Hooray, 30 Days of Biking is back with a September round again! Not as big as April, 2016 will be (SO SAVE THE DATE), but still lots of people adding #30daysofbiking comments and photos to Twitter and Instagram.

My first three days were off to a slow start, but that’s part of the fun of 30 Days of Biking–any bike ride counts, even an 11:59pm spin through the kitchen in pajamas.

September 1
Dentist and orthodontist day in Issaquah, 20 miles from home. We usually bike and bus there, but today we walked and bused. We did this once before, two months ago, because the kids were in the process of moving up a size in bikes and both wanted to use the middle bike (of course!). So it seemed easiest to just leave the bikes at home. This was kind of the opposite: in the past two months the kids have both embraced the bigger bikes, but we’ve also been riding a lot more on our three separate bikes so they both wanted to ride their own bikes to the bus–or they both wanted to sit on my old mamabike to the bus. I couldn’t get one of each. And I didn’t want to ride three separate bikes to the bus and use up all three bus slots…or risk being met with a bus with at least one bike already on the rack.

So we walked 0.8 miles to the first bus, two blocks between buses, and then 0.8 miles to the dentist. Then we walked 0.8 miles to lunch…where we were met by friends who biked over with their toddler in a trailer (yay!). And to get home: one block to the first bus, one block to the second bus, and two blocks home.

We don’t do a lot of walking so it feels awfully slow, but it’s wonderful not needing to worry about having two (or three) bus slots open on the buses. Not needing to lift the bikes up on the rack is nice, too. As is boarding the bus all together, though it’s also fun for the kids to get to board ahead of me while I wrangle the bikes up on the rack. Oh, and we can take the escalator out of the downtown transit tunnel rather than wait for the elevator. Maybe this will help ensure these kids won’t go through a phase of being terrified of escalators like me.

So my biking happened at 11pm in my pajamas, up and down the street in front of our house. I elected to take out my minibike, Gran Furismo (he’s covered in blue fur).

I don’t think I’ve mentioned Gran Furismo or his brethren on the blog before. They moved into our basement last winter, when a friend in the neighborhood was giving away his freak bike fleet. Here’s a better shot of Gran Furismo:

September 2
Yesterday we took it easy near home with a small excursion to the schoolyard two blocks away. I rode my skateboard and the kids rode their bikes. We did some wheel swapping at school and I took a few laps on my eight-year old’s Islabikes Beinn 24. It was pretty fun, even with the saddle all the way down (and he really could stand to raise it a bit…we’ve kept it low while he was getting used to the new, bigger bike, but he’s ready to ride with it at the proper height now). It’s so fun I’m tempted to start a crew of moms riding their kids’ bikes. Still working on the catchy name (ideas welcome).

September 3
Today we returned to the dentist (a couple fillings for one and a couple sealants for the other this time–boo!), again just by foot and bus. So today’s bike ride was a spin up and down the street on my six-year old’s Islabikes Beinn 20 Large, just to keep mixing things up.

I’m a little curious if anyone has used a different bike for each of the 30 days of the month for any round of 30 Days of Biking. I don’t think I’ll attempt to do that, but maybe I’ll try to ride every bike in the household over the course of the month. That could be a fun theme for this round. Not that a theme is required, but I like to have one…though generally my theme reveals itself near the end of the month, so this could all change.

Tomorrow and the rest of the days of the month will most definitely feature longer bike rides. Three days of barely riding have left me feeling lethargic.

Happy 30DoB, all!