Because Portland is such a bike friendly city, the Bicycle Transportation Alliance sponsors what they call a “friendly challenge” to encourage people to ride their bikes to work instead of drive. You also get kudos if you walk or take mass transit part of your route if biking the whole thing isn’t very feasible. Luckily for me, I’m about 5 miles from our current office which takes me about 30 minutes to cruise along on my bike. The bike commute challenge goes through the month of September, and as it is September 1st – I rode my bike to work today!

What’s even more exciting about this challenge is that beginning September 21, we’ll be in our new office which is a whopping 1.5 miles from my house. I really have no excuse to ride my bike nearly every day.

There are 4 others in our office who are participating. We’ve all been known to ride our bikes to work on occasion, but I’m glad that we’re all rallying around – or guilting each other – into riding more frequently.