Hi April, bye April! Last month was another 30 Days of Biking, during which thousands of people (5721 this year!) pledged to bike every day in April and share their adventures online with the hashtag #30daysofbiking.

This year I biked 503 miles over the course of the month (per the Ride Report app conveniently and automatically tallying my rides) and while I didn’t blog each day like I did last year for 30 Days of Biking 2018, I mostly kept up on Twitter and Instagram.

It was a pretty rough month, with a kid down with a cold and then his first seasonal allergies (which I experienced for the first time last year so I can really commiserate) and some other stressors, but even so it was probably the first April during which there were no down days during which we didn’t need to bike somewhere and had to think up an excuse to ride. One of the fun things about 30 Days of Biking is the 11:59 p.m. driveway pajama ride to hit the quota.

My mileage was quite a bit down from normal given the fact that my sick kid was the one who goes to school 4.5 miles away (the other kid’s school is only one mile away) plus he was away for a week of Outdoor School. For comparison, March saw 734 miles and 30DoB 2018 saw 602.

Note: It’s not about the miles! I don’t normally tally my miles so it’s fun to add ’em up just in April. The real beauty in utility cycling is those who can do it all with less than 100 miles a month.

We mostly just did the regular stuff this month: school, taekwondo, grocery shopping, but there were a couple special highlights:

April 8th, while my 12-year old was away at Outdoor School, my 9-year old and I went multi-modal and took the light rail to Beaverton and biked to a trampoline place. Much of our trip was on the Fanno Creek Trail, but the roads on either side were huge and we had to stick to the sidewalk a lot. But we’ll be back, including the cheap and fresh sushi lunch spot in the strip mall next to the trampoline place.

April 13th was the Ladd’s 500! Like last year, I didn’t have the kids this day so I could stay all day. Last year I had trouble deciding which bike to bring so I decided to bring them all: cargo bike, single speed, folding bike, and longboard skateboard. And last year I was on Armando’s 10-person team and did a few rounds of 30-lap stints. This was a bit different and I brought only two bikes, planning to only ride one (my single speed) the whole time, but swap to my Straggler if I got tired. The Straggler came along to pull my cargo trailer full of pop-up tent, camp chairs, snacks, and single speed. This year was mostly different in that I was on a two-person team with Joe “Metal Cowboy” Kurmaskie so we each rode 50 miles in 25-lap increments. It was a lot harder than last year, but really fun! Last year I did a bunch of bonus laps that didn’t count towards my team toting two photographers and one podcaster around on my cargo bike. This year I carried relay organizer Barstow around in my cargo trailer once I was done. That was just as fun as all the racing! See a bunch of great photos by Eric Thornburg here.

April 21st was the “opening day” of Kidical Mass season with our annual Easter Ride. This ride is always huge and this year over 300 people came! The ride is pretty far from home so I had originally planned to take a regular bike and pedal two miles to light rail and then catch two trains to get there because it was a bit far for the kids. But in the end I went solo so I could bike the too-big-for-light-rail bike the whole way there. This felt like cheating since I didn’t need to deal with the train nor did I have to figure out how to carry the Kidical Mass PDX banner with my regular bike.

April 26th we made our school PTA movie night a “bike-in” movie night and went early to hand out prizes to anyone who biked, scooted, or walked over. It was really fun with 25 people biking over for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. We can’t wait to do this again–movie night and 30 Days of Biking.