This year we rode our 3rd annual bike ride to Brentwood, California to visit G&S Farms to go cherry picking in Brentwood. Our original ride to cherry picking was great, and we’ve wanted to continue the tradition every year. Getting there isn’t very easy by transit, but it can be a neat multimodal trip from Oakland and other parts of the East Bay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbpQBpZXD0U&feature=youtu.be Cherry Picking by Bike in Brentwood 2023 – Some stuff was different than years past. BART Bus Bridge This year, due to track work that was being done on the BART tracks between Rockridge BART and Orinda BART, there was what they call a “Bus Bridge” between stations. There was no direct train service, but there were free courtesy shuttle buses at both Rockridge and Orinda stations. This is normally a bit of a hassle, […]
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Cherry picking (and other U-Pick fruit picking) in Brentwood. A successful 20-mile adventure by bike!
April to May to June is U-Pick cherry picking season in the Bay Area When I was a child, I remember apple picking in New England with my dad. My memory is fuzzy now and I don’t remember if we just went once, or multiple times, but I still remember climbing a ladder to pick, and watching cider presses. I was confused when the cider came out brown when apple juice wasn’t. It seemed odd, but I still enjoyed drinking it. There’s so much locally grown produce in California, and I wanted to create a similar experience for our family. Especially after friends at a picnic shared some of their u-pick cherries with us. Last June, we went cherry picking at a u-pick farm in Brentwood for the first time. Brentwood is the place to go for cherry picking in […]
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A replacement Trail-a-bike hitch seatpost shim to help fix your trailer
Trail-a-bikes We use an Adams Trail-a-bike (aka Tag along, as some people call it) to tow our child occasionally. It is kind of like a tandem bike attachment for kids. The steel hitch slides onto a seatpost, and clamps on via 2 bolts and a hex-wrench. The other end of the hitch has a square-shaped key and a hole for adding a retaining pin to hold the trailer in place. There are spacers included that fit in there for different seatpost diameters. We have a Weehoo trailer as well, and this shim should fit that hitch as well. This may also work for other tag along bikes, like the Weeride Co-Pilot and the Kazam Co-pilot. Both of those clamp onto the seatpost of the adult’s bike. We sometimes swap the trailer between bikes. Unfortunately, the bikes have different […]
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How do you carry a child on a bike? What we know about bike attachments for kids
We didn’t own a car when our child was born. That made the idea of running errands as a family much more complicated. There are well-meaning laws in California and other states that require you to use a car seat to take your child home after they are born (assuming they are not born at home!). Though apparently, the hospital is not allowed to deny discharge if you don’t take your child home in a car seat. A friend generously loaned us a car for a month. Since we don’t drive much, we only used it for the trip to and from the hospital, and to meet up for a friend’s birthday at a cafe. We live in a fairly urban area, so we were able to walk most other places we needed to go and transport our child via […]
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