Today we got up and made plans to go to Chester Zoo, before discovering it was £15 a head. It’s not outlandish, I guess, especially if you make a day of it, but I felt that since it was around 11am already we wouldn’t be doing that. Plus with our digital camera being dead we wouldn’t have been able to take any decent pictures of the animals, either.
Deciding we’d go to Chester Zoo some other time, Fliss suggested that I could go and get Elisha a bike seat and then go on a ride up the trans-pennine trail in the direction of Southport. This sounded like a good alternative, since Aunty Mary had given us a cheque to pay for said bike seat and a helmet for Elisha when we saw her at Easter.
So, off I went to Halfords to deal with the least helpful shop assistant I’ve had the misfortune to encounter in quite a while. I asked him how I went about getting one of the bike seats on display. He told me to just take one off the stand and pay for it downstairs. However, the ones on the stand were disgusting – all grimy with dust. So I went back and asked if he could get me a different one. He reluctantly agreed, marching off behind the swing doors without saying a word, then returning half a minute later with a much cleaner example of the seat.
Inspecting it before I went to pay, I noticed that it was missing one of the little platforms where Elisha’s feet would go, so I went back and pointed this out to the sales assistant after waiting in line behind the current customer. Man, it was like I was asking for something completely out of the ordinary, but a barely stifiled eye roll later and he’d retrieved the missing part for me.
Back home in the garden, Fliss and I set about fitting the bike seat to her bike. It doesn’t go on mine due to the fancy shmancy rear suspension, but Fliss’ bike is a hard tail and the bracket fitted onto that okay. Sadly there wasn’t a lot of clearance for getting her feet past Elisha’s, so I had to revisit it while Elisha went into hysterics due to being taken off of the most fun thing she’d encountered in a while.
By the time I had moved the bracket and re-fitted the seat to the bike, Elisha was in bed for her nap, so it was an hour before we got out onto the trail and headed north. I hadn’t been on my bike since last summer, and my saddle is built more for light weight and durability than it is for comfort, so my ass wasn’t exactly enjoying the experience. Aside from that it wasn’t too taxing – the trail is paved and doesn’t go up and down too much. Once you’re on it you can just coast along, stopping occasionaly to negotiate barriers or other people.
We went on for a bit longer than I really wanted to – finally turning back at Norris Green, which I think was around eight miles, so sixteen miles there and back was a little bit more than my butt had been expecting to endure that day.
It was good fun, though – Elisha seemed to really enjoy herself, which is the important thing, and Fliss seemed to like getting some exersize, which is a bonus. We even stopped on the way back for a mini-picnic of sorts, so Elisha could have a bit of a run around a field. It was a welcome rest for my butt, too.
Hopefully we’ll get to do this kind of thing quite often during the summer, as it’s a good way of getting us all outdoors without having to push a pram around. Thanks for making it possible, Aunty Mary. 🙂
