Last weekend our family successfully embarked on our first bicycle campout. This campout was very meaningful to us because of what it meant for our family and for our business with the upcoming launch of CampfireCycling.com.
As I’ve been preparing for the major directional shift to a bicycle camping focused business, a major dilemma has been how to tackle the challenges of running a business and improving as an expert bike camper all while raising a young family. Eventually, the answer became clear, I would invest my available time and energy for bicycle camping into figuring out how to bring my family along for the adventure.
Family bicycle camping doesn’t have to be an highly challenging endeavor. A combination of factors generally including bike ways, a nearby state park, nice weather and using a bike cargo trailer to carry camping gear can make bicycle camping achievable for the majority of cycling parents.
But as a shop owner testing many types of bicycle camping gear, I wanted to set the bar a bit higher from the start. Don’t get me wrong, I recommend learning by doing and taking incremental steps forward as you take on new skills. And honestly it probably would have been a good idea to have done an overnighter out to our nearby Catalina State Park as a warmup to this trip. But our schedule was a bit tight, so we just went for a bit of a more adventurous trip, heading out 15 miles into the high desert country Northwest of Patagonia, AZ…
