Biking in Seattle

I didn't get to bike as much as I hoped in Seattle even though Alex's father Kim graciously loaned me his mountain bike and Abby let us borrow the bike we bought her for her birthday. There were just too many other interesting things to do. Seattle is very bike friendly. Lois and I rode about 23 miles one of the first days on the Burke Gilman trail. It's a rails to trail path.  It supposedly went a good bit further but we were about done biking for the day.

One highlight on the bike though was successfully biking up Dravus Street. Alex had introduced it to us the night before in the car. He said locals know it as Hill of Death. I know this is a little hard to see in the accompanying picture but this is my iPhone with the app that acts as a level showing the slope on the street as 16.5%.  It probably wasn't quite that steep averaged over a foot. I biked up with the mountain bike in the "granny" ring in front and the lowest in back. It felt like I was ratcheting up the hill as each down stroke took me a bit farther up and I nearly stopped in between each stroke. I wished for my road bike several times but I don't think I would have made it up this hill as it isn't geared low enough.

The additional picture to the right shows a garage opening on to the street. You can't see from the picture that there is a bit of distance between the street and the garage door but it still looked like a challenge to get a car in there.

Going down I felt like if I braked hard I would fly right over the handlebars so I was pretty cautious and didn't let it gain much speed. The steepest part was only one or two short blocks long but the whole hill was at least 6 or 8 blocks.  I might not have been able to control the bike on the nearly level cross streets if I let it to to full speed.