This is the – sort of – kick of to my VLOG. I’ve kicked off a new effort, that’s going to not just be code focused or music focused or bike focused, but it’ll be fairly heavily bike focused and metal focused and food focused and coffee focused and…
well you get the idea right?
I’m going to cover topics I like, exploring Redmond, Washington with frequent train trips into Portland, rides into Seattle, and on about the area. With a narrative along the various adventures from yours truly along with elaboration of the various places and their quality of life, cool points of interest, and all that jazz. Along with this, there will be some music, almost all written, composed, and performed by me. All of this is going to be wrapped together into the VLOG these days.
Some of the other criteria I’m attempting to meet for each episode includes:
Keeping each episode under 10 minutes, with a few exceptions here and there.
Focusing on 1-3 key segments, or topics, per episode.
Improving a bit each episode.
So far, doing the ENTIRE production, music, shots, and every other aspect myself.
In this episode, the main mission is finding a bagel shop in Redmond, which maybe I succeed in finding, maybe I don’t. You’ll have to watch the episode to find out! 🤣
Also, for those videographer types, please do critique and leave comments on how I can improve this and pending videos. Shot angles, shot ideas, and all that, I’m keenly interested in learning more about! With that, here is the video I’ve put together, hope you enjoy. Various time points within the video can be found below the link to the video.
1:06 – Ride start with narration of the adventure. Plus, check out my edits! I might get pretty good at this video thing yet! 😬
2:49 – Love catching friendly interactions! Lot’s of friendly people here in Redmond!
3:19 – The secret (ok, not really, just hard to see) entrance to the back path road.
5:12 – Blazing Bagel arrival! I also point out, which this will be interesting looking back in several years, at the unfinished light rail and parking garage construction.
6:09 – The Blazing Bagel’s Super Dooper Van, or whatever they call it.
A discussion has begun on Bikey Discord about a cargo bike meet up on the east side. Bellevue was mentioned, since it’s somewhat central on the east side. Above I’ve numbered some prospective locations that might be good for a meet up of Cargo Crew.
If you’re interested in joining, leave a comment, or join the Discord and join #eastside-cyclists and we’ll get a location sorted out.
Looking forward to meetup #1, maybe we’ll carry some cargo around! (yeah yeah, such a dad pun)
Anyway, the suggested…
Meetup Spots?
Bellevue Downtown Park.
Hidden Valley Park.
This is the intersection of the cross-Kirkland corridor trail and, whatever the one is that is called in Bellevue, where all the light rail vehicles are stored for the new extensions to Link.
The Spring Blvd west end bike landes @ 120th. It’s where several PBLs come together.
I’m not sure what exactly this area is, Spring Corridor or something, but there’s a brewing company and there seems to be some cool areas to meetup here.
and of course, whatever you might propose, I’m game.
After we finalize a spot, it’s just a matter of picking a time.
Per this link, more and more Americans are 60 days behind on their cars, a depreciating asset that is losing value at the same time.
Keeping it up, it’s economic suicide to continue our auto-dependent society in its current state.
Americans, are literally building themselves into a debt implosion of financial servitude. Auto-dependency and relying on a massive industry – which too often requires bail outs in the billions and billions of dollars – to support a debt based economy with an asset depreciating product (the cars) is economically suicidal on a vast scale. It is ensuring that everything from quality of life, to tax revenues, is sure to continue to decrease.
Meanwhile the US has built our entire system around a debt based fiat currency with depreciating assets everywhere, with the vast majority of people not building any kind of personal wealth, let alone generational wealth.
Are there any efforts to curb this? We shouldn’t be building our society around something that ensures economic self-destruction and servitude for so many in society. The car mythically is touted as a freedom machine, but it’s really anything but.
Solutions?
Obviously people that have been watching this suburban, auto-dependent, economic suicide of suburbia and auto-dependent areas of the United States know this is happening. But we’ve continued to be suckered into suburbia and auto-dependency as a nation. The losses are staggering, and the destruction of personal wealth and generational wealth is almost total for most Americans.
For more details on the absolute economic suicide of “suburbs” and “auto-dependency” here are a few great videos – that are rather entertaining – that explain the situation;
If you want clued into how markets are going to implode, how American society must rebuild itself, and what is coming in the coming years and decades in the United States – these are MUST WATCH videos. They explain it better than I have ever managed to. More on this economic suicide in future posts, but for now, WATCH THE VIDEOS!
I’m officially naming this bike, like I do all of mine, and thus this bike is now named “Reload”. Goes along with “Mona”, “Spacey”, and “Pop Rocket” among the others.
So not a whole bunch to this blog entry, just a video of day 1 + day 2 riding and GoPro setup on the bike. Enjoy.
f you’re curious about my other rides, I’ve written up a few posts about them under my “All-City Pop Rocket” and “Space Horse Disc“. Today’s post is about the Riese & Müller Load 75 Electric Cargo Bike and the adventures we’ve gone on so far! If you’re curious about the exact specs, I’ll have those at the very end of this post.
Day 1 – Pick Up @ G & O
The first day involved pick up. I only mention this because it wasn’t merely a “go in store, buy bike, take home” type of scenario. With one of these bikes amidst these modern day supply challenges, combined with America’s inferior transportation systems and draconian take on anything but automobile travel, these bikes are kind of hard to get. So on day 1, at pick up, I’d already purchased and waited through shipping from Germany and the final assembly of the bike here in the USA. That’s where I’m happy to highly recommend G & O Family Cyclery in Seattle.
G & O Family Cyclery is a shop that focuses on bikes for people with families, like me, that want to have the extra advantage of a powered bicycle (or non-electric if you want to give that a go, but this is Seattle, land of hills and mountains!) or replace a car outright. In my case, I have no car to replace, so this is merely an addition that my son can ride in or I can just run errands and pick up metric tons of pizzas for game night! Whatever your reason for wanting an electric family focused bike, G & O Family Cyclery is your place in Seattle for the premium options.
Once I had made this decision and purchased the bike, it started it’s route from Darnstadt, Germany to Seattle, Washington, USA. This took well over a month and into the 6+ weeks time frame. To note, I also ordered a bike that was basically ready to be shipped too, another that is ordered custom and still has to be made ready to ship could easily take another 2-4 weeks or more depending on the build queue. Needless to say, if you want a high quality, durable, and capable e-bike of this caliber then you’ll likely have to wait a bit for it to arrive.
Once it arrived G & O assembled the bike and added various accoutrements to the bike. I didn’t get just the base bike, which I’ve included a picture of here for reference of what the “base” bike looks like.
Riese & Müller Load 75 Electric Cargo Bike
The base cargo bike itself is extremely smooth riding, powerful, with one of the more (most?) powerful electric motors from a torque perspective on the market. Which, when you live in a place like I do that torque is crazy important to get up the hills! But I didn’t just purchase the basic bike because I wanted more flexibility. Some of the things I wanted to be able to do with this bike includes:
The ability to pick up food from town, about 1-2 miles away, in the heart of Redmond. Then return with that food while it’s still hot and fresh. Not a single soggy ass hamburger will be allowed, not a single dried out set of soup dumplings, not a single cold kebab!
The ability to safely carry a child with seat belts to keep em’ in the bay, with protection from the wind and rain, because again, I do live in Redmond, Washington where it rains about 8 months of the year!
The ability to load up for outdoor expeditions that trek at least 20+ miles out into the woods in one direction. Then be able to trek back from that location without needing a recharge!
The ability to get into and out of Seattle from way over here in the boonies of Redmond, without using any mode but the bike and without requiring a recharge. In addition, while in Seattle I’d need at least 10-20 miles worth of charge to run errands, pick up equipment, tools, or other things like 1U, 2U, or 4U Rack Servers since I’m a hardware nerd and I pick up things like that sometimes. For those not versed, that’s about 20-80 lbs (9-36 kilograms) of metal computer gear that is about 2-3 feet long (0.6-1 meter deep from the rack perspective) and ~2 foot wide (0.6 meters) and a few inches tall (7-8 cm).
The ability to carry a keg. Not that I’d likely be doing that because these days I generally just fill a growler if I’m going to carry a quantity of beer somewhere or buy a bunch of singles. Which, in that case this bike would also need to carry 24-36 bottles of beer or wine as smoothly as possible so they don’t break.
The ability to carry a propane tank for things like a grill. Ya know, cuz sometimes ya gotta cook veggies for the vegans AND you want to whip out some wicked steaks on the grill. Propane is pretty wicked efficient for that!
Carry 1-2 guitars and a 2×12″ Amp. Weighing in at a solid 100-140 lbs (45-64 kilograms).
That rounds out the tasks this bike needs to achieve for me on a daily basis, so when I ordered it I bumped up the gear, which Riese and Müller are of course more than prepared for! To ensure that this bike would be able to accomplish every single one of those goals I consulted with the G & O Cyclery Crew and they put together a build for me that included the following:
Low Side Walls & Child Cover, along with three child seats (albeit I’ve not got three kids, but YOLO!), footwell, and a luggage shelf for the kiddo.
Image from R & M that shows the two front facing, and rear facing seats for the kids with the footwell in the center. This also shows some of the side walls installed along with the back and front walls too.Another image from the R & M site that shows the base and side, rear, and front walls all installed without any of the kids seats. So straight up cargo 100% for this configuration.
This took care of several of the tasks, almost 90% of the need around food pick up, and carrying an amp and a guitar in a hardshell case. All those things were check, check, and checked!
There were a few more amenities needed to really round out things and ensure that not 90% of the need was fulfilled but 100% of the need. That included a rear carrier rack, additional lock chain and bag for the lock chain, multicharger, and upgrading form single battery to dual battery! With those additions every single one of those tasks is now met, and beyond day 1 I’ll be providing some coverage right here about the Load 75 adventures!
We come full circle now with full context of new bike pick up day! What did new bike pick up day at G & O Family Cyclery consist of? Well, Davey Oil (Jenna and the rest of the crew that had been helping me pick this out where there too! Hey y’all! 👋🏻) gave a run down of all the bike gear, battery system, engineering, and coverage of maintenance and check ups for the bike. He didn’t just spit it all out to me as an unknown quantity either like happens sometimes in bike shops, he discussed with me my own experience with bikes, took into account that I basically have a bike shop of gear to work on bikes with, albeit often don’t have time to. He also took into account after a little discussion, that I’ve been riding and been car-free – i.e. only used a bike for my primary transportation for over a decade – and then went over those topics.
Davey going over these things with me before going over all of these things allowed him to specifically cater what details I could really use, was able to answer specific questions I had, and really set me up for successful usage of the bike! The TLDR, I was impressed and I’m not usually impressed very often.
With that, day 1 was complete and I set out from G & O for that 17 mile ride back home to Redmond, Washington!
Tires Schwalbe Big Ben Plus 55-406 Reflex; Schwalbe Big Ben Plus 55-559 Reflex; Schwalbe Smart Sam Plus 57-559 Reflex*; Schwalbe Smart Sam Plus 60-406 Reflex*
Transit Sleuth 