Here’s a photo of Oliver on his bike riding to the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market yesterday along the Confederation Trail:
You may see that photo and think “oh, riding to the market, what a nice idea.”
I look at the photo and see years of effort culminating in extreme bravery: it was an amazing feat, especially given that Oliver only started cycling in earnest a week ago.
The tricycle he’s riding is a Fiori Parklane that we purchased on Friday from MacQueen’s after renting it the previous weekend for a try-before-you-buy. It’s stable enough that Oliver’s skittishness about “tippiness” is mitigated. It’s easy enough to pedal that the 6 km round trip from home to the market was reasonable. It’s got a generous basket in the back that allowed Oliver to bear the brunt of getting our market purchases back home.
Along the way we realized that our regular Saturday local food trail is almost 100% accessible by bicycle: we can ride up the Confederation Trail to the Farmers’ Market, then back down to the Kensington Road-Fitzroy-Escher intersection and take the multi-use path up to Riverview Country Market, then come back around and stop at Purity Dairy and, finally, continue on to Receiver Coffee along the Event Grounds trail:
We didn’t hit all the stops this week, just the market and Purity Dairy (where we had a nice chat with personable owner Tom Cullen); we’ll expand the footprint as comfort level increases in the weeks and months to come.