Bicycles, particularly unusual ones, are expensive things and if this plan was going to come to fruition I needed to work out how it was going to be paid for. I had established a "bike fund" and into this fund I put the money from the sale of the Orbit tandem, two Brompton folding bikes, two VOLT e-Bikes and finally I sold a touring bike. All this cleared up a lot of space, it clarified things in my mind and most importantly it gave us a good fund to work with as we set our future direction.

It had always been a massive frustration to us that it was never convenient or easy for us to transport our tandem, even with the Tandem Swing roof rack, as it was a large heavy thing to get up onto the roof of the car no matter how much I tried to dress it up and to convince myself otherwise. On top of this it was essentially impossible to incorporate tandem riding into our motor-homing trips which was a great shame, essentially the ideal cycling arrangement for the future would tick the following boxes:

  • Must be comfortable to ride and not induce sciatica in either rider.
  • Must be reasonably convenient to transport by car to allow a wider range of cycling areas to be enjoyed.
  • Must be possible to transport in our motorhome garage, or on a motorhome rack.
  • Must be reasonably convenient to store at home.
  • Ideally could be ridden by one rider.
  • Must provide good carrying capacity.

The Pino semi-recumbent tandem seemed to satisfy these requirements as the frame could be dismantled into two pieces but reviewing YouTube videos this did seem to be a bit of a performance and also seemed to leave you with two pieces that would still be quite awkward to transport. I didn't want to spend a fortune and still not be happy with our setup but I carried on looking.

I had been keeping an eye on the secondhand market and I did spot two quite new Pinos for sale and made some enquiries about one of them and I came quite close to putting in an offer. At this stage we still hadn't ridden a Pino so all this was going to be a shot in the dark but it just didn't feel right to me to be taking up the time and expertise of a business if what I was looking at doing was to possibly buy secondhand, it just didn't seem fair.

As time has been passing I had continued to discuss my thoughts with Lorena who was by now coming round to the idea and dare I say it was even sounding quite enthusiastic!

And then everything changed, thankfully before I made an offer on the Pino I was looking at, when I spotted this on YouTube:


My first reaction was that I had had an unbelievably narrow escape by not buying one of the secondhand Pinos I had been looking at which would have required me to split the frame and rebuild it every time I wanted to transport or store it, again the advice of Igor from Rent-a-Pino was invaluable. The new 2021 Pino (released late 2020) had a telescopic front boom and a telescopic main frame, in addition a Shimano Steps option was available, depending on the depth of one's pockets.

It was looking as if I now knew where I wanted to be....