My wife and I took our first ride on our tandem yesterday. It took a while for me to get it to work, since I lacked a stoker stem, and once I found one, I had to fabricate a shim to make it fit.
The next obstacle is terror for my wife. She was very afraid. We knew this going in. She agreed to try it. I heard her breathing and felt the panic, and even my heart palpitated. But after a short while, she learned to relax, and we had a good time. We did ten miles riding on roads and the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail. We stopped in at the Rail Trail Cafe in Rosendale, NY and had lunch, and just then, a gamelan concert was setting up, so we got to enjoy that. Imagine all this in the woods, not near any road but just the trail.
This is a low end tandem, but I'm super pleased with it. It's a Burley Zydeco from about 2002. We were able to climb a very steep hill, one that my wife can't always climb on her single and which I have to work hard to top. This was some work, but we didn't come close to giving up. On the way back, we climbed a long hill, and that was good, too. I think we'll make a good team. We're working out audible and hand signals. It would be nice if the bike had higher gears at the top end. Maybe I'll make that happen one day. It's really easy to spin out in top gear when the going is good. I haven't looked at what ratios the gears are, but top gear might be well over 108 gear inches.
