Tandeming

Mimi and I ride the tandem all over: to school, the grocery store, the lake, and to her friends’ houses for play dates. This morning, we cruised downtown at 10:00 AM, to catch one of the Seattle International Film Festival films, this one, an upcoming major Hollywood release, the animated “Surf’s Up.” (I liked it pretty well; on the quality continuum for kid’s movies, with “Toy Story II” and “Monsters, Inc.” at the high end and “Stuart Little” or “The Rugrats Do Paris” at the bottom, this was squarely in the Pixar’s best territory; I even cried a little, which is pretty good in the realm of evoking responses for computer-generated images on a flat screen.)

After the show, we rode crosstown to Folklife, Seattles’ annual outdoor celebration of music inspired by the “Beverly Hillbillies.” I’m all for mandolins and washboards as percussion, but I have to say that the appeal of them amongst thousands of people eating various foods on a stick is somewhat lost on me. We stuck around long enough to see a fine selection of teenage musical entrepreneurs with their trumpets, saxophones, and/or violins and instrument cases for donations set before them and then rode the roller coaster in Seattle Center, which was the last straw for me.

The tandem then brought us home, up over Capitol Hill, and even though it was one of those times where I seemed to be doing both the captaining and the stoking, we arrived home no worse for wear and never having had to worry about parking or paying for it in all the crowded downtown areas we visited.

I’m surprised that we rarely if ever see anyone else using a tandem for daily riding like this. Mostly, the only tandem riders I ever come across are couples in spandex out for a training ride on the Burke-Gilman trail.

Just another example of how weird her dad is Mimi will be telling her therapist one day.