davew's blog

There is an old experiment. You take a bunch of students one at a time and give a them two boards and a rope. You tell him/her to cross a room as fast as possible without their feet touching the floor. Most students tied the ends of the rope around the boards, held the rope in the middle, and shuffled across the room. Some tied the boards to their feet and walked across the room. The average time for these students was a little over two minutes. Then they performed the experiment again with a different set of students. This time the experimenters provided one board and a rope.

I make no secret about my feelings about internal combustion engines and other forms of conspicuous waste. This leads some folks to jump to conclusions about me like I am some sort of extreme tree-hugger or I watched "An Inconvenient Truth" and went off the deep end. I have meaning for a while to write down the reasons I have chosen this lifestyle so here goes.

It's been two years now since that fateful flight from Atlanta. I'm sure we've all been there. You're bored. There's a SkyMall magazine. You flip though it not really intending to buy anything. Some of that stuff sure looks neat though. What caught my eye this time was an electric scooter. Small, quiet, efficient, and cool looking. Further research showed that the Rietti scooter was probably a piece of flotsam, but the seed had been planted. By the end of summer I had acquired a couple of ebikes, sold my car, and started an adventure.

I was at the post office yesterday and I noticed this guy. First I noticed him because he was parking his bike next to mine and then because he was schlepping this big package under one arm. That's not easy. I tried it myself last week with a bulky, heavy box that was too big for my panniers, and I was too lazy to hook up the cargo trailer. My arm got tired pretty quickly. Even if the box wasn't heavy it was big enough to be awkward. And it was heavy. Pedaling was cumbersome because my leg tended to collide with the package on each revolution.