30 Days of Biking 2021 – day 20

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

Big fun bikey day! During lunch I met Maria to kill her hill with her. It doesn’t count towards my own hill killerz challenge and I’ll always hate hills, but I really like getting to see Maria, even if we’re at opposite ends of the hill and just wave in passing.

At 3:30 I hooked up my trailer and met Kath at a hardware store to pick up her new outdoor set. She’s got a cargo bike and could totally carry it, but I love that she doesn’t realize that and lets me tote big things around for her. The four chairs weren’t in yet so we’ll get to do a repeat, but today I got to carry a table and umbrella, and even better: see Kath for the first time in forever. The portion of the trip spent carrying the furniture was less than a mile and all downhill, but the entire trip to and from home was 7.5 miles so it felt like a big deal.

And finally I met my friends for an after work ride. Normally I like doing a lot of research on my routes and testing them before dragging friends along, but in the parking lot outside the dentist I Google mapped our way to a dropped pin near Powell Butte and it worked OK! I’ve mountain biked up Powell Butte from the south once and that was nice, but we were on road bikes and needed a paved way up and it was steep! I don’t want to go back anytime soon. However, I very much liked the pipes exhibit outside the visitors center. And we got an excellent view of Mt. Hood. I wish a bus went up there so I could bring my kids. I wouldn’t subject them to the steep climb on bikes nor would I want to lock our bikes at the bottom of the hill and hike up the trails (because I don’t think the bikes would be safe parked along the Springwater Corridor Trail) or walk up the paved street because there’s no sidewalk.