Tangled Metal wrote:I've been busy on the internet looking for other ways of touring with a young child. There's a few ways but it looks to me that a tandem makes sense. What do you think?
I'm impressed by circe tandems. The morpheus has a recumbent front seat which would strap a 4 year old down nicely. The front chainset can move independently so he can pedal at his rate or not at all such as when sleeping. They do another more conventional version with the child at the back or the front with accessory kit. That bike takes special racks and brackets to allow a baby car seat to be attached it extra seats on the rear rack. It's possible to put the baby car seat behind the front adult with a child seat on the rear rack. Possibly get 3 kids on too. The car seat can go on the front with adult and child behind.
if you add in front, middle and rear racks plus rack bags i reckon you could get all your kit on av tandem with a second adult carrying a pannier set too. The company also makes a trailer.
So our current two bikes, trailer and child seat or tandem and bike plus child seat on bike or tandem make two different styles of touring. Which is best do you think?
Any other styles of family touring kit setup? Tandems seem to offer decent promise if you can afford them fully kitted out. Any opinions?
Long question with a lot of answers;-)
We have three kids (now 24/21 and 20) and when they were small we went through the whole range of kids equipment - seats, trailers, trailerbikes and tandems. For example at one point I was riding with Son no1 on a tandem pulling a baby trailer (full of baby+luggage as we were obviously camping) and Kate pulled a trailerbike with no2 son (and front and rear panniers) If you want a laugh this describes some of it at a slightly earlier stage;-) -
http://www.bretonbikes.com/family/a-personal-adventureWe then applied all this hard won experience to our business, but on choices of equipment here's my personal take on it...
First and most important is that most trailerbikes are junk. They attach to the seat-tube and have a poor quality bearing (often just a bolt!) as pivots. Not only will these develop play very quickly but because the pivot is well in front of the rear hub axis you create a 'Moment' so that the trailerbike tries to steer the adult bike. That's why any movement by the child has you all over the road. The only trailerbikes that I trust are those with proper pivots set over the rear axle - e.g. Burley Piccalos and the old islabikes. I've done 40 mph on these with an active 4-year-old and they are just fine. They allow the child to pedal independently but make sure they don't go to sleep...
I'm afraid I don't like any bike that puts the child in front of 80 kgs of adult. In an accident they hit the ground first and then may well get hit from behind by Dad - so for me I don't like child-first tandems or seats on crossbars. Once they are big enough, normally 5-6 we put them on small-back tandems like the Dawes
http://dawescycles.com/dawes/duet-twin/ The fact that they need to swing their legs through a huge circle doesn't seem to bother them, and they quickly learn a proper touring pace - I've never felt the need for them to be able to pedal independently (and my kids would have moaned every such a lot if they didn't like it). Set up like this we never dropped below 25 miles a day for touring (a lot if you've a kid on the back and a child trailer;-) - our legs were the limit always, never the children.
Our kids loved the tandem, indeed my daughter so much so that she refused to even try to ride a bike until she was 8 years-old...
You will have an absolute ball;-)
38 years of cycletouring, 33 years of running cycling holidays, 8 years of running a campsite for cyclists - there's a pattern here...
