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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

If you like to do challenges like these, a couple of fun ones:

- bike/walk/run every street in your city. Can use for instance https://wandrer.earth/ with Strava to track it. It's quite nice, discover all kinds of things in my own neighborhood I didn't know of. By habit you always take the same routes. This makes me take a new road on my way back home and see new stuff.

- Draw art on the maps using gps. I've done multiple. Takes planning and often a few attempts executing when you realize that road is closed, that path was flooded or whatever. I've even gotten in the news a few times from this. For instance when I ran this pest doctor during lock downs https://imgur.com/a/qRkB5QN

- Bike the longest distance using the smallest area. Basically find a roundabout and see how long you can take it. Or the opposite, the largest area in your city, basically bike its border.

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Bit offtopic, but if live in a big city, you don't even need to visit every street, just visiting every neighborhood might be insighful.

My wife and I are looking to move back to my home town possibly next year after 10 years abroad, and we are checking all kind of online resources about the city.

Is wild to me that a random expat on Youtube is teaching me all kind of things that I didn't know about my own city. I guess the almost 30 years I spent there I really only frequented a very small section of it, and entire sections of the city are complete blind spots.

What I really want is "nice" cycling routes, and then doing the longest paths. Many times I've tried to find the longest path that doesn't repeat from my house where I do not intersect with automobile traffic, or taking low-traffic streets without any major intersections. It's tough to get far this way, but competing for space with cars is just so stressful, so it's why I don't do things like ride the perimeter of my city. It's just not very conducive to keeping my bones intact.

> competing for space with cars is just so stressful, so it's why I don't do things like ride the perimeter of my city

In my city (Denver) there's an independent group that keeps a map of low-stress streets to ride on (which they share as a google map plus phone apps), which is different than the official bike routes map put out by the city.

https://www.bikestreets.com/maps It includes some off-street routes outside to the city limits but just looking at the ones within the city, there might be a nice route to try out for me.

The Citymapper app has been awesome to find routes through my city that I never would have found. It made biking as a car replacement far easier and significantly more fun.

Note that for really long rides, it is best to map segments of it in chunks to avoid main roads.

My goal is to make walks to satisfy my daily minimum of 6,000 steps, up to maybe 10,000 or 12,000 steps with outlier days up to 30k~35k steps. I live in an area I would describe as having moderate walkability: neighborhoods where it's not much of a problem, bigger streets with sidewalks, but also stroads and highways that I need to mostly avoid. And due to the obvious constraints of my home being in a fixed place, I feel I have completely exhausted my options. I get so bored from doing the (mostly) same variations. To be even harder on myself, I hate using the same in and out route, so instead of finding 3k steps worth of "excitement", I pretty much need double that to satisfy my craving :-D

> Draw art on the maps using gps.

Reminds me of this easter egg from the last 747 delivery flight:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34616511

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