Olivia and NO more training wheels!

This weekend I decided that Olivia needed to learn how to ride a bike without training wheels. She is 6 years old. Everyone rides a bike at 6, it is some kind of right of passage. We have had minimal opportunities living right on the water in our apartment to get her on a bike without her potentially loosing control and swimming with the fish. When we first moved here, she was nearly 5 and I signed her up for swimming once I realized how close we were to the water. That way if she rode her bike into the water she wouldn't drown. So she is water safe now and the bike ridding was next in line.

I am not the only one in this city with this problem and apparently the community addressed this issue a while ago by building a "bike park." The park is for beginner bikers and it has miniature lanes like the road, with all the signs, stop lights, round abouts and pedestrian walk ways.

The zig zags mean you are allowed to jay-walk...usually before a pedestrian cross-walk

Those stop lights actually go red, green and yellow! This I call the obstacle course.

To learn how to ride a bike, there is a shaded paved section with lines to help kids just get up and going. We started with no training wheels and Olivia was up and riding after 5 minutes. Stan was great to run with her the whole time.

Mary and Thomas went on the obstacle course on their scooter.

Once we mastered riding we took Olivia over and taught her all the street signs.

I brought band-aids expecting a few spills but we only had one! With a few more Saturdays at this park Olivia will be a pro!

What a cute little park! I love Sydney, they think of everything!