This is “Gwahir the Windlord,” the 2003 Trice (Inspired Cycle Engineering) Micro that I have used for my daily commute for four of the last five years, back and forth to St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. (For one year, I was on a sabbatical in southern France.  While there I rode an M-5 Shockproof recumbent two-wheeler. It was a wonderful bike, but I coming home to New Mexico I was happy to return to the stability of a recumbent trike, which is much more tolerant of abstracted thought and daydreaming while riding.)

The machine’s name comes from a comment made by a friend at the time I bought my first recumbent trike. ”Grant,” he said, “I’ve figured out the secret to middle age. (We were both in our late 40’s.) You have to find your ‘inner wizard.’ I’ve got Yoda. You can have Gandalf.” With that in mind, the Trice XL that I bought soon thereafter became “Shadowfax.” When I later bought the Micro, my son inherited Shadowfax; the appropriate name for the new machine would be obvious to anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings.

My son and I ride our trikes up the hill from our house every morning during the school year. It’s two miles to his high school and another half mile to the small college where I teach. The trip takes me between 14 and 18 minutes uphill, depending on wind direction, weight of whatever I’m carrying and degree of fatigue. The last factor generally creeps upward from Monday to Friday and resets over the weekend. The trip homeward takes about 8 minutes and is a terrific way to cap a day of teaching.

All in all, I have put 7,600 miles on Gwahir, the great majority during my daily commute.

In addition to commuting, my family and I have used our trikes for errands around town and for long-distance touring. In 2003, I rode Shadowfax from our home in Santa Fe to St. John’s College’s sister campus in Annapolis, Maryland. During the summer of 2006, my wife, my son and I rode three trikes — my wife has a Trice-QNT that has no Tolkien-related name — from Santa Fe to Chicago to visit relatives. As a result of that trip, I can testify that parts of Kansas are not as flat as popular opinion may believe.

Grant Franks
Santa Fe, New Mexico