Product Hits and Misses: All Terrain Tricycle

I've just changed one little thing in the sidebar -- Miss Joy is no longer 5 years old, but SIX! Happy birthday, sweetheart!

JoyDad and I decided a while ago that our gift to her would be a new tricycle, more suitable to her size. She'd finally this spring started riding the sweet little trike handed down from her sister, just as she got to the point of outgrowing it!

So we went online to see what we could find for a big-kid trike. We didn't need anything adaptive, mind you. Just something that acknowledged (universal-design-wise) that sometimes bigger kids like to ride trikes too, whatever their neurology. What we found was way outside our price comfort zone. We were not particularly interested in dropping between $150 and $250 on a tricycle, no matter how right-sized and sturdy!

Fortunately our school-district team came up trumps. The PT at Joy's school recommended a trike from Harbor Freight, which has a local store here. The product is called the All-Terrain Tricycle, and the full price is an eminently-reasonable $59.99 (plus shipping if you order online.) Apparently this item goes on sale frequently. We paid $50; as of this writing, it's $42.99 online.

The trike comes partially-assembled in a box:


The assembly instructions were poor, but the assembly was intuitive enough I had no problem. It was half an hour from box-opening to all-cleaned-up, with photography included!



The trike rolls easily, is plenty tough, and has multiple holes for setting the seat closer or further back depending on how long your kiddo's legs are. Downsides are minimal. The seat is a little too tilted for my taste; the front tire assembly pivots all the way around, as opposed to our smaller trike that didn't let you turn it too far; and, the new-materials smell from the tires was so strong we couldn't store the box in the house!

Other than that, though, it's an excellent bang for the money, and I think Joy will do just fine with it. I'll write more about the presentation of the gift, and other birthday-celebratory reflections, after we're back from our traditional Memorial Day pilgrimage to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Happy long weekend, everyone!