Go Local with Bike & Tour Websites

Indie travelers strive to get beneath the surface of destination, beyond the middling attractions the tourism bureau is paid to promote. They also want to connect with locals. A couple of new websites are here to help.

* Liquid (www.doliquid.com) - Connects bicycle owners with visitors who want to rent a bike. Owners submit photos and details of their sweet chariot; Liquid verifies the offer, and then posts it online. Visitors search by location, bike size and type, then deal with the owner directly to rent their wheels. It's like AirBnB for pedalers! So far Liquid is in the US only, but it plans to branch out to 400 cities in 80 countries.

* Gidsy (www.gidsy.com) - “Gids” is the Dutch word for “guide.” The service matches locals who lead offbeat activities - say, mushroom hunting in an Austrian forest or snowboarding on a Washington mountain - with visitors looking for novel experiences of a place. Tour/activity prices are cheap compared to their professionally led counterparts. For details, read this article about a Gidsy guy who leads a food scavenging tour through New York City. Ashton Kutcher is an investor in the Berlin-based company (he also invests in AirBnB, by the way).

Bike Love

Bicycling Magazine recently ranked Chicago as the 10th most bike friendly city in America (Minneapolis, Portland, Boulder and Seattle are top of the heap). The city does have a lot of two-wheeled love, whether its cyclists wielding DIY mallets for bike polo or bundling on another jacket for snow biking. The Chicago Cycling Club sponsors three to four free rides per week, and Chicago Critical Mass takes over downtown the last Friday of every month. Bike the Drive is coming up May 30, when Lake Shore Drive chucks cars in favor of pedal power. Perhaps the best bike idea yet is from the folks at Fork and the Road: tours where you ride from small ethnic restaurant to restaurant, leaving a trail of pierogies, tacos and falafel in your wake.

Puppet Bike Party

You can't help but smile when Clover the Bunny (an aspiring starlet) and Chock the Kitty (a blues musician and dice-rolling gambler) dance together under the glittering disco ball. Which is why many people refer to the Puppet Bike as a "happiness maker."

The Puppet Bike, in case you haven't had the pleasure to meet it downtown or in Andersonville, is a mobile theater atop a jolly red tricycle. A lone puppeteer parks it at varying street corners and puts on a show with Clover, Chock and five other hand-operated critters. Solar panels power the boom box that blasts jazzy music. Out front kids wave, jump and dance around in circles - just like the puppets.

Each year the Peter Jones Gallery hosts the two-day Puppet Bike Extravaganza with bands, costumes and revelry. The bash rages this Friday and Saturday, Feb. 27 and 28; admission is by donation.