What's all this, then?

I live in Boulder—tiny but urbane; pretty cosmopolitan but small enough that you see the same people over and over again. And small enough that the nearest grocery store is six blocks away from my house. The next-nearest grocery store—in strip mall along with the cafe I like to eat breakfast at, the bank where I cash my checks, and the giant hippie brewpub where I spend many evenings—is barely double that. Perfect bike riding distance. Slow, lazy, tipsy-but-still-able-to-carry-the-groceries bike riding.

But the convenience of the car is killing me. I find myself driving that half mile to pick up a bar of soap, or some toilet paper, or a bag of garlic powder that we'd forgotten on our last trip to the ever-precious Whole Foods, 1.7 miles away. There's a perfectly lovely trailhead just four blocks from our house, one that gets you up and away into the Rocky Mountain foothills in 35 steps, but twice a week we drive our dogs up the 11 or 12 switchbacks to take them hiking. Between my wife and I, our Subaru's been racking up 200, 250 miles a week. 20,000 miles a year—more if you count the annual 5,000 mile road trips we've been taking since moving to Colorado.

And filling up the Sub's gas 16-gallon tank—at $4 a gallon—is killing me too. Not because I have some "Blood blah blah Oil blah!" sticker on the bumper, but because spending $70 a week just to port the dogs around town makes me feel like an idiot.

But instead of trading in the Sub and its 100,000 miles for a $30,000 hybrid (one that's incidentally too small for dogs), I bought a $2500 bike—a big mother with a back deck and two dog-sized saddlebags on the tail and room for a surfboard on the side: A bike built to take the car out of my life.

This rad beast is called a Big Dummy, designed by the geek kings at Surly in tandem with a company called Xtracycle. XC's been making its Free Radical attachments—basically big bike extenders that plug into your existing frame to give it a longer wheelbase and room for saddlebags and surfboards and dogs—for years. But the Big Dummy, as far as I know, is their first foray into purpose-built frames. And I got one.

So do a lot of people, and you can read all about their Dummies on the vast internet. But I'm going to tell you all about mine.