Use my bike for transportation purposes

There are so many reasons to ride my bike: health, spending time with my boyfriend, developing a skill. Recently I bought a mint green beach cruiser which I love, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed riding with my boyfriend. We recently took the bikes down to Pinkberry for some frozen yogurt and I really enjoyed using the bike for transportation. This is how biking really helps the environment. It felt so good to know that our trip to Pinkberry did not add to carbon emissions, etc. So especially when I’m down at his place, I would love to use my bike as much as possible.

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.

I can’t do it. It’s just not feasible at this time. I love the idea, but I just live in an area that has too much traffic and is too far from where I need to go.

Walked to and from work on Friday. Not exactly a bike, but it is NOT using a car.

My husband and I rode our bikes to Starbucks. I used my little bike basket to carry paper and pens so that we could think and plan life awhile at the coffee shop. I also dropped a letter off in the mail along the way.

I need to take my 12 year old bike to the shop to get the gears working properly though.

I located a great apartment today only 1.0 miles from my job! And I can reach it by bike through mostly neighborhood roads. I hope the price doesn’t go up during the next two months, and that they will have a vacancy…

The stage is set to accomplish this goal in 2007.

I have a bike, although it’s not a road bike. The perfect opportunity to ride my bike for transportation presented itself while in college, but I never did. My first goal will be to get one of those baskets to make the bike more suitable for carrying things.

I love the sense of security that a bike brings too. If we ever have a serious gas shortage, I can be mobile.