Riding with Flowers

I rode off today dressed in my new puffy coat for a packed afternoon of errands and a massage with my friend Taya. As I'm riding away from home I think about her and how excited I am to see her for the first time in months. I decide to stop at Fred Meyer for a bouquet a flowers. A little bit of spring in winter.


Once the flowers are firmly attached to my bicycle basket I ride briskly over to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription. Bringing in my flowers and my bag (you have to bring everything in when you do errands by bike), it's hard to jostle everything while I sign my receipt. The clerk was nice enough, though, to use a Sharpie to scribble off the price on the flowers.

Taya's house is on Mt. Tabor so I decide to ride up the steep side, go around the top, and then down to her house. I haven't been doing much fitness riding on my bike and I'm on Reilly, the 46-pounder, so when I see Mt. Tabor looming up ahead I feel a touch of anxiety. Come on legs!

As I get closer I see my friend Leslie barreling her way home from her fitness ride all decked out from head to toe in roadie gear. She looked great. "Leslie, hey!" I said. "How are you?" "Hi Sara! Have a nice ride!" she says as we zoom past each other.

Soon I'm at Mt. Tabor and my legs remember all those hill repeats I did last year. Even on my heavy bike it's no big deal, although I have to unzip my puffy coat all the way. Too hot!

When I get to the top I take a picture of the city just to prove I was up there and then scoot on over to Taya's for my massage. She opens the door as she sees me approaching on my bike and asks, "Do you want me to throw your clothes in the dryer? It's no problem." "Thanks!" I replied, "that would be great!"

My massage was lovely and now I have one more errand. When we went to Whole Foods on Thursday we got blueberries, blackberries and raspberries, but Peter was sick so he couldn't eat them. I decided to go back to Whole Foods to pick up fresh berries for him (and for me too) since he is all better now and ready for some flavor!

It's amazing that with all this riding I am on neighborhood streets the whole time. There's one little tricky part where you have to take a pedestrian bridge with a twisty ramp to get across the freeway, but otherwise it's easy low-traffic streets. They mostly have signals for bikes to cross and painted all over the roads are sharrows. What a pleasure it is to ride a bike in Portland.

Berry shopping done, I hop back on my bike and wind my way through the bike streets and home. 2 hours of errands by bike and a one hour massage (complete with dry clothes at the end) sure makes for a fun afternoon.