It’s April! That means 30 Days of Biking and biking every day and hopefully blogging about it each day.

I visited my hill killerz hill at lunchtime and for the first time the house with the driveway skatepark (plus other skatepark features in the front yard) didn’t have a car parked in it! Yes, I rode it. And no, kids, you shouldn’t ride in other people’s driveway skateparks.

I really like my hill. It feels like a slice out of yore. The tallllllllllest plum trees rained tiny white petals down on me near the bottom of the hill. Not that my own neighborhood is all that citified, but all our fruit trees are much younger and shorter. Everything here has been growing for a long, long time. The bottom of my hill ends near a creek and is flanked by a feed store and a stone supplier–the sorts of businesses that get displaced in other parts of Portland. I jockeyed for position with a forklift moving between the two businesses on a couple of my laps today. I guess that’s more industrial than rural and old-timey, but there’s more interesting stuff going on than just up the hill where I live.

Later on I headed down the street to my friend’s place of business for a post-work loop. We had planned on a repeat of Monday’s cemetery/Mt. Tabor double climb (“the usual”), but we were intrigued by a side road and ended up climbing to Council Crest (“Portland’s highest publicly accessible point”). This route didn’t have a horribly long and steep hill like the last time we ascended Council Crest (which was also my first time up ever) so that was nice! However, there was a long, gradual descent in the middle, and it’s a shame to lose so much altitude in the middle of a long climb. Even so, I liked today’s route more, but I bet there’s an even better route up.

I can’t believe how easy it has been to be on my bike every day for two weeks now. It’s really different than a year ago when I couldn’t bring myself to do much of anything.

Today’s miles: 29.6
Total April miles: 290