Tandem Bicycles

A Tandem Bike For Kids

When we traveled to Sanibel Island for vacation, my family members decided to rent tandem bikes so that we could explore the island without spending the afternoon driving around in a car. We rented the bikes for a week, and planned to take many rides to various beaches, shopping, and sightseeing. This turned out to be a quite interesting experience. We tried at first to get a tandem bike for kids, so that the children - then 12 and 6 - could ride with each other, and I could ride with my best friend on another. That didn't work well, and so the people kindly traded that bicycle in for a regular tandem bike and the plan was that each adult would ride one child. My friend, however, gave up easily, and became so frustrated that she refused to try to ride for the rest of the vacation. So it was a mitigated disaster; she refused to ride some places, and wanted to stay in our condo and watch television (this was her idea of a vacation). My friend and I learned a valuable lesson. We don't always share the same interests, but we enjoy vacationing together. We both learned that it was perfectly okay for me to rent a tandem bicycle and go explore the island with my children while she stayed in the condo and watched television. Everyone did what they wanted, we were all happy, and we had plenty of time to spend together as well. So we did exactly that. While she watched television, I rode around the island with my daughters, visited a few places, and had a pretty good time with that. We visited the butterfly exhibit and shell museum, and traveled to a couple of beaches that we found very lovely. We collected a lot of shells and explored a lot. The most memorable ride we took, however, was in the rain. We had biked to a beach about 10 miles from our condo, and a sudden rain came up and dumped four inches of rain in four hours. We rode as hard as we could because there really was no shelter at which to take refuge, and we didn't have a cellular phone to call my friend (who had of course stayed behind). It was one wet ride! When I got home, I even considered purchasing a used tandem bicycle to ride with my daughter, who was still afraid to ride without training wheels. She quickly learned to ride after we returned home that summer, and so I decided against it. When I see tandem bikes for sale, though, I am often reminded of the wonderful time we had that summer in Florida and wonder whether a tandem bicycle will always hold a nostalgic memory of that wonderful time in Florida.

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