Well, the kids are rather too big to sit in a cargo bike (or trike) and get pedaled around now, so mostly one nihola goes down to the store, and mostly the other hides in the garage. There is however one remaining additional use: transporting small dogs. Small dogs do have legs, but we have ambitious goals.
Three people and two small dogs went out on a tour a couple weeks ago, myself on a nihola and two others on fatbikes. (Those are very comfortable on gravel, BTW.) The forests north of Oslo have a lot of paths, although unfortunately its hard to make round trips on paths which are easy to ride on. I have tried a certain number of uncomfortable paths with a nihola, to be clear, but thats not a long-distance option. There was one feasible gravel road I could see, about 70km.
(Actually there is another also, a bit over 40km round trip to "the queens view" but we've done that a number of times. I could write about that some day.)
I have used Google maps to put together a representation of what we did. So there you have it, 68km with 950m of climb, almost all gravel, on hills ranging up to 540m over sea level, done on a nihola by a regular guy. We carried water, food and a good set of tools in two Ortlieb bags on the nihola. The dogs had a combined weight around 15kg, but walked on all the significant climbs.
The uphills were work, even the downhills took time. On one of those, I set a personal record for highest speed on two wheels with a nihola. Long downhills and corners you see, I felt like there was some mild drifting in the gravel, and so I pushed it a bit. (Didn't try that a second time.)
My advice on nihola tours: just turn the pedals and the kilometers will pass. (It does help to have a quality gearing system installed.)
