Use my bike for transportation purposes

I is a run I make all the time in my car. The bank is only about a mile away but its a sort of treacherous stretch to be on two wheels. I am looking forward to moving to a quieter safer neighborhood and biking everywhere. I dont think I can mark this off until then. But I’m making great progress on this.

Tomorrow is Bike to Work day. My husband is thinking about biking the 25-30 miles to our office which is over the Santa Monica mountains. I think that is craziness but he has always had a more adventurous streak in him in that regard. I have 2 other friends that plan on making equally as long trips tomorrow too. I may ride around the block and back to feel like I participated too. Ha! I have serious admiration for them though. I am slowly getting there.

So I finally did my first attempt at this. My husband has gotten really into his bikes. He went out and bought a road bike after a critical mass ride. Then after visiting my parents one day he got a free old Schwinn Road bike and turned it into a fixed gear bike. Since getting his fixed gear together he has been riding it everywhere he can run small errands. Tuesday I finally joined him. It was probably a good 8 mile round trip. It felt good to be out and doing something in the middle of the day when I was waiting to get feedback back from a client. I want to try and do this more. I just need to be more brave on streets around here with no bike paths.

He rode his bike 17 min there and 23 min back home to get to where we met for dinner last night. I was shocked when I arrived with some friends at the restaurant and found out he was pedaling his way over. Now I feel sort of jealous that I cant have this sort of initiative.

I’ve got a mile radius around my house where I can go to the store, my bank and library as well as get to great hiking trails. I think it would be better if I tried to start using my bicycle to get to these places or walk there. My main concern has been that doing so will take time out of my day that I can be doing other things. Perhaps I need to think of it in terms of how I will get my daily 20 min exercise and not worry about the extra time it will take. The only down side is that the streets I will have to commute down and quite major and not bicycle friendly.

Anyway I need to try and find my bike lock and figure out if I can put some sort of basket on my bike for carrying books or groceries and the like.