‘Twas our rainiest Thanksgiving Day yet. Here’s the Flickr album of 115 photos, many of them blurry, all of them grey and wet. But our annual Thanksgiving ride is rain or shine so there was never any thought of canceling.
Check out previous rides to see less rainy, more exciting photos:
I wasn’t sure anyone would make it out to join us, but we met with one other family at Gas Works Park for the start and word of another catching up along the way.
Official start-of-ride group shot (my children are both hiding): two adults, three kids, one dog / two longtail cargo bikes, two kid bikes, one balance bike:
While I stopped to load one of my kids and his bike onto my cargo bike, we were joined by three more adults, one tween, one dog / one cycletruck, three regular bikes / one dog trailer:
Our first new bicycle infrastructure this year were the flexiposts protecting the bike lane over the University Bridge:
Despite the weather, we stuck to our schedule and stopped at the little playground at the southeast corner of Lake Union from 11ish to 12ish. And good thing, we were joined by another dad and kid! This made our final tally 11!
11 people: 6 adults, 1 tween, 4 kids, 2 dogs / 1 Surly Big Dummy longtail cargo bike, 1 Xtracycle EdgeRunner longtail cargo bike, 1 Larry vs. Harry Bullitt longjohn cargo bike, 1 cycletruck cargobike, 3 regular bikes, 2 kid bikes, 1 balance bike (the balance biker was off and on), 1 dog trailer.
This year we did ten loops around the Lake Union Park model boat test pond (except for me who did zero so I could take pictures and my seven-year old who raced around 13 times):
And then we enjoyed the other new bicycle infrastructure along our annual route: the Westlake Bikeway!
One other change this year is that the Starbucks in the AGC building was closed for the first time! We stopped for a beat to consider our options while cars streamed through the drive-thru (which wasn’t open to bikes, of course).
I suggested we continue along our way and see if we stumbled upon anything open. Having a warm-up stop is pretty nice, but I was also anxious to get home and start wringing out our wet stuff.
Normally we would have biked under the Fremont Bridge before crossing on the west side for the most kid-friendly route, but my kids were so far ahead they didn’t hear my shouted directions so we strayed a bit from this official route. I guess that’s a hazard of the kid-friendly Westlake Bikeway ;)
We noticed the Fremont Starbucks was open as we stopped next to Yellow Dot Cafe to consider next steps. A phone call revealed the Fremont Caffe Ladro was also open so half the group headed there and half of us continued home.
I was happy to get the kids’ boots on the boot dryer and this was the first time I made use of our HotSnapZ Reusable Hand Warmers. The heat packs are so big that they don’t tuck into gloves or boots easily so we’ll have to do some plotting before we head out in the cold next. They’d work nicely in pockets for passengers, but not sure what to do about pedaling kids.
Happy Thanksgiving!
In keeping with my resolve to just keep pedaling…but also do more, I’ll share how we started our day when normally I would skip posting about this part:
The kids and I spent some time talking about Standing Rock. I told them about our friends who are out there, like Mike who is charging phones with his pedal-powered generator bike. We wanted to choose some items from the Standing Rock Needs You Amazon Wish List, but had trouble getting the shipping to work (which I see has a workaround now) so we gave to the The Official -Sacred Stone Camp GoFundMe instead.
Family Ride 