It’s hard to learn to bike in the city. Our neighborhood doesn’t have quiet cul de sacs or dead ends. The short alley behind our house leads right out to the narrow, crowded sidewalk. Also, our house is at the top of a hill, so heading in most directions involves an alarmingly steep slope. We’ve taken the kids with their bikes to neighborhood parks, but a lot of them are small—big enough to learn to ride a bike, but too small to show the kids why they want to learn to ride a bike—to fly down a road in whatever direction they choose to go.

I owe this secret to www.princeofpetworth.com, who posted some beautiful pictures on his site a while back. Inspired by his photos, on a recent Sunday, we took the family to Yards Park, the new waterfront park along the Anacostia River in Southeast, right by the Nationals Stadium. We included in our car Z’s two-wheeler, S’s princess bike with training wheels, and what M calls his pink tricycle, a little four-wheeled bike without pedals. Yards Park is beautiful, and not only does it have long, varied walkways the kids can ride their bikes on, the walkways were not crowded, and they were designed with different surfaces—concrete or wood—different dimensions, and different directions–along the river, over the water on a futuristic bridge, and by terraced landscapes and grassy lawns. The kids biked longer than they’d ever biked before, and at the end of the trip Z biked back to the car and, riding in circles on the sidewalk, yelled, “I love biking!” just before the bike’s tire slipped into a dirt parking strip and she fell. It was a good day.