Do you ride a MADSEN?

Do you ride a MADSEN? have a photo or two? we would love to hear from you!!  

Thank you so much Ann for giving me this post to share. Ann rides a 2012 MADSEN is a super Mom of 3 a super active girl and a great writer living in Arizona. check out the rest of her story below. 

 

I'm a pretty active person with hiking and biking near the top of my list.  That didn't change once I had kids, but unfortunately since my husband travels so much for work I just had to be more creative and figure out how to bring all my little people along.  

At first it was easy: with one baby I could still hike and ride quite easily as long as I always remembered to bring diapers.  With two babies I could still hike with one on the back and one on the front for the first six months, and I could ride on quiet roads pulling a double trailer.  With three it got trickier- I could still stroller hike on a small handful of paved trails and old service roads through the forest.  I could still ride a bike too with the addition of a kid bike seat, but I knew it would only buy me a few months.  From day one of the new bike seat my toddlers knees were already pressing into my back, but besides that at this point my four year old could barely squeeze into the trailer next to his baby sister. 
November in Zion National park was our last ride of the season.  I was pretty bummed because I figured it was also probably my last ride on something other than a spin bike for a couple of years.  Even worse we'd recently moved to a new community full of lovely bike paths that I'd pass all the time in my car during my errands around town.  It was like rubbing salt in the wound.  Fortunately by the time Christmas came so did a Madsen Bike- I didn't even wait for the weather to warm back up before I started using it to take the kids to church on Sundays.  
The first thing I noticed was the extreme convenience of getting the kids in an out.  Setting up the trailer and buckling everyone in always took so much time, but now we can all jump in and out so easily that we started stopping along our rides anytime we felt like it, to feed horses, to examine beetles, to scan the pond for that one giant crawdad...  We also started riding a lot more and a lot longer than we ever had before- a dream come true for me.  Since the kids could now see so much more of the scenery (compared to a trailer view) and we could converse easily we started riding for more than an hour or pretty regularly.  Sure by the end I often had to pass out the refined sugar, turn on an audio book, or pretend to be hitting my head on all the overhanging tree branches, but hey, I was back in the saddle again and logging some serious time.  The center of gravity of the Madsen is different, but I got over that pretty quickly and can actually stand up on hills for extra power if needed, and on a certain ditch on one of our regular routes, I've actually gotten air.  So what started as potentially a commuter bike for me has really turned into one of my favorite forms of kid-included outdoor recreation.  
People on the trails often comment on how strong I must be when they see me dragging along all my kids in the bucket, but really riding my Madsen is just about still being able to do some of the things I love the most with the people I love the most.

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