“How are you today, Charlie?” asks my six-year-old daughter Kate as she bounces through the open door of our shed. except out here, she’s not my daughter and i’m not her dad and this isn’t our shed. last fall i became Charlie, the owner of Charlie’s bicycle Shop. in our game, Charlie has a daughter about Kate’s age, but it’s not Kate. they always seem to miss one another when Kate drops by the shop. She stops by quite frequently, sometimes like today for tune-ups and to drink tea—apple cider served in petite flowered pink china.
I pulled our eldest around for a summer in a Chariot bike trailer, but with two babies it somehow became just too much, not too much to pull but just too much to pull together. My tired, almost vintage Gary Fisher mountain bike lay mothballed with a half restored cedar canvas canoe in my neighbor’s barn.
“Whose old bike is that?” Kate asked one day when we were rooting around the barn for spare paddles.
“It’s mine,” i said.
“Why don’t you ride it?
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Why don’t you ride your bike?”
“I don’t know how.”
That night i booked us for a weekend at Lake of Two Rivers campground in Algonquin Park. We weren’t taking canoes…
This article appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Spring 2013. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read the rest here.
