School of hard knocks

 I couldn't contain my excitement on finding a program that was such a perfect fit to my concept that I hadn't heard of it before.  It was exactly what I was looking for and felt that it would be a perfect complement to our existing Slow Roll group that I was hoping for the same excitement when proposing the program to local retirement residences.  

I had first hand information on the conditions and activities in a local upscale retirement residence since my mother-in-law had been a resident of one for a few years since moving there first for respite care after her husband was discharged from hospital and then for convalescence after major surgery.  I knew that their activities director was in charge of activities and that there were many (prior to COVID) that involved bringing in entertainers, barbeques, outings to the mall and restaurants etc.  So naturally I thought this would be a great fit.  But I was wrong as the reception was luke warm at best.  I was surprised and although I felt that they had the budget to invest in such a vehicle, they may have balked at the amount of organizing that they felt it needed.  Even calls to the head office of Chartwell went unreturned.

Giving my head a shake, I thought there must be a better way of organizing this program and started working on designing a trishaw cab that would be detachable from the bicycle for a fraction of the cost of a complete trishaw.  I envisioned that if the retirement residence could invest a couple of thousand dollars in the passenger carrier that could then be hooked up to an e-bike with appropriate qualities.  With such a system, the cab would remain property of the home and the pilots could ride their own bikes to the home where they could attach it to the cab.  For pilots who signed on for regular rides, we could subsidize their bikes. It would need to have a detachable front wheel and a rear or mid drive e-assist with head tube bolt braze-ons that would secure the bike to the cab in a fashion that it could easily and quickly be detached. I found that the RAD bikes as well as EUNORAU produced ideal models that would work with this concept.  I created a proposal for such a design and approached several engineering colleges to design the parts without success.

Eventually, COVID hit and plans were put on hold as all hope of interacting with senior residences would have to wait until the pandemic had simmered down.  No one expected it to last over two years but that gave me enough time to continue researching alternatives to the expensive European trishaws.

It was by chance I noticed on a cargo bicycle group on Facebook that a new start-up company out of Seattle was importing high quality cargo bicycles from China for less than half the cost of their European counterparts.  The owner of the company 'Baere Bikes' seemed approachable and so I forwarded him my proposal to see if his company in China would be interested in developing the idea into a working model.  Surprisingly, he let me know that, although he was not in the business of importing trishaws, his supplier actually manufactured one and he was prepared to import one on our behalf at cost even offering to underwrite the shipping costs to his warehouse if we could wait until it could come over in one of his containers.  However, we would be responsible for shipping from Seattle and assembling and testing the trishaw once received.  This was a great deal since it worked out to less than the cost of the European models.

I had to confirm with Jane Williams-Hu who was the Canadian CWA representative that the trishaw we were importing from China would qualify for the program.  When I sent her the details she surprised me saying that it had been copied from one of her designs Ami, that was developed specifically for Canadian use and sold by her husband's company Cycles Toussiant.

I decided to pay the costs upfront personally to get the trishaw to our shores in the hope that once here, we could drum up enough interest to have donations and participation fees cover those costs.  It was still going to be several thousand dollars out of my pocket up front.  A Facebook fundraiser with the goal of raising $6,000 was off to such a slow start that I had to review the goal and slash it in half to $3,000 to cover the bare minimum costs.  We did not get to even have of the revised goal eventually realizing just under $1250 after costs deducted by Facebook.  It was not going well but that was not going to dampen my enthusiasm for the project.

As the summer wore on and we got busy with other projects like our Streetsville Slow Roll rides and the annual Ancestor's Trail Hike which took place after at 2 year hiatus, we got a welcome surprise when the trishaw battery arrived directly from the factory as the lithium batteries could not be shipped with the vehicle.  Soon after I received a message from Baere Bikes with a photograph of the crate containing my trishaw being packed into the container.  They gave us a container tracking number which we traced to being loaded onto the container ship Wan Hai 309 and tracked it across the Pacific first docking in the Oakland port of San Francisco and then up the coast to Seattle where it was offloaded.  After being unpacked at Baere Bikes warehouse, we received pictures of it prior to being shipped to Mississauga.