Misses Driving Daisy

Em swore she'd never ride Daisy and never have fun doing so even if I made her.

The she lost her cell phone, and the teentrum she threw over that lost her all other media until she gave Daisy a chance.



Oh, and I found her cell phone, the one she was so certain she'd last seen in the car was in the couch she'd tole me, defiantly and angrily, she'd thoroughly searched already.

Okay, you're riding Daisy, kid. And you'll like it.



Because for serious, anyone rides on this contraption and can ward off happiness, I'll call an ambulance because something is whack.

People kept complimenting us on the 'bike.' But Daisy isn't a 'bike,' I guess she's a pedal car, maybe an HPV (human powered vehicle). I think parallel tandem recumbent trike about sums it up.

I was able to more or less keep up on foot, except when the grade tended to downhill. My neighborhood is almost entirely flat, but Daisy makes a 1% grade seem like a hill. Going up, you crank for all you're worth to move about as fast as the old man with a walker in the opening credits of Office Space. Then going down it you get up enough speed to make the Flintstones braking system a tad dicey.

Em learned the hard way something Pastor Kurt told me about when he went over Daisy's 'issues' with me. Bury the steering to the right and it gets stuck, you have to get up and unstick it. She also learned about the tendency of that front chain to drop and that chain grease is nasty and hard to get off your hands.



And at one point I thought Mo had broken the seat on her side. It'd been listing to starboard and when Em dropped the chain and pulled into a driveway to fix it, Mo flopped over backward. I pictured a difficult repair or expensive replacement part, but it turns out the lever that locks the seat position had slipped to the unlocked and her butt had slid it all the way forward.

I do need to shore up the stability of that seat, I think. I think a rod tethering the two seats would do a lot for that.

We made it around the block and up and down our street a couple times. Em rode stoker with me, drove while Mo rode stoker, ran camera while me and Mo rode, etc. A neighborhood kid asked if he could copilot, and who am I to deny him?



As me and Adam (this kid I don't know from Adam) pedaled down the street, he said, 'This is a blast!'

Misses Driving Daisy from Chixulub on Vimeo.

He did seem disappointed when, with daylight fading and Daisy going under the tarp, he asked if we had anything to do. When I asked for clarification of this question, I learned he meant did we have a Wii, an XBox, etc. Nope, sorry kid, not even a working DVD player at the moment...



Em worried some about if a peer might see her, but not enough to discourage her from the pilot's seat. She's fourteen and has still to realize you don't need to account for the opinions of people who don't really matter.