A tour

 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.)

A small dog

Life goes on, kids get big and heavy, also strong enough to turn their own pedals.  I'm going to have to admit that in the hilly edges of Oslo, a person might think twice about rolling out the 32+ kilo trike when a bike at half the kilos will do the job.  I can haul a good deal of food on two wheels.

But we have a dog now, at 6kg and "small" he fits really nice in a Nihola box, and surprise surprise its not a bad way to take the dog out past boring car-filled places to somewhere he can stretch his legs.  Quite relaxing on a trike really, easy to start and stop.  I can just go slowly along and he runs around sniffing, then back up on board when we come to somewhere overrun with cars.  I would say the speed of a Nihola is well suited to giving a dog of this size a nice gentle run.  Our particular dog seems well aware that getting squashed would be bad, and he likes to run in the proximity of the rear wheel, but at a safe distance.

We have a foam mattress section in the bottom of the box, wrapped in a towel.  We take a roll-up leash and lock at at a length so that it hangs from his neck when he stands up, to remind him where he is supposed to be.  He's not totally wild about bumpy roads or sudden changes in direction, but also we haven't done this too many times yet.

quite a big fancy truck for Norway, which does not impress the small dog