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Featuring posts about cities, scenic vistas, gear reviews, bicycle friendly businesses, family travel tips, transportation challenges and first class experiences.
The holidays are a great time for festivities on two wheels, it turns out. We know of plenty here in our back yard in New England, but our friends across North America have turned us on to plenty of other bike-themed happenings in their cities, too. We've collected many of them below for you, and we hope that your 2015 holiday season is a happy, healthy, and bikey one.
Before I get started, do you know what I'm talking about? When you look at rooms to rent on AirBnB, you've got a pretty exhaustive set of amenities you can filter by. You can choose to see only 1-bedroom places, with a pool, who provide shampoo...but the possibility of the host offering a bike (or bikes) for guests is strangely not one of them.
Coming off a somewhat disappointing Milwaukee visit a few months back, in which we saw virtually no infrastructure progress made since we last visited in 2010, we cannot help but think that Atlanta has now stolen Milwaukee's baseball team and its bicycle mojo. Atlanta is on fire. And they're excited to show you what's changed.
Maybe your flight is eeeeearly, before the T is running. Maybe you don't like cabs. Maybe you're planning to bring your folding bike with you on your trip. Maybe you're just looking to kick off your vacation with a sense of accomplishment. Maybe you're looking to arrive for your flight alert and ready. Maybe you just like the sound of it... biking to Logan Airport. Well my friend, you're in luck, because it's easier than you probably imagined. Let's get into it.
Throughout our travels, I’ve had the opportunity to bring my own bike (folding and full sized), I've rented bikes once I arrived, and I've used bike shares. For most people traveling somewhere far away, the decision usually boils down to one of the last two: renting a bike there, or using that city's bike share program. This week we will offer our thoughts on the goods and the bads of both scenarios, and why making the decision isn’t really as simple as it sounds.
Milwaukee has a strong bike culture and decent-to-amazing infrastructure. And it has those unfailingly nice mid-western people. And it has GOOD beer. Unfortunately, Milwaukee also has a governor who has cut spending on every kind of transportation except highways...
Bikabout donates 25% of its revenue each year to support local non-profits that advocate for better biking. And while that may sound altruistic, we want to be explicit about the fact that our motives are entirely selfish. We're trying to remake North America the way we'd rather it be. Let us explain.
In Charleston, South Carolina, there is a very good taco joint called Taco Boy. They've got one of the more engaging, beautiful dining spaces I've ever seen, with a sprawling beer-garden style outdoor seating area that has trees overhead and ivy covered trellis walls around it, and a breezy, open interior space if you prefer to dine indoors.
...is a glorious thing. The morning temperature is "light jacket," but during the day it scooches up into T-Shirt Territory. The trees are a riot of blossoms, and when the wind blows, they rain down on you like you're running out of a wedding chapel. Everyone's got that renewed zest for getting the hell outside.
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.
