Burley Nomad

With the temperatures here in Texas finally dropping below the 90 degree mark (32.2 Celcius), it's time to start thinking about camping. The UPS man dropped off our new Burley Nomad trailer the other day and I've been itching to try it out. The Nomad is Burley's touring model. I figured that we'd use a trailer rather than panniers to avoid putting too much weight on the bike-broken spokes appear to be a common problem afflicting people touring on tandems. I loaded the trailer with a bunch of camping gear, hooked it up to the tandem, and hit our local bike trails. I hardly noticed the trailer was back there. I'll post a review after we've had the opportunity to take the Nomad on a camping trip.

Catching up (Condensed-believe it or not)

Blogger has never worked worth a darn on my ipad. I just bought a laptop running the latest version of Windows, so, I believe I'm back in business, although Blogger is still fighting me. You'll notice some stuff is mis-spaced, off center, among other little things that drive me crazy. Here's a condensed summary of the past few months:

Group ride with the mayor of Fort Worth-me and my wife showed up on the Santana tandem and had a great time.



I was looking for ways to carry gear on the front end of the Santana. I tested out an Iberra handlebar bag, which was inexpensive and a really great bag, but I ended up going with a Wald basket.





The wife has really taken to the whole tandem bike thing. She actually brought up the idea of buying a tandem that is capable of running wider tires, since we end up riding a lot of gravel and hardpacked dirt trails. We started researching steel framed tandems. We passed on the Salsa Powderkeg-the 32 spoke wheels didn't inspire confidence (we're not a lightweight team),



 We also passed on a Co-motion Mocha-again, we're not lightweights and the Mocha lacks a lateral support bar which would mean the frame would flex quite a bit.



 We settled on a Hokitika Haka, an American made steel tandem produced by Tandems East, a tandem specialty shop in New Jersey. This bike was a fantastic deal, saving us about $1,400 over the Powderkeg or the Mocha.

Racks and accessories have been added:

Rides have been made to several local coffee vendors.

We participated in a local benefit ride, The Cowtown Classic, and made a short video with cheesy royalty free music:

We have met up with our friend Chris, aka Pondero, on a couple of occasions. Coffee was brewed and enjoyed.

That pretty much sums things up. Till next time.