Bike Awesomeness

Excited as I was to put the bike together right away it turned out to be more of a challenge then I had thought. It came in different pieces, all with odd shapes weird angle, and funky configurations, screws that needed to be tightened, loosened, moved, jiggled... It was a hot mess of random looking parts. Even with directions it took about a week to put together (due in part because I've been fiendishly busy). But it's finally together. Putting my bike together piece by piece. Getting a better angle. I took it out for a test drive as soon as I could. It's an amazingly smooth ride, easy on the shoulders, which can be a problem in just a regular wheelchair. And it looks freakin cool! The has a very wide turning radius and like any adult bicycle you can't backpedal. But as long as I watch where I'm going it works beautifully. Pretty comfy. On my first test run I learned two things: always double check every nut and bolt before you take out a new bike, and wear pants if your legs are dangling inches above the ground. Fortunately nothing worse happened than my backrest coming loose and dirt covering my legs, but good lessons to learn nonetheless. Hitting the road! I've made a couple trips on it now, each ride increasing the distance I cover. I'm now up to 8 miles (we checked that using the car odometer earlier today) and wasn't even beat. I've got nothing but flat open road for miles and miles so we'll see how far I can go. One of my friends who is a runner has pointed out that in the half marathon that he ran there was a contestant with a hand bike. My sister has been insisting from the beginning that we should enter a race of some kind together. When I join one of these I'll let everyone know and I'll make sure to post pictures.