My wife Lorena and I have enjoyed cycling for many years, I have been involved in a number of endurance events and I qualified as a cycling coach a number of years ago but I vastly scaled down my coaching activities at about the same time as retiring from the UK National Health Service to spend more time doing other things.

Over the years I have ridden all manner of different bicycles for all manner of different purposes and I have now reached the point where cycling has become something that I very much enjoy as a leisure activity rather than something which has at times, for me, become rather all-consuming. Increasingly I also want to try to incorporate cycling into other activities, in particular traveling in our motorhome.

In the past we have had several motorhomes which have become incrementally larger, currently we own a Hymer B680 which has a spacious garage in which we often carry a Honda PCX 125 scooter which we use to explore from the motorhome, large vehicles can be more trouble than they are worth when exploring the countryside!

Lorena and I have had a great deal of enjoyment over the years riding several "conventional" tandems (Dawes and Orbit) both here in the UK and over in Mallorca where, until recently, we have cycled regularly until that was stopped by The Coronavirus Pandemic. Our regular mode of transport is a Nissan X-Trail and we have a "Tandem Swing" carrier mounted on roof bars which we used to transport the Orbit tandem.

Sadly as time went by riding our tandem ceased to be the pleasure it once was . This was primarily brought about by Lorena being diagnosed with a large prolapsed lumbar intervertebral disc which required surgery. The surgery was partially effective but the long term outcome was that riding a tandem almost invariably resulted in Lorena suffering from agonising sciatica which quite simply took away all the pleasure of riding a conventional tandem.

Sadly, as things could not be made better no matter what we tried, we reluctantly took the decision to sell the Orbit tandem which we did in 2020. At the time of writing we still have a Dawes tandem in store in Mallorca but in all honesty we think it is unlikely that we will ride it again. Having sold the Orbit tandem I think Lorena and I had pretty much come to the conclusion, though we avoided talking about it, that our tandem riding days were probably finished.

At some point, I suspect on a previous visit to JD Tandems in Gargrave, I had seen a HASE Pino tandem and I had been intrigued by them, I liked that fact that they were different and I just started to wonder whether a HASE Pino might be a way of getting us back on the road. I started doing some research and received invaluable help and advice from Igor who runs Rent-a-Pino in France, we hope to holiday with Igor in the future.

Time passed and the idea of owning and riding a Pino kept nagging away at me and for some reason simply would not go away. It has to be said that Lorena was less enthusiastic than I was, her main concern was perhaps feeling vulnerable sitting out on the front, I assumed from this that on a regular tandem Lorena regarded me as some kind of human shield!

At this time, with the pandemic raging, it was not a good time to be test riding tandems and many businesses were in any event closed. What I needed to do was to clarify my ideas, rationalise our bicycles, watch the market, and most importantly, work on Lorena......