About Us

Who We Are

We are just a couple of middle-aged recreational cyclists who decided to try something different for pedal-powered transportation.

We live in the South Keys area of Ottawa and bike a lot on the local roads in this part of town and also on the NCC parkways on Alcatel Sunday Bikedays.

Since March 2007 we have been living car-free and instead have quite a few types of cycles. Aside from our four-wheeled Rhoades Car, we each have conventional two-wheeled mountain bikes and we each have three-wheeled Catrikes, too. We have also written a diary about our Catriking experiences.

People ask us how we get around in the winter in Ottawa without a car. We don't ride our bikes as the tons of salt the city dumps on the roads would corrode them to dust in a short time. Instead we walk or take the bus. Ottawa is easy to live car-free in.

Why We Bought A Quadracycle

We were looking for a new vehicle that could reduce our dependency on gasoline-powered vehicles.
We do most of our grocery and other shopping on foot all year round, but we find that hauling loads such as a 22 kg box of kitty litter or 120 lbs of bark mulch home isn't practical, although it is darn good exercise! We have looked at various solutions like grocery carts, little red wagons etc and a quadracycle seemed like a better idea.
We wanted to do some camping by bike, but we have never been able to haul the equipment along to make that practical for our needs. Yeah, we know that we can load our mountain bikes up with panniers to carry tents, sleeping bags and other gear as some people do, but we find it difficult to ride with those kind of loads over the hills in our area.
One of us has a disability that episodically causes such things as dizziness and fatigue. This has left us with a couple of summers where we can't bike together at all as a couple. This quadracycle has given us a chance to get out and get some exercise together, even when one of us isn't feeling up to balancing a bicycle or pedaling all day.

Do we plan to ditch our bikes?

Not at all - just as a quadracycle won't do everything a car can do, it also isn't a complete substitute for a bicycle either. So the bikes will stay, when we are able to ride them.

A number of accounts we have read indicate that many quadracycle owners don't put a lot of miles on their bikes after starting on four wheels. In our first year on four wheels we found that is very true, quadracycling is so much fun that the bikes do tend to get dusty!

(For more about this, see two reviews 1 & 2)

Contact us

You can contact us in three ways: