No Trike for this Tyke

I have been searching high, low and futilely for trikes, both on the internet and in stores everywhere.

First, I would like to know if I am the only person in the world to call a tricycle a trike. I mean to say if a bicycle is a bike, why isn't a tricycle a trike? You know, that's the way that I learned it from my parents — trike — but nobody else seems to use the term. Personally, I think it's a winner.

I have been searching for trikes for a certain tyke's birthday — Nikki Dee's in point of fact. For as the weather has warmed up this year, and the kids have wanted to get outdoors, she and we have discovered that ND is too big for her old riding toys. She has a little bike with training wheels that she will eventually graduate to, but at this point she finds it wobbly and not terribly responsive to her pedalling.

Her brother has a trike that kindalike fits Nikki Dee in a pinch, but it's his, so he isn't zactly anxious to share it too often or for too long.

And so ... and so we have been looking for a trike to suit her. But we can't find one. Anywhere. Well anywhere except Toys R Us, USA. The trouble with that is that we don't live the USA and our Canadian subsidiary doesn't carry those models. Pity that, but we often get short-changed up here in the Canadian wilderness (see Aside Rant, below).

Back in the day, I had a trike, and I am positive that it was big enough for me to ride until I was 7 or so, but 4 seems to be the current cutoff age. Such is progress.

So, the kid is caught in-between. She's not quite ready for the bike, but is too big for her trike, and we can't find one to suit, which is what we wanted to do for her impending birthday. So, we wring our hands and scratch our heads trying to think of an alternative. It's not going well, I'm afeerd.

Aside Rant: Honestly, sometimes you'd think Canada was north of Timbuktu when in reality almost all thirty-four million of us just live with a few hundred miles of a razor-thin, imaginary line separating the two countries. To my everlasting frustration, we repeatedly see this in shipping costs. I will sometimes click on an item advertised on an American website only to find that the company charges an astronomical fee to ship it the extra hundred miles — because that's about how far we are from the border to New York State. Back in Sarnia, we almost lived on the Michigan border and could have swam/swum across if we had so desired, but the very same nonsense applied. Maddening really.