John Vogel and Nancy Sathre-Vogel are school teachers and long time cycling nuts who met on a bike trip through India. Their twin sons, Davy and Daryl, spent their first 7 years in Ethiopa, Malaysia and Thailand, before the family headed back to Boise, Idaho to “settle down” in Nancy’s childhood home. But the wanderlust returned and the Vogels found a way to satisfy their love of adventure as a family of four. When they boys were eight, they loaded up a triple tandem bike for John and the boys and a single bike for Nancy… and biked all over North America, logging over 15, 000 km in a single year. They stayed in cheap motels, crashed with generous strangers, but mostly camped in the family tent.
Last summer, when Davy and Daryl were ten, the family decided to embark on an epic journey from the top of North America to the bottom of South America, a two and a half year road trip. The Vogels are documenting every step of their 30 month journey, on their blog and through video posts, sharing their adventures with Reach the World, a non-profit organization that helps kids in under-funded, urban schools use the web to see parts of the planet that are normally far beyond their reach.
With 41 years of combined classroom teaching under their belts, John and Nancy are “roadschooling” their own kids, who will spend grades 5, 6, and 7 as cycling nomads . Read more...
Yahoo!‘s Purple Pedals Project is an effort to get people to share their adventures via a fleet of photo-snapping purple bicycles given out to different people in different cities around the world. This summer, Yahoo! gave Bunch a Purple Pedals bike to ride around our hometown of Toronto. So what kinds of images did Bunch’s bike, Purple Shutter, capture? When you click through the Flickr photo stream, you get a neat mix of action shots (a bike’s-eye-view of a busy street), artistic blurs (Is that a bike rack or a backhoe?), and wonderfully candid photos of the people and places a family encounters on an urban outing. Ultimately, the types of photos are as different as the families who took Purple Shutter for a ride. We asked these families to write about their Purple Shutter adventures and pick their favourite photo highlights: Read more...
In a fitting turn of events, a member of local band The Bicycles helped Bunch out by dropping Purple Shutter at the home of Jim Creeggan and Anna Hill. Jim is a member of another local Toronto band, The Barenaked Ladies and he, Anna and their kids Chloe and Finn are a car-free family, whose primary mode of transportation are their bikes. Point in fact, we saw Anna pedaling well into her pregnancy with Chloe and what’s even more commendable, in the depths of the Toronto winter. Read more...
Fu-Gen Theatre’s Nina Aquino, Richard Lee, and their daughter Eponine (who is named after a character in Les Miz), are a car free family. A bike is their preferred mode of transportation. So they were excited when Purple Shutter showed up at their door! On this particular day, Richard took Eponine for a spin near Cherry Beach and shared his story with us:
A while back Purple Shutter paid a visit to Parent Central editor Brandie Weikle and her son Cameron in their Bloor West Neighbourhood. Without hesitation, Brandie knew what their mission was: dessert before dinner! So, they quickly set off on an exciting adventure to find the perfect cookie. Here’s their story:
Last week I got a great email from Rebecca Brown, the woman behind Bunch Family, the company that puts on groovy family-friendly parties like the Bunch Family Dance Party, the Bunch Family Salon, and other events that help us feel a little less like the lame-ass soccer moms and dads that we’ve become.
The BMX Bike Park that’s just west of my Toronto neighbourhood in front of the crazy sci-fi arches of Wallace Emerson Community Centre (est. 1979) is a magical fairyland, if you are a little kid whose training wheels just came off.
The park attracts tons of skilled teenage Read more...
