Bikes

Autumn has fully engaged midcoast Maine. The foliage color is near peak, many leaves have already fallen, the sun doesn't rise until after 7 AM, and the temperatures are starting to fall. Actually - we have been very fortunate temperature-wise. Here it is October 21st and we still haven't had a real freeze. But I suspect it is not far away.

It was a sad day on Monday when I put the Chevelle in it's winter storage. We didn't get to drive her enough this summer but we certainly drove her more than the last couple of years so I suppose that's the good news. She'll be fine 'till next spring when we wake her up from antique car hibernation. I hope there is still gas to be found ... at less than $5.00 a gallon.

You may recall that earlier this year our son Eric gave us a couple of nice mountain bikes that he and Jen weren't using. The bikes are several years old but appear to be nice quality TREK bikes. I cleaned them up a bit and did some basic maintenance last spring but we really haven't used them yet. We do want to take them with us this winter when we head south for a few months and I've been contemplating how we were going to accomplish that. We could purchase a bike rack to mount on the hitch behind the Winne and in front of the Vue - but our propane coach heater exhausts into that area so that probably wouldn't work very well. We could purchase a nice hitch mounted bike rack to place on the Vue and carry the bikes back there - but the Vue doesn't have a hitch receiver installed. We could purchase a relatively inexpensive bike rack that mounts to the rear door of the Vue - but I'm not too sure how that would have held up over a few thousand miles. Decisions - Decisions - Decisions.

Last week I decided to go with the Vue - Hitch Mounted option and went internet shopping. I found a nice bolt on hitch for the Vue on Amazon.com for a pretty reasonable price and free shipping. I found the bike rack I wanted on Amazon as well - but Camping World had the same rack on "internet" sale only - and also with free shipping! It appears the retailers are doing all they can to encourage us to part with our hard earned cash - so I did!

The hitch arrived on Wednesday so yesterday was installation day. Fortunately the Vue was built with mounting holes/welded in nuts in place for just such an installation and the install went pretty much as planned. Today our friendly UPS driver brought the bike rack so I put that together, put it on the Vue's new hitch receiver, and mounted one of our bikes to see how it all worked. All-In-All it looks like it will work pretty well. Adding the hitch to the Vue was an added expense - but it may turn out to be handy for other purposes in the future. The bike rack installs easily, appears to be well built, and should last for many years. The bikes are easy to load and unload. The only drawback I see is that you can't get the back door of the Vue open with the rack installed (I didn't buy the fold down version of the bike rack since you need to take off the bikes anyway to use the fold down feature). I don't see this as a big deal since it looks pretty easy to remove the bikes and rack if we need to use the back door.

So now we can take our bikes when we travel! I wonder if this means we will actually use them?