Trailing behind

It's obvious by now that The Gubbins Experiment will now be running in 2010, beyond the end of the 2009 one-year run. Partly, it's the "high score" mentality compelling me: I want to keep it going and see how long it can run for.

But another big advantage is the opportunity to plug the gaps in the experiment that I discovered last year, chiefly situations where, for instance, someone and I do the same A-to-A-via-B trip for my benefit (eg. hauling mulch back to my house) but I do it on a bike and they do it in a car. Those instances initially make my experiment look a little silly because we're doing exactly the same journey and for my benefit.

But it is a good opportunity to make improvements. A great new way to do that finally happened yesterday. My three friends - Bill, Chris, and Thomas - split the cost of a bicycle trailer with me. We bought the biggest model we could find:

It's a Bikes At Work 96A trailer. To quote the manufacturer, it "is designed to carry six waterproof 18 gallon (68 liter) Rubbermaid Roughtote plastic containers (sold separately, but also available locally), each of which can carry two large paper bags of groceries. In addition to groceries, these trailers are useful for carrying things like recyclables, newspapers, ladders, and furniture. This trailer can carry loads up to 300 lbs (136 kg)."

Basically, this thing hauls serious cargo. It will allow me to cut out some of the occasions where someone had to drive around on my behalf. One more step to self-sufficiency.

We assembled the trailer yesterday and the process was captured on videocamera, so here it is [for some reason, part of the video is cut off so double-click the video to open it in Youtube]. Time-lapse affectionados will be happy...