One day, when Sarah was sleeping off a night shift, I schemed to take the kids on multi-modal adventure. I wanted to paddle down the Raquette River from Brown’s Bridge to Postwood Park. The paddling was no problem, but getting back to the car presented a dilemma.

My solution, since asking Otis to drive our other car was out of the question, was to drop off a bike downriver. The car would be quite a ways away, though, and even though the park was abandoned thanks to the pandemic, I didn’t want to leave the kids unsupervised. I scratched my head for a while, trying to figure out how to get two kids on one bike.

My solution was to attach Otis’s tag-along bike to my rack and to attach the trailer to that. Thus was born bike train.