Family and Bikes
Hi, I’m Amberlee and I am a Customer Service Representative for Leeds. Here is a little snipit about myself. I was born and raised in Utah. I did live in Southern California for my first 5 years of marriage, so I was able to get out of the “Utah Bubble” for a bit. When it comes to Utah you couldn’t ask for a more beautiful place to live. We get all four seasons here. We have lakes for the summer activities and the mountains for the winter sports. We have all the colors in the fall and the true beauty comes out in the Spring. The cost of living here is super reasonable too. I have given up way too much information and now you’re all going to want to move here. It’s awful actually and if we don’t get more snow soon I won’t even be lying!
As an adult I was kind of forced into biking. When my husband and I found out we were pregnant with twins we were so naive. We had no other kids and had no idea what we were up against having two babies at one time. My husband was working and going to school and we lived in Southern California at the time. There was not a lot of family around so I was kind of solo with two infants. I quickly found out that taking the babies outside made them less fussy. So, of course, I had the double stroller with a very reliable walking partner. My neighbors called me the “Walking Girl.” I literally went on walks to 2 – 4 times a day just to maintain my sanity. Luckily I lived in Southern California with the awesome year round weather and not Northern Utah’s cold temps! Then my sweet husband purchased me a comfort bike and a kid bike trailer. I was ecstatic to say the least. He and I both used it to haul the kids on the local neighborhood trails. Like I said, I was forced into biking. Once the twins got old enough we had them biking too. We had my son on a bike with no training wheels a week before his third birthday.
Fast forward to today and we are a very avid biking family now with three kids. The traditional 10 year wedding anniversary gift is tin or aluminum. What did my sweet husband get me for our tenth wedding anniversary? You got it, an aluminum hard tail mountain bike. We live in the mountains and I’m not pulling kids in a trailer anymore. Once again, I was forced into biking. I tried mountain biking on a local trail years before with my husband and hated every second of it. Then a couple years later I went with some girlfriends and loved it and still do to this day. I do get out with my husband and we do have fun except when there is a technical section he’ll stop and turn around to see how I handle the section and every time I freeze and can’t get through it because he is watching me. It makes me so angry. He would never be able to teach me how to golf, we would kill each other!
We just recently went down to Moab, Utah and did some family friendly riding that all five of us could handle. My youngest is 7 and she is pretty hardcore when it comes to biking. She has competed in numerous mountain bike and cyclocross races as a little shredder. My oldest daughter is not a very competitive person but put her on a mountain bike and she places first place 9 out of 10 times. My son, now this kid just has a smile on his face to be there with his friends. Unfortunately for him there is a lot of competition in his bracket.
As parents we have had our kids in soccer, basketball and other team sports. What we have found is with biking we can do it as a family and as a team. Biking is a sport and activity you can use for your whole life. As a customer service representative I talk to a lot of customers that are biking for all sorts of reasons. My favorites are the older aged folks getting back out on a bike when they haven’t done it in years. What a joy it brings to them to get to ride with their families. One of my most favorite and memorable rides was an anniversary trip my husband and I took to Zion National Park. Since they have closed the park to public transportation the only way to get through the park is by shuttle bus or by bike. It was the most beautiful sight to have Zions National Park practically to ourselves, other than a shuttle bus passing every now and a again. I highly recommend riding your bike through Zions. I was not forced to bike on this occasion I thoroughly enjoyed it!
