I have been reading, with a greener than green envy, bike blogs that praise the virtues of riding in the snow.
Lovely blogs like Girls and Bicycles have wonderful pictures of winterised bikes ready to hit the road what ever the weather.
I wondered for a while if it was just another hang up I would have to get over, another "scary monster" in the road of living without a car, but sadly I really don't think it IS the case.
Most of these hardcore carfree blogs are city or town dwellers not middle-of-nowhere rural like me.
Gritters do our road last, clearing the main commuter routes first or often not getting to us at all. If we are lucky a snow plough will wind a path through the white stuff.
The problem though is not the snow (knobbly tires would sort that out) or even the ice, but the traffic.
UK roads, especially rural roads are very narrow, much narrower than US rural roads.
On a good day cars can pass each other and a car will have to creep past anything bigger. Put the snow plough through though and all you are left with is a single track with nowhere to go.
The traffic travels as fast as it always does and all of a sudden a fairly safe run becomes something akin to jumping out of a plane sans chute shouting "BANZAIIIIII!".
The thing about town and city riding is there is nearly always the option to get out of the way of traffic. You can pull into parking spaces, driveways or even the pavement in an emergency, but on the rural road you don't have this safety net. The roads we have to cycle either have hedges or fencing all the way to the road or (even nicer) steep drops to fields below where the road has been dug into hillsides.
So you can imagine, with roads like this, the added "excitement" of ice and snow and 50% less space means that staying home or cranking up the old Land Rover seem very tempting.
How annoying to be stuck indoors when I have a bike and basket and bike trailer waiting for me in the shed.
Any tips?
We live in the city with pretty good bike lanes and trails and I'm not going out in the snow. But I'm also a wimp! I gave it a go and did the 10min bike ride to the children's second hand clothing store there was a few feet of snow on the ground but the bike lane was clear and dry so it wasn't so bad. There was one part that had been flooded and turned to a huge ice patch and I had to dismount and carry my bike around it through a snowdrift up to my waist. Luckily that was on my way there and I didn't have a huge knapsack to carry too.
ReplyDeleteSo running into obstacles like that added to the wind and crazy winter drivers make me not want to go out either.
Don't feel bad about taking the Rover out, you guys are so green in so many ways the limited times you'll take it out will balance everything out. Safety has to come first!
To be honest Andrea its too bad for the Landrover at the moment!! Kim got it stuck coming home last night and we are pretty much snowed in!! Worst snow fall in 30 years they say on the radio! WIll post some pics :)
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