Interesting News

Great informations about velomobiles, meetings, etc., etc. in US:

just click here: Cab-Bike in USA: Mary & Dale

U.S. Oldest Velomobilist !!

U.S. Report on Velomobiles !!

Mary Arneson wrote a very interesting report for a specialized newspaper on recumbent bicycles. You can download the whole story just by clicking here: DOWNLOAD

Winter time !!

Mary Arneson is happy !!!

Time for Ice-Biking !!

and a short story ....

Today was my last chance to ride to work in January, so I took the
Cab-Bike out at minus 12 degrees Fahrenheit (around minus 25 degrees
C).  There was recent snow. though it was packed down on the streets
and bike routes, and they had been at least sanded.

Riding in the local ice bike race last weekend, I'd been able to
establish that the Cab-Bike rides pretty well on ice if it isn't going
up or down hill, so I chose a fairly flat route.   I had to get out and
push the Cab-Bike uphill only once where was too icy.

The Rohloff hub's all-weather lubricant feels stiff at these
temperatures.  It's hard to ride very fast.  When changing from one
gear to another, there is some hesitation to drop into the new gear.

Temperatures inside the Cab-Bike were not bad.  I wore a heavy jacket
and actually got too hot.  My shirt was wet by the time I got to work
(about 5 miles or 8 kilometers).

The windows did not fog up, but snow actually formed in the air and
fell onto me inside the Cab-Bike.  My hair was covered with frost.

Tomorrow's temperature is predicted to drop to minus 23 F (minus 30 C),
and my work-day will begin before sunrise, so I'm leaving the Cab-Bike
at home, even though I would be curious to know if it would function at
that temperature.

Mary Arneson (Minneapolis, 30th January 2004 )

Mountain Lion Attacks Bikers !!

Mary Arneson sent us this from abc7.com link (8th Jan. 2004):
Mountain Lion Attacks Bikers In Orange County, Body Found
A mountain lion was shot by authorities late Thursday after two bicyclists were attacked in an Orange County wilderness park, one of them a woman who was dragged and injured. The body of a man who may have been mauled by the same animal also was found nearby, authorities said.
More infos under: http://abclocal.go.com/kabc/news/010804_nw_mt_lion.html

Above news is to be seen in relation to the following story Mary sent us half a year ago:

The "Cab-Bike" as a Security Vehicle

There are a lot of advantages which are not well known to us when cycling on a Cab-Bike. Our USA friends from Minneapolis in Minnesota wrote an e-mail to us sort of reading as follows:

An important Advise from your Physician

On a more academic level, if you look at cardiovascular risk, it's not a
very big risk to be overweight. It's also only a modest risk to be
inactive. But it's a really BIG risk to be overweight AND inactive.

So as a physician I stress to overweight patients that it is probably very
important that they be active (most studies use as a cutoff: "active" means
at least 30 minutes of vigorous exercise three times a week). I tell myself
the same thing (gg)

Dale

(note: Dr. Dale Hammerschmidt uses his Cab-Bike to cycle every to his hospital)

Winning a Challange

"'Bent Rider On-Line" is, as its name suggests, a web-based magazine
for riders of recumbent bicycles. Every year, they have a challenge
from June 15 to July 15: Swear off your car for the month, and write
about the experience. Excerpts from the essays get published, and a
winner is named.

My wife, Mary Arneson (who was riding the v-mobile ahead of mine when
we met) took the challenge. She finished last evening with 1,609 km
on the odometer --- exactly 1,000 miles. In the entire month, she had
only one breach: she used a car for a few miles to rescue our son
when his bike broke down mechanically.

Our biggest challenge for the month was in  fetching our daughter at
the airport when she returned from a semester in Vienna. We rented a
four-person human-powered vehicle called a ZEM (from Hoigaard's),
rode it out to the Humphrey Terminal, and took the shuttle to the
main terminal to fetch her. (It worked OK, but the ZEM is really too
big and heavy and non-aerodynamic for a long ride in wind.)

Also fun, we were part of the Minnesota Human-Powered Vehicle
Association's entry in the Edina Independence Day parade; later on
the 4th, we also were in the Intermedia Arts' "Art-Car" parade on
Lake Street.

I didn't take the pledge, but also commuted most days by bike during
the month, and put only a few hundred miles on my car. Usually, in a
month we'd buy gas for each car twice --- in the period of the
pledge, we only made one purchase for one car.

We have lots of pictures, and you'd of course be welcome to take some
video shots if you decide to do a story.

(And if you cannot live without a velomobile, we'll be happy to put
you in touch with the right people [gg]).

Regards,

Dale Hammerschmidt (Minneapolis, 15th July 2003)

"Even when I was a youn child, it was clear that I would one day rida a velomobile !!! "

Cab-Bikes from Germany over Holland to US (lay-out courtesy of Ethan Davis)

Mary Arneson and Dale Hammerschmidt of Minneapolis Minnesota bought three Cab-bikes and had them shipped back over to the US. Here is some short story of what they said about the experience so far:Our doughter came up to Giessen (from Vienna) by train. Dale & I flew to Amsterdam & took the train to Giessen. We picked up the three Cab-Bikes & took the train across the little mountains to Krefeld, which is near Cologne (it's also the end of the rail route from Giessen, so the train stops long enough to unload three Cab-Bikes). From Krefeld, we biked across Germany and Holland to Rotterdam, detouring through the tulips and the coastal bike path along the way.Riding across Germany & Holland was wonderful. We tried to stay out of the cities. Folks were very friendly. We rode through the tulip fields in Holland and through the harbors in Rotterdam before sending them off.

The Cab-Bikes performed very well. In a side wind, they are stable and faster than normal, and they really whip along with a tailwind. We started with some easy days and worked up to about 75 km, not wanting to push our non-biking daughter too hard. We really liked the simplicity of the Rohloff hub. Handling was fine. We could hardly stop without attracting a crowd.

The Cab Bikes on the ferry over the Wall by Woudrichen and Gorinchem, Netherlands.

The costs for the Cab-Bike come out to about $7000 each with the features we selected (flame job, luggage bags, 14-speed Rohloff hub), but the refund on the Value Added Tax offsets the shipping costs and the 3.7% US import tax on tricycles, so that's pretty much the whole cost.

At this point, you can't just order a Cab-Bike & have it arrive in the US. This has to do with our product-liability laws and the big liability awards in American courts. European insurance companies won't write standard insurance policies for product liability if a small company ships to the US. If you buy the product in Europe and transport it yourself, it's fine, because the point-of-sale product liability laws apply.

How to cycle from Germany to Holland

To give a help to some people wanting to cycle through Gemany and Holland we asked Mary Arneson to give us her experiances. Here is what she sent to us:

We left Walbeck on a forest road toward Feriendorf in Holland, then went down into Arcen and bought a lot of detailed maps of the Netherlands at the local VVV (tourist office). 

As we came into the Netherlands, we bought regional maps with cycling information.  They are titled Kaart voor vakantie en vrije tijd (or map for vacation and free time) and are produced by Falk in cooperation with the ANWB (the Dutch automobile association, which still reflects its origin as a bicycling association in its initials).  They cover the Netherlands in 41 overlapping segments.  We used numbers 38, 35, 34, 21, 26, and 27.  Our first night in the Netherlands was in Venray.  The next day, we rode through Vredepel, Rips, Gemert, Erp, Veghel, Heeswijk-Dinther (where the lady in the VVV was especially helpful and was able to find us the maps we couldn't find in Arcen), all on map 35, then turned to map 34 to get into 'sHertogenbosch.  The routes between towns were easy to follow, because there would be white signs with red destination names on them, but the routes through the towns were less clear.  We stayed in the center of town, parking the Cab-Bikes in the hotel garage, three in one parking spot.  In the morning, we had some difficulty finding our way out of town to the west, apparently failing to see the bike path under the railroad station and detouring a bit to the south.  A bike and motorbike bridge over the A59 highway led to a lightly-traveled road and bike path through Haarsteeg and up to Herpt.  We got somewhat lost in an island town called Heusden, but found our way to the bridge over the Maas.  We were entirely ready for a rest break and lunch when we arrived in Wijk en Aalburg.  Helpful people told us how to get up onto the dike and find a restaurant;  they recommended that we ride the dike road, although it wasn't labeled on the map as a bike route.  It was a beautiful little road without much traffic.  We followed the dike for much of the way to Woudrichem, passing through Giessen on the way.  (map 21) We stopped to take a picture to show that we had gotten from Giessen, Germany to Giessen, Netherlands.  At Woudrichem, we took a bike and pedestrian ferry across the Boven Merwede, which forms where the Waal meets the Maas.  We were pleasantly surprised to find it a very large boat with plenty of room for us and an easy ramp to get in and out.  The crossing brought us into Gorinchem, which was confusing to get out of.  We asked a pedestrian for advice, but she directed us the wrong way.  Three boys with spiked hair and bikes gave us the right directions to get to Schoonhoven, where we took a ferry for cars over the Lek.  We got some more unreliable advice from a man who probably never rode a bicycle, but we recognized that he was routing us on the highways, so we followed our map and left Schoonhoven on a bike route and very small roads along the Vlist toward Gouda.

 

Our arrival in Gouda ended our time in the more rural south and brought us to the fringes of the Randstad (or edge city, an urbanized area extending from Rotterdam to Amsterdam.  To the south, it was distinctly useful to have bought a language tape and learned some Dutch phrases, because even in the hotels there were people who didn't speak English or German, and we often had to ask directions on the road in Dutch.  Further north, in the heavily touristed areas and the industrial centers, English seemed to be no problem at all.  With the heavier concentration of people comes a higher crime rate, and we wanted secure storage for our Cab-Bikes so that we could take the train to Vienna for Easter.  The place for secure bike storage in Holland is the train station, which generally has a Fietspoint, where parts and repairs are available, a few bikes are for sale, and there is a huge enclosed garage for bikes and motorbikes.  Trikes park for the motorbike rate.  We pulled in to the railway station (after getting directions from a helpful native) and were somewhat startled to find a Cab-Bike enthusiast running it, and delighted to find that he spoke the Bavarian dialect of German, which is close to the Austrian German that we're used to.  He settled our Cab-Bikes in for a couple days, and we took our side trip to Vienna by train. 

 

We arrived back in Gouda on Easter Monday, a holiday in much of Europe.  Riding north from Gouda to Waddinxveen, we found ourselves in a bike festival with a major bike race blocking our planned route.  We relaxed and enjoyed that race, but when all the junior classes started racing past, we figured we would have to change directions.  We would have left Waddinxveen on Onderweg, which is probably a great route, but we ended up detouring directly north, encountering impassable mazes along forest bike paths, and eventually getting directed to a bike route along the road to Boskoop.  From there, we turned straight west on Hoogeveense Weg, then north on Provincialeweg to Hazerswoude-dorp and further to Hazerswoude-Rijndijk.  This was fairly sparse territory for hotels, and we took a helpful native's advice and looked for Hotel Groenedijk on the Oude Rijn (Old Rhine).  We seemed to be getting into tulip territory during high season, and we were lucky to find a room. 

 

In the morning, we crossed the Oude Rijn on the bridge at Hazerswoude-Rijndijk and took a dedicated bike path called Matten Kade north-northwest to another path called Ruige Kade, working our way across country past Roelofarends Veen and up to Lisserweg, a quiet road through tulip-growing areas that leads into Lisse, home of the Keukenhof gardens.  Tour buses were thick on the street as we passed Keukenhof, and the tulip, narcissus, and hyacinth fields were splendid.  We headed for the town of Noordwijkerhout, where we were told there would be hotels.  A stop in the local VVV office made it clear that this was not the time to be looking for a hotel on short notice, but we were referred to a delightful bed and breakfast at 4 Fazantlaan, with a garage that could hold our bikes.  We left our luggage and rode back to Keukenhof.  Bikes park free there.  The display gardens were well worth the admission price.  We had only a few hours, and it could take a couple days to see everything. 

 

We rode through some more bulb-growing areas in the morning, but it was foggy.  The North Sea Coast Bike Route is an amazing trail that circles the North Sea, running through Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Scotland, England, and back to Holland.  There are several ferry crossings and it is enormously long.  There are several BikeLine books (in German, but not hard to read the maps) with information about it.  We used one of those and map 26 for this region, from Noordwijk to Hoek von Holland, where the bike route runs mostly through coastal dunes that are pleasantly hilly without being too strenuous.  The biggest hazard for Cab-bikes was "Drempels."  These are what Americans call "speed bumps," and I have heard that the British call them "sleeping policemen."  They were in closely-spaced pairs, and the Cab-Bikes couldn't cross them without dragging.  We had to go around or cross them diagonally.  There was one set of "wildroosters."  This was some sort of cattle grate for wild animals, perhaps to keep them out of someplace, and it was very noisy to cross.  The North Sea was barely visible through the fog, and the path generally stayed behind the first row of dunes, which are strictly off-limits to protect their vegetation from erosion.  These dunes protect Holland from the sea, so they have to be shielded from damage.  At intervals along the coast, there were little resort towns, and the big city, Den Haag (The Hague).  We had trouble finding our way through, ended up asking a lot of people for directions, and eventually found our way back to the dunes.  At one point, as we stopped for a snack at a shopping center overlooking the North Sea, two groups of bicycle tourists with matching bike bags came pedaling past with their guides.  We weren't sorry to be on our own in the countryside, but we could sure see how a guide could be useful in that city.  The coastal path didn't offer any obvious places to stay, and we turned down the Nieuwe Waterweg toward Rotterdam before we came to a city that looked big enough to have a hotel.  Maassluis used to be the major port for that part of Holland, before the New Waterway was completed to Rotterdam.  Now, it's a fairly quiet little town.  We headed for center and found Hotel Kreta.  There was only a two-person room available, but there was no room at all in the other hotel in the area, and the staff at Kreta was willing to set up an extra mattress for us.  They served a very nice Greek supper in their restaurant, and we had a pleasant walk through the town before bedtime.  It's not a fancy place -- just a sink in the room and a bathroom down the hall, with the most amazingly steep stairways to the upper floors, but the people were very friendly, and the bike parking was secured by a gate.  They served a generous breakfast and called the local newspaper to take pictures of the Cab-Bikes. 

 

Our last trip was along the canal to Rotterdam.  We used map 27, with a copyright date of 2000.  There were several possible routes to the shipper in Waalhaven.  We passed up the chance to cross on a car ferry from Maassluis to Rozenburg, though it offered the chance to take a side trip to the very scenic village of Brielle, and it appeared that the bike route along the south edge of the harbor district would be pretty good.  Instead, we went to Vlaardingen and took a bike ferry across.  It was a nice ferry, but just a little tight on the entry.  It landed us between "1e Petroleumhaven" and "2e Petroleumhaven."  Apparently the sight of three Cab-Bikes on the bike path in front of the biggest refineries in that part of Europe was irresistable.  A free-lance television crew popped up along the path and interviewed us at length.  We continued along a bike path that didn't show up on the map but had fortunately been completed parallel to the A-15.  It allowed us to stop for lunch in Pernis (don't try the moving ramp/escalator for bikes to the bridge;  there's a maze at the top that a Cab-Bike wouldn't fit through;  the regular ramp is a better choice).  Coming back to the bike path, we followed the signs to Rotterdam but stopped in Waalhaven on Albert Plesmanweg to drop off the Cab-Bikes for shipping by air to Minneapolis.  We figured it was a good omen that the street was named for the founder of the Dutch airline KLM.  The folks at Ocean-Trans were very nice to deal with.  Our biggest difficulty was that they deal with cash, and the local banks wouldn't cash our traveler's checks.  (We had gotten VISA traveler's checks instead of American Express, and only the exchange at the central railroad station was willing to cash them.)  One of the staff gave us a ride to the Central Station, where we handled the check-cashing and were able to catch a train to Amsterdam.  This gave us another chance to see the tulips, not as close as we could from the bikes, but a lot more of them. 

 

For anyone thinking of doing this trip, we have a few suggestions. 

 

Get good maps (1:50,000, with bike routes).  A reasonable alternative to our route would be the lower Rhine bike route.  There is one book that would cover the whole thing, from Mainz to Rotterdam, complete with lists of hotels that are known to be bike-friendly.  It's from BikeLine and is called "Rhein-Radweg, Teil 3:  Von Mainz nach Rotterdam."  You can order it from www.amazon.de, which even "knows" all the data you might have stored in your account on amazon.com.  The bikeway along the Rhine had too many cities for a group of three Cab-bikes, with one ridden by a relative novice at bike touring, but it might be fine for one person traveling alone. 

 

If you are traveling with someone else, arrange signals of some sort.  We had wanted to bring "family radios" to keep in touch with each other, but the frequencies used for CB in the United States overlap with the river traffic frequencies in Holland and aren't allowed, so we made do with hand signals.  It didn't always work. 

 

Learn a little Dutch or at least bring a phrasebook if you are going off the main tourist routes.  Despite what you may have heard, the Dutch don't all speak English.  They are marvelously friendly, though, and they will happily speak Dutch to you -- even slowing down to give you a chance to understand some of it.

 

Mary

Trip to the North-Pol

Our friend Chris von Datteln near Dortmund/Germany started cycling on his Cab-Bike toward the North-Pol !!!

Chris just simply said to us "I start my trip on the 2nd of May 2003 . I do not know when I will be back. I just have got time till the end of September!"

Chris continues with his story: "I do not know yet which roads to take; in any case my trip goes till the North Pol!!
Probably I will be cycling via Denmark, Sweden and Finland. The way back shall be over Norway! I do not know if I will manage all the way up and down, but it is not so important!"
As what concerns his Cab-Bike: "I do not know how heavy it is now, but I immagine it is much heavier than 40 KG!"

Chris has mounted following additional equipement:
* one GPS Garmin 176C receiver with Digital maps

* one TFT 16:9 TV-screen with connection to a rear cam with infrared lenses

* one Satellite phone

* one TV arial

* one GPS arial

* one Digitaler compass

* one Solar vent and flashing lights

* two Sigma 5 Watt plus two Sigma 20 Watt head-lights

* one heart-pulse counter and one cycle computer

The electrical power arrives from one battery 12 Volt/17 Amp plumb-geel as well as one battery 6 Volt/ 12 Amp plumb-geel for the head-lights!
The Cab-Bike chassis has been reinforced with fiber-glass! The gears are handle by a Rohloff-hub with one 15T sproket on the rear and one 53T chain-wheel on the front!
 

"I shall be cycling so far as it is fun!!!!!!!!" said Chris.
 

Youngest rider

Little Helena Preute does not want to get anymore out of the Cab-Bike of her grandfather Karl-Josef Schmidtobreick. She is just two years old and she loves to be driven around by Karl-Josef. She normally seat down behind her grandfathers seat. Now she want to drive her little doll around in the same way.

Foot & Mouth Desease