Saturday’s Ballard Summer Parkways was awesome! We didn’t do the entire 3.3 miles so I can’t speak to the entire event, but what we experienced was terrific. I heard there were bounce houses at both Salmon Bay Park and Loyal Heights Playfield, but the kids were having so much fun at Ballard Commons Park that we stuck there.

Flickr album: Ballard Summer Parkways – 35 photos, 1 video

Here’s the map of the entire event, from SDOT:

We started our day at Ballard Commons Park, one of the five activity hubs and home to the Sustainable Ballard Festival. I set up our kid bike decorating stuff (pinwheels!) at the Family Bike Expo booth. Here’s what Morgan Scherer, Executive Director of Familybike, looks like arriving with all the expo bikes, by the way:

We had a great location, across the 22nd Avenue from the northeast corner of Ballard Commons Park so we were perfectly placed for bike test rides along the 58th St Greenway and situated on the Parkways route. The Family Bike Expo offers test rides of a variety of bikes, as of recently has a balance bike on hand for toddler entertainment, and is a great way to talk to family biking “pros” about anything and everything family biking, including scheduling a family bike rental. More about all that at the Familybike website.

We hung out until 11:30 decorating bikes and helmets and then gathered all the bikey families and brought them through the park to the stage area for the official announcements. Unfortunately I had to follow word of FREE ICE CREAM, but it turns out kid bike parade is the only thing that doesn’t pale in comparison to FREE ICE CREAM. Phew!

And then we led Kidical Mass around the lower loop, through Historic Ballard. We had 61 bikes along which is pretty big for a Seattle Kidical Mass, though not as huge as the 200+ during last year’s Ballard Summer Streets/Kidical MASSIVE.

One of our riders got a great video of our ride, posted to his Instagram.

We stayed until the bitter end at Ballard Commons Park where the kids made bird feeders, watched the Bubbleman, over-decorated their bikes, but mostly just biked back and forth along the closed streets.

There’s one more Seattle Summer Parkways–West Seattle Summer Parkways on September 25th. I’ll organize bike decorating and a kid bike parade again (full details coming soon) and then spend the rest of the day volunteering for the Disaster Relief Trials which is the MOST FUN EVENT EVER!