Fifth Session: 4th April

I decided to take a trip to One Tree Hill with my flatmate... On the Saturday of the Easter weekend which was probably a bad day to choose... there was the fair going on at Alexandra Park which meant Balmoral/Greenlane Roads were busy!

Oh, excuse the pink rope, if only I had known...
So you could understand why I was quite scared initially to ride on Balmoral/Greenlane. The designated cycle paths definitely made me feel better though - Remember the first entry when I said I was NEVER going to ride on those since they're so narrow! But I realise it's better than nothing. In a sense it is sufficient width... or at least you feel like you, being a cyclist, actually belong somewhere in the public space. For most of my sessions of cycling I feel like I don't belong anywhere, and am either intruding on pedestrian paths, or car space.

One thing I noticed while we were cycling (which I'm not sure whether it's noticeable in the video) was that I had to pedal about twice as much as Linda (my flatmate) to at least even get up to speed due to the smaller size of the wheels on my bike. Oh well... I guess that's more exercise for me!
Here's a snippet of when we get up to the traffic lights... it feels so glorious to move to the front of the line past all those cars!...

I noticed that I did that swervey thing again... probably because I tried to go too fast to get through the traffic lights...

We came to One Tree Hill to get an ice cream and water, and...

came across another fold up bike. Yay a companion!

Here's the three of our bikes together:

I couldn't really identify who's bike the blue one was so didn't get a chance to ask them about cycling unfortunately.
The cycling session was good. Usually takes me about half an hour to walk to One Tree Hill, but cycling allowed us to take about an hour all up to get there, have refreshments, and get back. I didn't end up finding the main road too scary... apart from going back home and having to go uphill. I was afraid of going too slow so just walked that length.