Today, we had another first for the kids. These don't happen as often as they used to now that they are older, but this one is pretty significant. Today Chloe got the idea that we should take a bike ride to town. Maybe not such a big deal to some, but we've never tried it. I was never really sure about Ryan being able to negotiate streets with traffic. We've always done our bike rides on dedicated bike paths or just in our little neighborhood. So, we decided to give it a go. We got the bikes down, filled the tires, found the bike lock, grabbed the backpacks and headed to the library. It's actually all down hill from here to town and only about 2.5 miles to the library so the going was very easy.
Bend is well known for our roundabouts and we have two between here and there. They were designed so that experienced cyclists can "take" the road to go through them, but inexperienced cyclists can get on the sidewalk (there's actually a special little ramp just for bicycles to enter the sidewalk) to take the pedestrian crossings. The two main roads we took both have nice sized bike lanes and the traffic speed is about 30 mph. Well, I needn't have worried. Ryan did just fine. It took about 10 minutes to get there and closer to 20 to get back because of the hills to go up.
I think we'll do it again sometime!