Love is ... bike riding together

"Not only are you out in the fresh air and the sunshine ... but we get toots, we get waves, we get people talking to us - strangers, friends, neighbours.'' John Darnley

Once, visitors used to come for miles just to chat with Avis Darnley.

But as a disease melted away the muscles in her jaw and throat, left her wheelchair bound, and stole her ability to speak and move, life got smaller.

Most days Avis Darnley had her front room, her television, and her husband John Darnley.

You can get angry at life, John Darnley said on Friday, but you need to move past it.

In his case, he put his wife, with Parkinson’s disease, on the handlebars of his bike and they got on with living.

The former mechanic, living on the Kapiti Coast north of Wellington, has created a modified e-bike that allows his wife to roll on to the handlebars in her wheelchair and enjoy the great outdoors while he pedals. The couple have toured Waikanae and headed north and south alongside State Highway 1 on a new pathway built with the $630 million Kapiti expressway.

John Darnley said the idea came after he started trying to think of ways to get some exercise, and free his wife from the house.

‘‘I thought: I wonder if I could put the wheelchair on the front of the bike; so I started to do things.’’

After scouring the internet he came up with the idea of modifying three-wheeled bikes - like the old ice cream, or butcher’s bikes.

Instead of a chiller box on the front, he could put Avis Darnley and her wheelchair there.

The couple have been married for nearly 44 years, and the Parkinson’s diagnosis came 11 years ago, after she had a fall.

They thought it might be the degenerative condition after checking ‘‘Mr Google’’.

The specialist took one look at Avis Darnley and said ‘‘you’ve got Parkinson’s’’.

The disease was not going to stop, it gets ‘‘worse and worse’’, John Darnley said.

Eventually, he took his cycling idea to Levin’s Southend Cycles, where staff modified an electric three-wheeler with a frame that would hold Avis Darnley’s special wheelchair. To date their longest trip together has been a 6-hour jaunt to Paekakariki and back.

‘‘Not only are you out in the fresh air and the sunshine ... but we get toots, we get waves, we get people talking to us - strangers, friends, neighbours. Avis is part of that conversation.’’

On Thursday the pair biked the about 10 kilometre return trip to the supermarket in the morning, then made a 12km return trip to Paraparaumu in the afternoon.

The first time he rolled down the street with his wife, she loved it, he said. He knew from her eyes and her face.

And even though she now mostly communicates without words, it seems the most important ones are the last to go.

Every night, when they go to bed, Avis Darnley still says ‘‘I love you’’ to her husband and ‘‘thank you for the day’’.