30 Days of Biking day 1: April foul

Welcome to 30 Days of Biking: Year 2! It’s the third round of the event, but only my second time participating. Last time was big fun and I expect this round to follow suit. In addition to biking each day, I’m going to keep track of my [paltry] mileage. I’ll also time how long it takes me to get places so as I transition from a fair-weather cyclist to a proper Seattle urban cyclist, I’ll have a playbook.

I had a great itinerary planned for today: we were going to ride four miles to a playdate in Crown Hill. I know this goes against my rule of avoiding destinations with “Hill” and “Heights” in their names and I have no idea if I would have made it there without walking the bike. Now that I have my new zoo route, this is what I had planned:

Note: I don’t live at Rancho Bravo. I just wish I did! And it makes a nice impersonal “home” coordinate.

But it was raining like crazy and the kids were both coughing and had no interest in getting on the bike. I was ready to do the whole ride just to see if we could make it and then come straight home, rather than expose our little friends to their germies. Instead I eventually rallied the troops to drive to Ikea. I didn’t see any bikes at the Ikea bike rack (but maybe the employees can bring their bikes inside). My most exciting purchases were a 59-cent big blue shopping bag and 99-cent small blue shopping bag that I’ll use to protect our seats when we have to park in the rain. I lost my last set of three mismatched plastic bags so I’m looking forward to our snazzy new uniform look.

I finally got us out on the bike in the afternoon. We just rode a half mile to the Wallingford Center to meet a couple buddies at the Izilla Toys marble track. The bags worked great–first for keeping my messenger bag dry on the way over and then for keeping the seats dry while we were inside. Of course it wasn’t all perfect–after a couple hours indoors I realized I hadn’t turned the bike lights off, and I forgot gloves for the baby (his Newt Suit doesn’t have pockets) and me so our hands got really cold on the short ride home.