Our 20-mile bike errand route
On a lark, my brother, Jon, stopped by and asked if I wanted to bike to Ikea with him today. Why not? It certainly turned Saturday into an adventure. Transportation is a big part of community — how should we get around our community? Are paved four-lane roads what we want in our community, or sidewalks and landscaping?
Small groups of folks in Portland are focusing on car-free moves — that is, combining bike trailers and people power to move couches and refrigerators across town. This was our small first attempt at moving something normally considered unwieldy, by bike. Is there an irony to biking 20 miles in order to buy products from a huge international corporation that ships many of their products from Sweden? As with everything we are attempting to do here on the Living Skills blog, I think we’re just trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got. As far as I can tell, Ikea is one of the most environmentally conscious furniture companies focusing on flat packaging, and as a European company, uses less toxic chemicals in their manufacturing than their American counterparts.
It may have been an imperfect goal, but the goal of the day was to buy a shelf and bike it back to Jon’s house. We only live 10 blocks apart, so we left from my house. Biking east through the neighborhoods in Southeast Portland is no problem until you get to 82nd St, which a friend of mine once called “The Berlin Wall of Portland”. You must cross 82nd at a light, and only then with great trepidation, and preferably on a designated bike route.
We missed a turn a couple of times, but we managed to make it alright. Our most major missed turn took us into Washington! We ended up on the Glenn Jackson Bridge on I-205, headed into Vancouver. Bike lanes are forgiving, so just when we realized we’d gone off the wrong trail, we stopped and took stock. Looking back where we came, we saw the “Welcome to Oregon” sign. Whoops! Turned the bikes around, and headed back where we came from.
Ikea has plenty of bike parking, and is right off a MAX line, if you find yourself too tired to bike all the way home afterwards.
I have a foodie confession to make: Ikea’s Swedish meatballs. They’re really nothing special, but for some reason I can’t say no to them.
After the usual glue-eyed Ikea trip (including Swedish meatballs), we bungee-corded his shelf boards and my two throw pillows onto his flat front rack. The weight added to the bike definitely made the trip home harder, and the terrain wasn’t really all that challenging. The I-205 bike corridor is hilly, but only moderately so — thank goodness for that. We routed our trip to the sides of all the little dormant volcano hills in east Portland, so we avoided the big hills. Four hours and many bike wheel rotations later, we got back to the house satisfied that we had completed our goal.
Shelf: in hand. First major self-sufficient bike errand: completed.
Jon
