Have you ever had that dream where you're not quite flying, but where every step you take carries you a mile across the landscape? Or where you can descend flights of stairs in a single graceful bound?

Riding an ebike is like that.

( Meet Gudrun*. )

It's been five years since I got the sudden wild idea to buy a bike. Since then I've lost 65 pounds, sold my car, reduced my transportation expenses to $75 a month, let my driver's license lapse, and, in a not-entirely-unrelated development, retired1.

( Five Years By Bike, in lists )

As the Rebuilding Center's bumper sticker says, "I love that place ( Read more... )

Thing Two in a Five-Thing Visit To My Favorite Portlandy Things

After our tour a couple of weeks ago around the waterfront, I take you now to a much less glamorous site, not frequented by visitors at all: The Going Street Neighborhood Greenway.

( Going Street )

I've never been able to stick to an "exercise program," (bleh) so changing my transportation mode from passive to active was perhaps the greatest stroke of genius I've ever had.1

For the last four and half years, my daily eight-mile bike commute to and from work has been what gets me off my ass--the only thing. I was a little worried that ( Read more... )

I asked my sis to take some in-context pictures of my newly-festooned bike this evening. A little inadvertent bokeh ensued.


( Read more... )

Productive weekend.

( More power! )

After being an absolutely vile human being yesterday (mood swings of a sort) and kind of hating myself for it, I was grateful to put in twelve hours at work today. Less time to dwell on my vileness ( Read more... )

...it is only a test. If this were the actual end of the world, I would be worried about other things than getting a bag of sugar home without it dissolving in the rain.

It feels a bit world-endy, though. I committed to a car-free way of life on the grounds that Portland's famous bad weather is really just mild, damp and gray--not All-Summer-In-A- ( Read more... )

I spent my lunch hour today with my sister and Mary Stewart, an architect at Alta Planning + Design. Alta is the firm responsible for the bike-share systems in Washington, New York, Minneapolis, a bunch of other US cities, and soon, Portland (yay!).

Through a comment conversation on BikePortland, I was invited to view Alta's array of amazing bike ( Read more... )