Yeah, I know…this is pretty late on a Tuesday for a “Green Tuesday” article, but I made it under the wire!

I hope everyone did something green and fun for their Earth Day celebrating — our family got to spend the day riding bicycles!

Early this morning, my wife decided that we should celebrate Earth Day by going entirely car-free. This is a pretty regular day for me…I only drive my car about once every two weeks or so, on average (I really need to get rid of that thing!), but it is rare that Leah and I both have a day off together, and since she works odd hours, she often drives her car to work and doesn’t get to ride her bike that much during the rest of the week.

So, we decided to do everything by bike today, and we had a lot of fun with it. First, we took our son to school by bike, something I do most days of the week but rarely together with Leah.

Then, we went grocery shopping. 5 bags of groceries fit beautifully in her Basil panniers and my Wald fold-out grocery baskets attached to my “patented grocery gitter“:

When it was time to pick up our son from school, I raced home to switch out bikes for the Redline R530. My son’s trailer hitch doesn’t clamp properly on the narrow chainstays of the grocery gitter, but the Redline’s beefy chainstay is perfect for it.

We decided that we’d stop by the local lake on the way home (Lake Roberta in the historic Hampton Terrace neighborhood of central Tampa) to feed the ducks and turtles with a sack of stale bread.

Here come the ducks!

The lake is absolutely full of turtles, too…from cooters to sliders to really big softshell turtles and probably a snapper or two. In the evenings, the softshell turtles are more active, but they must hide during the day because we only saw a couple off in the distance. This one is either a cooter or a slider…I can never remember which is which:

All in all, we had a wonderful day — didn’t fire up the car once, got a little exercise and got to check out the neighborhood “wildlife”. Good times!

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