Baylands Bike Ride

Damon works just half a block away from a large park with athletic fields, playgrounds, and picnic areas. It 's at the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, and also has 105 acres of wetlands preserve, with paved and gravel paths traveling next to and through the salt marshes. Damon regularly goes for walks there during his lunch breaks where he sees all kinds of seabirds, turtles, lizards, snakes, and lots and lots of snails.

When the girls were on spring break, Damon took all of our bikes with him to work in the back of his truck. At lunchtime, the kids and I drove over to the park and met him for a noontime bike ride. It was a beautiful sunny day, but very windy. There were times when we really had to fight against the wind. It was a bit tiring, but everyone did a great job.

Holly was clearly tired out by the ride. . . 

. . . or at least lulled to sleep. She was OUT.

 

The Cycle Begins

One of my favorite things about our new home is sidewalks. While in most ways White Salmon--despite its lack of sidewalks--was infinitely more walkable (everything was close enough and traffic was light), we've found Milpitas to be more bikeable. The sidewalks create clear and safe boundaries for the kids, and there's a park with a pedestrian/bike-only entrance and completely paved loop path at the end of our street. Also, it's much flatter here; some of those steep hills in White Salmon and Bingen were just not conducive to biking--at least not at my level. So, really, maybe it's not the sidewalks that I like so much, but rather all of the things that go together to making it so easy to ride bikes here.

I've long told Damon that I want us to be a biking family. I love riding bikes but have found it difficult to do much of it since having children. I never was never ready to commit to the purchase or physical strain of a trailer, and even if I had a couple kids in the trailer, the older ones weren't ready to ride along where we could go. But, now, the time is here. Since moving to California, Gunnar has become completely independent on his bike (when we got here, he could ride a 2-wheeler, but still had trouble starting up on his own), meaning there's just one family member who'd be left out on a bike ride.

So, a few weeks ago I finally did what I'd been contemplating for months: I bought a bike seat for my bike for carrying Holly. We installed it immediately and took it out for a spin right away. Holly's first words: "This is fun!"  And I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to ride with the extra weight. I'd anticipated a period of balance-adjustments, but really didn't notice much of a difference at all.  Away we went!

We take advantage of the bike lanes, too (meaning not just sidewalks). Twice now, Adah, Maggie, and I have ridden over a mile along a somewhat busy road to a Saturday morning farmers' market. In these photos, we were about to embark on our second trip, this time taking Holly along.  It's a bit of a trek for the girls on their one-speed bikes, but they make it and then help carry home our purchases in their backpacks. I'm so proud of them, and they also feel such accomplishment for going on such a big ride and a family errand.

I'm not quite ready to take Gunnar out on the busy streets, and he was pretty disappointed that we were leaving him home with Daddy that Saturday morning.

 

Still, we have managed at least one whole-family bike ride through neighborhoods and parks, and I'm trying to take Holly and Gunnar on frequent rides, even if it's just to the park down the block and then around the loop in the park a few times. We even rode bikes to take Adah to school two times during a week of early releases (meaning we had extra time to pick her up via bike and then come home and get in the car to go get Maggie). Our next step is to get a bike rack for the car so that we can actually take our bikes to other places where we can find longer trails.

We're beginning to be that biking family I've always hoped we'd be!

Mosier Tunnel Bike Ride

A few Saturdays ago I took Adah and Maggie on their first real bike ride.  We live in a neighborhood with no sidewalks and our house is at a T intersection one house away from a semi-busy street, meaning there are lots of turning cars coming and going on our street. Combine that with having two younger siblings and you get two good bike riders who don't have much opportunity for safe bicycling near our house.  We usually have to load up the bikes in the back of the truck and drive to our church parking lot in order to give the kids some good, safe bike-riding time.

Saturday afternoon Damon stayed home with Gunnar and Holly and the girls and I put our bikes in the back of the truck and headed east through the Gorge to the tiny town of Mosier.  There's a fantastic paved trail that climbs up to go along parallel to the Columbia River, and then it goes through two tunnels. I think the whole thing used to be the highway before the interstate was built.  I had only been there once before on a date with Damon where we had walked the path, but I was pretty excited to ride it with Adah and Maggie.
My hopes for an excellent ride were looking a bit dim shortly after we began.  It was a little steep at first, and Adah was saying she was already getting tired.  Mags was having real trouble with her shoes. The straps kept coming undone about every 5 yards and she'd have to stop to fix them.  Eventually I tried to secure them with the only thing in my backpack that seemed promising: Band-Aids from the first aid kit.

 

The Band-Aids didn't solve the problem, as I'd hoped, but it did keep the straps a little more secure.

With all of the stop-and-start caused by the shoe trouble and both girls struggling with the hill, I readjusted my expectations for the ride. Once you crest the hill you can leave the main path to go to a look-out for an awesome view up and down the Columbia Gorge. I decided that that would be our goal, and not the tunnels.  However, as we turned off the main path for the lookout, I could see that the tunnels weren't much further and that at least going to look at them would be realistic. Whether or not we would ride through them would be another matter, since they go downhill and returning to the car would require an uphill climb that I wasn't sure the girls could handle.

First, though, to the look-out.  (Fortunately there were some other bicyclists there to take a picture of the three of us; they were riding a tandem bike.)

The views of the river and Gorge were awesome.  It was a beautiful day and I was, once again, so grateful to live in such a gorgeous place.  (Adah was happy to be munching on her Saltines; she loves those crackers.)

 

Looking east:

Looking west:

 

We did decide to ride through the tunnels. The girls were so excited once they saw them.  There are two, and the second one immediately follows the first, but is constructed differently.  The photo below is looking down the second tunnel. Way at the bottom is one of the girls on her bike. You can look out on the river (through trees) to the right.

 

We turned around after going through the second tunnel.  There was a short downhill stretch before the path started to climb back up.  I instructed the girls to get up as much speed as they could and to just keep going. They actually did really well.  Adah kept on chugging and made it through both tunnels in great time.  Maggie chose to stop at the break between the two tunnels, which meant I could get this fun shot of her: (Isn't the tunnel cool? It looks like you're inside a giant barrel.)

 

And there's her silhouette at the mouth of the east end of the tunnel:

 

I was so proud of the girls for making it back through the tunnels. Once we got through there it was a short way to the crest of the hill and then it was all downhill from there.  They LOVED that part of it. We got going pretty fast and it was such a great reward of ease and speed after all the pedaling. I realized later that it was really the first time they'd ridden their bikes down a real hill!  That sounds so sad, but, as I explained, we do most of our bike riding in our church parking lot.  We definitely need to do more bike rides like this. Gunnar will even be able to join us pretty soon. He learned to ride a two-wheeler at the beginning of April.  Hooray for bike rides!