I just saw this article on Salon about Mark Benjamin's SUB - Sport Utility Bike. Good article, made me smile and feel warm and fuzzy inside. That Xtracycle technology is sweet. I like the blender attachment. May geeks rule the world.

Check out the video, it's very cute, and interesting too:

This brings back memories of my own biker chick past, and the ridiculous amounts of cargo that I would routinely load on my motorcycle. Being San Francisco and all, it would have been impossible to tote cargo of any sort up and down all those hills on a bicycle. I could barely get myself up and down them, and I was a very young woman in good physical shape. A motorcycle was much better. Less sweaty, and infinitely cooler and more badass.

I'm not toting anything here in the photo below, just looking good riding around with my friend Margie at age 19 or so. Note that this was way back before the helmet law was enacted here in California, though I did wear mine 95% of the time anyway. This photo is also great because you can check out my rack...the one on the back of my motorcycle, that is.

In this next photo from around 1991, I am up in the hills to the west of Silicon Valley, on Skyline...Hwy 35. Headed off on a camping trip with my then-boyfriend Andy, I think this camping trip was to Big Basin.

On this trip I was riding on back, so as packed as this bike appears to be with one person, it actually had two people on it while we were underway. It's not so much gear, relatively speaking, because this was just a weekend trip. On a later month-long trip across and around the American West (over to Utah, up to Montana, back through Washington and Oregon) we had a TON of stuff packed onto every available surface of that bike. We had tank bags, we had cargo nets and bungee cords. Here you can see the tent packed onto the fender, but on the big trip we had like 5 times as much stuff strapped onto it. Craziness. But it was a FABULOUS trip.

This next photo was taken in 2001. My friend Julie Call and I were working at eCompany in San Francisco at the height of the Dot-com Era. She had just gotten a bike, so I took her on her first bike camping trip to Harbin Hot Springs up in Middle town, north of Napa. It was fun...we took this photo on the way back, after stopping for lunch in Napa Valley. I had a Honda Nighthawk 650 then....that was a sweet ride. Very smooth, silky and comfortable to ride, quiet and powerful.

Julie has THREE KIDS now, all under age 4. Fuck. I get cold sweats just thinking about it, as I am on the brink of insanity with my two.

Right now I am seriously interested in the Rhoades Car, specifically the four-seater model with a shade canopy and locking cargo trunk. Minus the rotating sign on top. Yes, THAT'S where you have seen these before. But they are still cool.

Here are a few of the other Rhoades models in action.

I could totally see myself commuting back and forth to preschool and the gym in this beauty. Not quite as badass as being a biker chick, but hey...a suburban work-at-home mom with two kids has to work her cargo bike whatever way she can. And Dan has his own seat!

$5000 with all the options I want though. Not going to happen anytime soon, unless my Portable Baby empire takes off big-time. Sigh. But I can dream.