Cycular Knitting

Somehow I’ve become a cyclist. Here I am, at the age of 50, having not regularly ridden a bicycle since before my teens, and now I have my first ever shiny new bike!

I have to say we did a trial run first with a second hand  ’70s vintage Raleigh Stowaway folding bicycle bought on eBay last year. I needed to have a low step-through (none of these uni-sex cross bars for me!), and something fully adjustable to cater for the assortment of injuries I’ve gathered over the years. I also needed to gain a lot of confidence – I’ve got spectacularly awful balance problems  at times which can (when I get an MS flare up) mean me toppling over every time I turn my head , so I needed to be in as much control over my fate as possible. But, much to my surprise, after a few weeks practise I was ready to upgrade.

So I’m now the proud owner of a Malvern Star ‘Bayside’ hybrid, and it’s working out very well. The bigger wheels (27″ as opposed to the Raleigh’s 20″ or  22″ish) mean I expend much less energy to cover the same distance, and last weekend we did my longest trip to date – the 30km Capital City Trail around Melbourne, with an extra 4km detour added on.  The ride starts at Flinders Street Station, goes along Southbank and Birrarung Marr through Richmond & Burnley, following the banks of the Yarra river all the way. Sometimes even on the river, as they’ve done a sort of floating boardwalk/cycle path  in places. Then onto Hawthorn and Collingwood (through the children’s farm) and up towards Yarra Bend and Dights Falls. It was from here that we took a detour to The Fairfield Boathouse, parked our bikes and then devoured the most enormous afternoon tea of scones & cream and iced coffees (and I thought cycling would help me shed some kilos. How wrong was I !) We then picked up the Merri Creek to Rushal, and rode back into Melbourne where we’d parked at the University. There’s no doubt, riding around Melbourne on a bike gives you access and views that you never get to see in your regular commute. Another trip we’d done was from Caulfield out along to the coast, up the Bay to Port Melbourne and back to Caulfield via the Elwood Canal. There’s another little world to be found among the backwaters of the city and suburbs, which is usually lost to those us who are in a hurry to get from A to B by the quickest route possible. We’ve also done a bike trail from Eltham to Diamond Creek via the aquaduct, and back through to Eltham, which offered some delightful scenery and surroundings.

Now, whilst there are many advantages to riding a bike, there is a huge drawback. You can’t knit and be in proper charge of the machine at the same time. Not that I’ve tried, I hasten to add – though I did once holiday on the Isle of Wight with a boyfriend on a tandem bicycle, which could have provided suitable knitting opportunities.  I just peddled in time at the back, without really having to worry about steering the thing. But this does mean that this new found mode of transport and recreation takes away a great deal of knitting time, and I suspect that could well have been one of my partner’s ulterior motives as he encourages me to pedal on to greater things.