Bear with me while I get caught up on 30 Days of Biking posts. It’s a good problem to have when the blogging about biking every day is so much harder than the actual biking every day.

My father was in town for a couple days and I met him at the Frye Art Museum on First Hill on the 21st. Last time he visited we took the bus there and back, but this time he drove his rental car and I biked. Had it not been 30 Days of Biking I may not have considered biking and caught a ride in his car, but it worked great this way.

I don’t often visit neighborhoods with “Hill” in their names, but I do know the flattest way to most of them. Riding my slow and heavy cargo bike (75 pounds of bike plus 100 pounds of kids) has made things feel easier on regular bikes. And has provided me routes to take with my newest bike…that I realize I haven’t mentioned yet: a single-speed cyclocross bike, the All-City Nature Boy Disc.

I intend to use the bike for racing cyclocross (I only race once or twice a year), but I’m having a lot of fun riding it around town before cyclocross season. It certainly wasn’t the right bike for the day…per my Instagram:

Rain in the forecast, pulled muscle in my back, all-uphill destination, slippery museum floors? Of course that means I should take the fenderless, derailleurless, clipless-shoes-only bike. TGIF! #ibite

Here’s my route to the Frye which is the flattest way from the Burke-Gilman Trail. Interesting to see I got a lot of PRs (“personal record” I think?) on Strava. Apparently my six-year old has been right all this time when he declares he was faster on his single-speed sixteen-inch bike than on his twenty-inch geared bike.

One more thing:

I swung by Back Alley Bike Repair on my way home (the shop that built this All-City Nature Boy Disc as well as my Surly Straggler) to check out their recent and on-going expansion. That meant I had to ride through downtown to get home. I’ve been avoiding downtown because there has been a lot of construction on 2nd Avenue. Some of it is building construction (where I crashed), but most of it is in the name of making permanent the 2nd Ave pilot bike lanes. The detours were horrible. I’ve seen in Portland first hand and in photos of many other cities that it’s not unreasonable to expect a detour be as good as the original infrastructure. But I was happy to see I could ride the entire way uphill in a protected bike lane. There was still a one-block sudden disappearance of the lane in the downhill direction, just to keep us on our toes.

30 Days of Biking stats:
April 21 miles: 6.1
April 22 miles: 12.6
April cumulative miles: 352.9