Double Your Pleasure
Back in Seattle, the weather turned nice on Sunday and we wanted to take advantage of it. Our son was thinking of taking a bike ride, and I suggested to Mrs. Perils of Caffeine that we dust off our Rodriguez tandem and see if it (and we) still worked. I was pretty sure we hadn’t ridden it in 10 years.
I’ve given a little of the history of this bike here. We had it built for us in 1981. I pulled it down and brushed off a coating of spider webs, oiled the chain and carefully inflated the tires. Everything seemed to work, so we got on and headed down the hill to the Burke-Gilman Trail. We didn’t want to push our luck with the bike’s running gear on this first ride, so we decided to take a short spin out to Shilshole Marina/Golden Gardens park. The route has the virtue of being both short and flat.
At some point, the kid decided he’d show off his newly-acquired bicycling legs, and sprinted away from us. What he didn’t count on, as a neophyte, was how a tandem can just eat up the road if it’s flat, especially when its stoker has retained some of her racer’s muscle memory. I slammed into a high gear and we started bearing down on him. He kept looking behind, incredulous, as his demonic parents bore down on him like an engine of doom. We blew past him, and he was so gassed he couldn’t even catch our wheel. I relish any shreds of respect I can glean at this age.
He paid us back on the climb home due to another principle of tandem riding - they’re a bitch to haul up a hill. And also because he’s fit and 23, versus the 107 combined years pushing the tandem. He could have finished a beer by the time we pulled up the driveway.
