Walkability

My posts are all about walking lately.  And here goes another one.

My favorite thing about where we live is all the places we can walk.  In fact, we can walk to get most everything we need and we run most of our errands on foot.  Let me give you some examples.  We can easily walk to many different places to buy our food, including "regular" grocery stores and high quality places such as New Seasons, Zupans, Whole Foods, Pastaworks and even a farmers market.  There is a library branch close by.  There are many restaurants of various sorts that are close.   Our bank is within walking distance.  John walks to his weekly wine tasting.  I walk to my yoga class.  Those are the places we go the most but we also can walk to buy just about anything plus we have movie theater pubs, music venues and bookstores.  We also are within easy walking distance of many services like our acupuncturist, chiropractor and massage therapist.  Movie Madness is close by, too.

Not only can we walk, but the walks are very pleasant.  On the way we walk through a beautiful park where there are always interesting things going on.  We walk through neighborhoods and the streets aren't very busy.  Our climate makes walking inviting most days year round.  It's pretty darn nice.

This is the park we walk through all the time.

How far do we walk each day?  Generally 2-3 miles round trip.  And should we need a little extra exercise or not have much time, there is the stair master, a set of sixty some stairs in our nearby park.  Several trips up and down these stairs can really get your heart rate up there.  Who needs a gym?

Here is John coming down the stairmaster.

Walkability scores are a big thing these days.  I can't imagine a place with better "walkability" although our score is only in the high seventies.   I wouldn't want to be so close to a restaurant that I could always smell what they were cooking or so close to anything that people parked on my street.  They don't seem to factor that into those scores.  It's all about how close things are without factoring in the quality of the walk or the downside of being too close.  And they certainly aren't adding in the exercise advantages of being a little further away.

We do have to drive to hike.  Seems odd.  My friend says walking for most everything and driving to hike is very Portland.

Did we choose to live where we are for the walking?  No, we were just lucky.  We also have great access to public transportation.  As I said, we are very lucky.