It's not quite Knight-Errant

but I'm working on becoming a Bike-Errant! Last week was Ride Your Bike to Work week. So most of the week, I was trying to use my bike for shorter errands that I'd normally drive...about 1-2 mile trips, say, to a local Chinese buffet, or the drug store, grocery store, liquor store or hardware store. On Friday, I stepped it up and actually biked to work (~6.5 miles each way). It took roughly a half hour...I need more practice, but I really only had one driver look pissy at me. So that's okay. And then on Sunday, I explored a new way to get to 95th & Quivira, which is about 4.5 miles away. This route was really great, so I think it'll open up whole new avenues (no pun intended) for exploration and errand-running.

Now, what I'd love to see is some website out there that brings community to bike-errantry. It should be based on the Google Maps API, and allow users to highlight sections of road to color-code (or weight) them with some sort of code about how bike friendly it is. Maybe green means very bike friendly, yellow means not bike unfriendly, and red means bike unfriendly. Maybe you could even have blue highlighting to indicate pedestrian-friendliness. Then -- and this is the best part -- the route-finding functionality + the friendliness weighting could be combined to find the most bike-friendly route between point A and point B. A user could enter hir comfort on street riding or maybe indicate a preference between "shortest route" and "safest route" and the search would map the best bike route! It'd be so cool. And the neatest part is that I'm sure Google's got it all published already!

I mean, it also helped that gas has now officially hit an all-time high, but really, I'm enjoying the exercise and environment-friendly behavior just as much.

I am so hardcore. :-p