vandopoly: bike ride

Josh and I had such an awesome bike ride on Saturday that I had to blog about it.

I haven’t been that great with riding my bike through the winter. I have no trouble riding into work in the mornings, but I have lots of trouble working up the energy to ride home at night. I’ve managed to easily talk myself out of riding because it gets dark so early, especially since I don’t have proper lights to see (only to be seen) and some areas of the bike path are not lit. Couple that with the fact that I had a nasty spill late in the fall and I can even talk myself out of riding here on the blog!

So, the point is that I’ve been going in to work on weekends to pick up my bike. I usually make an adventure out of it with one kid or both. This past weekend, I went in with just Josh. (Brian and I have been doing more of the divide and conquer approach to parenting lately because it gives us both a break and wonderful quality time with each child.) Because it wasn’t raining, I suggested we bring Josh’s bike as well and try to do a ride somewhere. Josh was very excited about this!

Somewhere ended up being around False Creek. We parked on the south side of the Cambie Bridge. We rode along the sea wall from the Cambie Bridge around Science World. We stopped at the playground near Science World to take a break and play (and gauge whether Josh was ok to continue). When we were ready to get back on our bikes, Josh said he didn’t want to go back yet and he wanted to go “all the way to the big thing with the things coming out of the thing”. That was Joshese for BC Place.

When we got to BC Place, Josh wanted to take a picture (to show Daddy). And along the way back, he wanted to stop a couple of times to take pictures. Just as I’m writing this, I realize that perhaps he wanted to stop so he could take a rest. But whatever his reasons, it didn’t matter. We stopped and took a couple of pictures. We had great conversations - at one point Josh told me that “a humpback whale can ride a bicycle with no legs”. Ha. I can’t imagine what he was picturing in his head! And at one point, we were just riding along and Josh said, “Mommy…”. I said, “What?”, and he said, “I love you.”. And just like that I knew he was having as good a time as I was.

All told, I think the ride was about 5 km. As we got close to our starting point, Josh would stop, get off his bike and walk, claiming his feet were tired. No whining, or complaining; he would walk a bit and then get back on his bike and ride a little further. He was great. It was a perfect way to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon.