Since yesterday was Zero Emissions Day and today is World Carfree Day, I wanted to sing my praises to our Taga. What is a Taga? This is a question I used to answer every day last year!
The Taga is a bike that easily folds up into a stroller and has a variety of attachments to let it grow with you and your kids. In my opinion, it is the ultimate cruising-around-town bike if you have kids, a bike-friendly neighborhood, and don’t want to travel by car. My mom bought one for us when Alex was born. We brought it to Boulder with us, and it was my dominant form of transportation during our first year here when we lived in town.
I have such fond memories of my first days in Boulder. Everything in the city was new to me, and I couldn’t wait to explore. Alex and I would hop on the Taga, I would pick a bike route and a final destination, and off we would go. As anyone who walks or bikes to explore a new place knows, you feel so much more connected and see more details than if you were in the car.
For us, having the Taga was a godsend because Alex hated (with a capital HATE) the car, so being able to do almost every errand by bike was amazing. I was so proud of myself on the weeks when we would get to Friday and I would realize that we hadn’t used the car once!
As you can see from the image at the top of the post, the Taga comes with a variety of options, the primary one being the kid’s seat that allows you to use it as a bike or stroller. This is what we had, and we always kept it in bike mode. The only downside is that there’s not a lot of storage space for lugging home groceries. To remedy that, we added a seat post mounted bike rack and a basket. That gave me plenty of room to bring home a few day’s worth of groceries at a time.
Of course, sometimes Alex would go for rides with Calder in a kid’s seat mounted to the back of a regular bike, but for everyday transport, the Taga was our favorite. When we decided to move into the mountains, I was so sad to say goodbye to those every-day trips. In fact, I really wanted to buy the double wooden seat for the two boys if we bought a house in town, because I had high hopes to keep our driving lifestyle to a minimum.
But alas, we’ve put our daily bike rides on hold in exchange for daily hikes up our backyard mountain. Not a bade trade, but I do have high hopes of the boys and I hopping on bikes again once they are a touch older. We can drive down the mountain with bikes, park the car and do all of our errands by bike (a girl can dream!).
In the meantime, looking through these photos brought back so many memories. Like trips to buy new shoes!
Going to vote.
Bundling up and driving a little bear cub around town on chilly days.
If you live in a town with bike paths and/or nice bike lanes, I can’t recommend the Taga enough. I mainly stuck to the paths because in Boulder we were lucky enough to have them running right by our house and to all of our favorite parks and shops. I took it on the street a few times, but always felt more comfortable with a little more distance between us and the cars.
By last spring, Alex was an old pro at hopping on and off of the bike. As you can see, he always made himself comfortable, often with his feet up on the handlebar. And eventually he learned that he could just reach his hand through the little sunroof whenever he wanted a snack or the drink bottle. What a kid!
The Taga worked so well for us, and whenever we were out on a ride, we would always get at least one compliment. I’m surprised that I haven’t seen more in the US, particularly in such a bike-friendly town like Boulder, so with that in mind, we wanted to share our love on the blog today.
I know it can be hard to go car-free with kids, but we are such big fans that we want to encourage everyone to give it a try. If you can make it work, it can lead to even more adventures and moments of exploration for your little ones. We were always stopping the bike to watch construction sites, trains go by, and prairie dogs popping up from their burrows! Seriously great memories from our first year in our new hometown.
