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Hi everyone, my husband and our 8 year old son are keen mountain bikers but with my youngest making an arrival we haven't been able to be given any good advice on how to include him. He is 13 months now and we don't know whether a trailer or a seat would be best. We have tried a trailer when we hired one a couple of months ago and it seemed so unstable I ended up strapping his car seat in there to give him more support. With that in mind surely a seat would be better?
Any advice on what you have used/ you think the best option would be would be bril.
Thanks!
Just get yourself a bike seat for the wee'un and hit the trails... I always recommend the Yepp Mini, having tried a couple of different models, but the Weeride always gets good reviews too.
My youngest has just turned 18 months, he's been in a Yepp seat since 7 months going to daycare, and has been off-road several times starting at about 13 months. Whoever's riding with him on board will have to moderate their style a lot, you have to work hard to smooth out bumps and dips, pick the smoothest lines and so on, but it's still fun. I think the furthest we've been off-road is about 12km of green/red trails, we stopped when the five-year-old got tired.
If the youngest hasn't been on a bike before you might want to do a few regular short rides first to give his neck time to get used to the weight of a helmet, which is exacerbated by the roughness of trails.
Get a self following drone and put him in a hammock tied to it.
Just borrowed a Weeride to give it a go with our 2 year old. Only requirements for fitting is you need to have a bit of seat post showing and also some head tube that extends above the top tube. Once fitted is very secure.
I've been properly impressed with it, little un loves it and works great both on and off road.
All trailers are not equal we have 14mth twins and a croozer trailer, had a baby sling in there and good straps that holds then securely. New Croozers or Chariots have suspension too.
Last week with the babies
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A few years ago with their brothers...
Chariot, tunable suspension, its excellent
I had a trailer but when number one got too big to fit in there with number two, I moved to a tag along and a weeride. Number two loves the weeride.
I'm not by any means an authority on trailers at that young age though - I don't think mine went in until a bit older and I still worried about necks when they fell asleep in it (mine is a basic model I inherited from a friend that had lived in Holland).
Car seat strapped into a Burley trailer when they are very little, that way you can keep them warm / out the sun and they can fall asleep. Falling asleep in any seat does not look comfy. Trailer has the added bonus that you can carry all the associated baby junk which seems to grow with every outing. Then Yepp mini as it doubles up as a high chair with the attachable legs option which you can carry in the trailer with the rest of the junk!
I have a weeride and a 2 seat chariot. They are both great, however, I only ever take the kids properly offroad in the chariot - it has suspension. I wouldn't fancy being strapped solidly to a bike's top tube and then ridden down anything but the smoothest path & I'm fairly sure my kids wouldn't either. (H, 2, turns around and wags her finger at me when I drop down kerbs when she's in the weeride).
In the chariot all I hear is screams of laughter, giggles and "weeeeee!"s no matter how many beans i give it. I bought a maxle adapter for it recently (jeesus fe&^ing how much???) so now I can drag it along behind my alpine 160, which must be a truly terifying proposition.
On smooth paths the weeride is awesome & both kids have been known to fall asleep on the lecturn bit. Watch out for it being cold up front though.
13mths is fine for both options. I probably wouldn't even use a hammock for the for the trailer at that age
hopefully mac-ride will have got over their production issues.
I had one of the first kickstarter mac-rides and it was great until they issued a recall...
We've got the full shooting match - Burley trailer, Himax rear seat and a front mounted WeeRide.
The Burley DeeLite trailer has been the most used, it's great. It keeps them dry and warm regardless of the weather and makes taking the essentials easy. Our daughter was in it from 6 months and we've done loads of rides big and small since then. There is an extra padded seat thing to help with stability for 6months - 1yr.
The back mounted seat is great for shorter rides. I use our for going to child miders, the shops or round the park. I couldn't ride the same stuff with it I do with the trailer. The WeeRide was good when she was small but it's PITA unless it suits the geometry of your bike.
I've been using a Yepp mini since my son was a year old. He loves it. The great thing is you can get multiple stem mounts and use on multiple bikes with the click of a button. Check out athleteshop - that's where I got mine.
Chariot/Thule trailers have the option of an "infant sling" too - think it's meant to really little ones when you're using it as a pushchair but we kept on using it for a while longer with #1 as she was pretty small for her age.
Then there's an insert for those bigger than the sling but too small for the regular straps - gives lots of head/neck support and sits them a bit higher. Still using that at 2 1/2 years.
The suspension helps a lot too.
We've had good success with cheap Hamax seats off Gumtree.
We found though on both bikes we had to purchase the extra high riser fixings. Still worked out around £30 second hand.
Nothing better than getting out on the bikes with the little 'uns.
We've had good success with cheap Hamax seats off Gumtree.
We found though on both bikes we had to purchase the extra high riser fixings. Still worked out around £30 second hand.
Nothing better than getting out on the bikes with the little 'uns.