…I can do this now.
Low on gasoline and (after a rather expensive trip to a dog shelter and a Petco a week ago) utterly out of money, it was nice to still have the means to ride to town on this lovely Sunday to pick up a needed package I had been told was waiting in a lockbox in town.
When I first got the bike I had serious doubts about its ability to ride all the way to town and back on one charge, and early experiments seemed to justify those doubts. But after I learned how to manage power use, it turned out that the bike can do it perfectly easily even with all the hills and rolling resistance. And it’s a pleasant way to kill a couple of sunny hours. I’ve had my Vitamin D for the day, Dr. Fauci.
And it never fails: Every Single Time I ride to town, somebody wants to ask where I got that impressive-looking ebike and is it really as useful as it seems like it ought to be? This morning I was almost out of pavement when a man shouted a question at me from across the street. I pulled over, he crossed the street and we had a rather lengthy conversation about the thing. I think of ebikes as sort of a hipster thing but these are always aging-to-old full adults, not a hint of mustache wax in sight, in a very rural desert town, admiring my huge-frame, fat-tire, very dusty contraption.
Can we expect to see Tobie riding in a (large) milk crate on the back?
I think not. 🙂
Out of curiosity, do you carry an extension cord with you so that if you get to town and have less than a 50% charge left you can power up in town somewhere and get back?
Check the tip jar.
What Anonymous said.
CZ: I’d have to carry the whole transformer brick with me, and I don’t usually do that. No place to plug it in in town anyway.
Ebikes aren’t that much of a hipster thing anymore. These days they are pretty much mainstream. I’ve been thinking about getting one for a while and I’m as far away from being a hipster as one can imagine. Hell, my seventy-two-year-old neighbour down the road uses his to go into town (12 kilometres away) for coffee a few times a week.
Yes, my wife got a Trek ebike a couple of years ago. I still ride my road bike, but she has asthma and cardio problems that meant that she couldnt come close to staying up with me. Now she can ride as far and as fast as I do, if not more.