When I started biking in Greensboro, I never really thought it would turn into an almost daily activity once I moved back to Chapel Hill. After all, I had my running community, my knee would surely recover fast (right?), and I didn’t really like to ride in traffic. But it didn’t take long for me to discover several things:

Traffic isn’t as scary as I thought, as long as I ride safely, use my eyes, obey (most of) the rules, and pick ride times and destinations sensibly.

My (almost) daily route now is through our neighborhood to the University Mall area, where I connect to a greenway at the Community Center that takes me all the way into some neighborhoods in Carrboro, where I come out a hop and a skip from Gray Squirrel Coffee Company.

Gray Squirrel is a place with lots of memories for me over the past half decade. I first started going to Gray Squirrel regularly shortly before the pandemic started in 2020. In the Fall of 2021, when they were opened back up and just being careful about it, I started to walk our dog there daily for love and attention from baristas and neighbors.

When we moved to our new house across town in Chapel Hill proper, I quickly began to miss my mornings at the Squirrel. But thanks to my newfound interest in biking, it wasn’t long before I realized that I could easily bike there and back in just about an hour total, and suddenly the Gray Squirrel was back in my life on an almost daily basis, and suddenly Carrboro didn’t feel so far away anymore…