a longer ride. He came up beside us and told us not to be alarmed, but there is a small child following us. Just completely random.

We really enjoyed seeing the mix of cyclists at the ride. We are used to seeing the very dedicated cyclists. It was a nice change of pace to see all different levels and abilities on this ride. We did run into some other riders from our tandem club as we were leaving. Looks like they had a nice ride.

We rode 29.7 miles, so this was certainly Emily's longest ride. It is quite a bit harder than riding without the trailer, we are debating how much. 1.5 times as hard (and count the miles 1.5 times) or twice as hard (cound the miles double). One of our tandem friends suggested that it was double, we are probably pulling 40-50 pounds behind us.

Emily had a lot of fun at the rest stop in the middle and enjoyed eating some of the snacks that the ride had. There were horses across the street and we went to look at them and she knew just what a horse says. And, big new word of the day was bicycle! A big, big word! And it was said before we left the house this morning about the bike on my t-shirt.