Yes, I am always biking home from wherever I’ve been, since that’s what I do, travel by bike. But sometimes (okay, maybe often), I do what James and I joking call “take a bike ride on my bike ride home.” Which is to say, take the long way home. Frequently a totally ridiculous long way home. A such-a-long-way-home that it’s not really a commute anymore, more of a bike-ride-for-the-sake-of-adventure way home.
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(frequently I am enticed into longer rides by wanting to see things, like our various mountains, from different places — this is Wy’East, or Mt Hood, from the Columbia River Slough much further west than I would strictly speaking need to bike to get home)
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This is a good antidote to getting bored of my commute, since it means I am frequently throwing new things into it.
My ride to work (which I do about once or twice a week these days), is about 14 miles one-way. Since I’m riding from SE Portland to Vancouver, WA, there are several ways I can travel of a basically similar distance that take advantage of different parts of the Portland street grid. I favor some at certain times and some at others, but I would say there are about three flavors of way I choose between when I come directly or mostly directly home from work.
Oddly enough, I almost 100% of the time take the same way to work; I guess I’m not as creative in the morning? Or maybe I just always want to start by seeing the Willamette River.
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(or maybe I want to see the buds and blossoms along the river;) If it’s spring)
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Point being, depending on my mood, I can take several equally pragmatic ways to work or home again. Or to wherever I’m going, be it work or otherwise.
But then there are the days where I end up in places that are not even remotely pragmatic, like a birding stop at Kelly Point Park, or a ride along the Willamette River way down to Milwaukie, or who knows what else, all for the sheer enjoyment of being on my bike on a nice day. Or maybe sometimes not a “nice” day, but a day where I just want to keep pedaling regardless.
Those are the “bike ride on my way home from my bike ride” kind of days. And I love them, and they make me feel like a sneak-attack adventurer in the middle of normal life, and they are great.
There is no officially attested native name for Mt. Hood, and no evidence that Wy’east is anything other than a made up name created by a white fellow for a work of romantic fiction published in 1890.
Here’s a conversational sort of article from The Columbian about the situation:
https://www.columbian.com/news/2017/jun/11/anthropologist-dispelling-myths-with-plankhouse-talk/
I personally think it’s better to stick with Mt. Hood, since Wy’East is just completely made up white settler nonsense pretending to be a native word.