Bike to Farm

Who needs a car to shop in Westwood? Thanks to perfect weather and my wife taking our other two kids to a birthday party, I was able to try something I've thought about for awhile. I took my son to Powisset Farm, then Roche Bros., to pick up our weekly produce and do a little grocery shopping--on my bike.

I have a mountain bike with a bike seat and a Burley solo trailer. Normally, the trailer would be hauling our youngest child, but a trailer can also be used to haul groceries. Also, given the winding, blind-curve nature of the road to the farm, I felt a little more comfortable with only groceries in that trailer and my son right behind me on the bike.

First, we rode about 2 miles up Gay Street and stopped at the Sovereign Bank on High Street. The ride up Gay Street is fairly easy, except for the hill up from Milk Street. The traffic on a Saturday afternoon is not bad, but I know at other times, it can be a bit scarier. The trailer has a flag which creates quite a visible contraption that I'm sure drew the attention of motorists. Midday is also a good time for a ride like this as morning and afternoon have blinding sunlight that makes it harder for drivers to see suprises like our procession.

Jason had a great time, but couldn't wait to get to the farm. Riding down Hartford Street, UP High Rock to Powisset Street, then UP, UP through Hale Reservation to the farm was a beautiful ride and a great workout for Dad.

Powisset/Dover Road, the back way from Dover to Westwood, is a great cycling route and, like South Street from Dover to Needham, is a well-traveled area bike route. While the road is winding and narrow at times, I believe most locals expect to be careful and proceed with at least a modicum of caution around the blind curves.

Once we arrived at the farm, I collected our weekly share--peppers, fennel, winter squash, potatoes, chard, collard greens, and more hot peppers than I know what to do with from the pick-yer-own fields. While we were there, we met another family who had biked over from Dover with their daughter on a trail-a-bike. Last week, I ran into a friend from Dedham who was loading her produce into her bike panniers. I think many of us who are "into" the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) thing share the same kind of ideas--how can we live more sustainably, how can we slow down and experience life a little more authentically? Granted, 90% of the time, we are going to be pulling up in our minivan, so this trip was an exceptional sort of "luxury," but it was fun.

Jason checked to make sure the bags of produce were secure in the trailer, and then we donned our helmets and set out for the trip home--much easier downhill towing that load of food! I had a grocery list of other things we needed from Roche Bros., so I decided why not make a complete bike trip of it and swing by the Islington store on the way home.

I went back down Gay Street--you could not pay me enough money to take the bike trailer down Clapboardtree although that would be more direct. Pine Lane, on a Saturday afternoon, was not quite the cut-through racetrack it is during the week, so getting to the store was pretty easy. But things got a bit crazy once I arrived in the parking lot on a very busy Saturday afternoon.

There is no really good place to park a bike...and riding around in the parking lot is probably more dangerous than all the riding on the road I had done so far. Finally, I decided to just leave the bike and trailer directly in front of the store without locking it up or anything.

Inside the store it was a madhouse. All the checkout lanes were full and the deli counter was like a Wall Street trading pit. Plus, it is always challenging to navigate a grocery with a 2-year old--but Jason was pretty patient on this day.

Of course, this was the day I needed to pick up sugar and flour (5-lb bags), so by the time I added my three bags of groceries to the trailer, I think I was pulling the equivalent of a teenager back there instead of the 22-lb baby. But the only real difficulty I had on the bike was getting out of the parking lot and through the light at Islington Center.

With a trailer and a kid balanced on the bike, it's a little harder to move as "nimbly" as I might when I'm riding my fixed gear bike to work in Boston...so I made my way to the light and forced my way into a left turn onto School Street against the oncoming traffic that generously stopped for me. If I did this on a regular basis, I'd probably figure out a better way to do that--to use the sidewalk and crosswalk and probably leave the kid at home.

It was a fun experiment. I feel like I learned a few things:

• A bike trip like this, with kids, can be safe. Cars whizzing down Gay Street at 50mph may scare you, but if you plan accordingly, make yourself very visible, and ride sensibly, there is no reason you can't bike across town for errands.
• You can make the time to do it. The entire trip involved less than an hour on the bike and covered 11 miles. Of course in a car, we'd be at the farm in 10 minutes and from home to Roche Bros. in 2. But that really works out to about a half hour total, so an hour is not that bad--plus you get the benefit of the exercise.
• You need good "kid karma." I was lucky that many of the unpredictable (more accurately, "unschedulable") things that happen with 2-year olds did not derail my grand plan. But we did not stand in the deli line on this day!

In my post a couple days ago about walking and cycling in Westwood, I envisioned a future where trips like this are commonplace. There are not specific things along the route that I would say are preventing anyone from doing this today, but I think it's a whole way of looking at things that would change from making the town more pedestrian and cyclist friendly. It is very easy to just hop in a car and go and, especially with kids along, that's what we are going to be doing most of the time. But we can look for opportunities like this beautiful Saturday afternoon to try something a little different.