Ruth’s making a comeback – on a Tandem

Those who regularly follow the blog are probably shaking your head in disbelief, both at the suggestion of “a Ruth comeback” and the term tandem.

After the recent series of long rides on my mountain bike I have struggled with the thought of leaving Ruth at home again for another so I decided to have another shot at getting her to make a cycling comeback. She was not averse to the idea of these adventures but really does struggle with handling the larger and heavier bike necessary for most of the riding in NZ, especially on gravel and trails.

I did a little research into what the possibilities might be. I started out suggesting an electric cargo bike. This would have involved Ruth being an idle passenger in the bucket/seat on the front. After initially being quite keen on that idea, when I showed her the dimensions of the ‘passenger’ area, the thought of just sitting in a rather cramped position taking in the scenery lost its appeal; she said that she needed a bit of exercise. I had also spotted an electric tandem in my searches, and after a bit more research, I realized that this option actually ticked most of the boxes on Ruth’s cycling ‘cons’ list. I would do most of the work: steering, navigating, gear changing, and providing the bulk of the power and management of the bike’s weight. The batteries would provide most of the rest of the pedal assistance; she just needed to top it up, so to speak. Her only other duties would be to give hand signals, including ironic waves to abusive motorists, and pedal. The latter involves as much effort as she desires. As a bonus, we can converse with each other without the need for risky riding. I even suggested that she could do her knitting if she wanted to. I know, that last point is taking the sales pitch too far.

We could be a real cycling team, ‘the tight two’. In tandem speak, I would be ‘captain‘ and Ruth would be ‘stoker’. Although I am under no illusion that we will probably rewrite tandem biking terminology and add a new role of ‘admiral’ or ‘supreme commander’.

Anyway, she gave me a semi-enthusiastic thumbs up to the idea, and we have taken the plunge and ordered a Moustache X2 TRK electric tandem bike. Ruth has six months to get back into the groove and warm to the idea of bike touring again, and I will just have to kick mud (no dust around here at the moment) until the bike finally arrives, hopefully later in the year.

Maybe we can keep pedalling into the setting Sun like this couple. He is 86 and she is 91 and it is a manual bike. They are going to ride it to heaven.

In the meantime, I have plenty of work to do in terms of plotting out our future itineraries and working out how we can deal with some of the logistical issues that a longer bike presents. I have had to rely on information that I can glean from the web as, to my knowledge, there are none of these in NZ at the moment.

We will keep you posted on how this develops and whether or not you may spot us on a road near you in the coming summer.