It’s April! That means 30 Days of Biking and biking every day and hopefully blogging about it each day.
What a difference a year makes–I’m still amazed 30 Days of Biking was so easy to do this year after how hard just getting out of bed was last year. Looking back at 2019’s 30 Days of Biking I see I called that a “slow month” with just 503 miles due to a sickly kid. The previous month the school commute + work added up to 734 miles so that was my norm back then, wow. So this year, biking 541 miles this month with nowhere to go is quite the feat.
As always, it’s not about the miles. I still think getting everything done by bike while biking very few miles is the real deal and sets a great example. But I admit I like spending one month of the year tallying my miles and seeing big numbers. In fact, I realized if I rode 13 miles today I could hit 550 for the month, so that’s what I did.
Holgate Trail 
Pipeline Trail 
Elderberry Trail
I’m not spontaneous enough to bike 6.5 miles with no destination and then turn back to hit my 13-mile quota so I routed a test run to Powell Butte, using the Pipeline Trail friends told me about on Instagram. It’s apparently the gentlest way up. I couldn’t tell how to get to the bottom of the Pipeline so I took a different trail on the way up, figuring it’d be easy to figure out Pipeline on the way down. It all worked OK on my road bike (I was testing to see if I could bring my friends on their road bikes, but I don’t think it’s quite that road-bike-friendly), but I’ll be back on my Straggler or my kid’s mountain bike. Even the trail that wasn’t named Pipeline had a pipeline on it, which I found cute.
It seems fitting that I ended the month with a ride on my road bike–it goes to show how much my riding has changed lately. I didn’t even use my cargo bike to pick up school lunches today–I walked! I’m rarely in family biker mode these days and have been thinking about archiving this blog. I’m awfully change averse so it probably won’t happen too soon. And hopefully my kids will humor me with one more ride soon so we have one last ride to write about.
Today’s miles: 14
Total April miles: 551
Family Ride 
Hi! I’ve been following along with your April biking and have been so inspired! You *do* set such a good example! I’ve been jumping on my bike to run little errands just to get on my bike every day. I just learned about Hill Killerz from this blog. And I did my first family bike camping trip years ago back in Seattle when you organized a Bainbridge ride! I hope that even if you archived this blog, you would start a new one. :)
Aw, thank you! This is so nice to read. I think I’ll probably revive an old blog and it’ll end up being mostly bike stuff :)