Showing posts with label bicycling to Connecticut. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bicycling to Connecticut. Show all posts

08 November 2021

Saving The Colors

Saturday was the last day of Daylight Savings Time.  It would be the last time until Spring I could start not much before noon, take a longish ride and get home before dark.  So I rode to--where else?--Connecticut. 

Connecticut is just a north of my apartment.  It's actually not very far "as the crow flies," but the geography and topography make it impossible to go like a crow.  Why would I want to be a crow anyway?  I wouldn't be able to ride my bike and, well, their diet isn't very appealing.

But I digress.  Connecticut is just far enough north that the Fall foliage is a few days ahead of ours in Astoria.  I figured, correctly, that it would be at or near peak.



In downtown Greenwich, I saw quite a few people out and about.  The day was chilly, but it was illuminated by that perfect autumnal light.  

Given how awful I felt on Thursday, I could hardly believe how wonderful I, and everything around me, felt.  I pedaled into a fairly stiff wind most of the way up.  The flip-side of that, of course, is that the wind blew me into the sunset.



From the Randalls Island Connector it's about another six kilometers to my apartment--just enough for me to enjoy the last flickerings of twilight.  And that night I'd have an extra hour of sleep after a 140 km ride.

04 August 2021

Three Times, Better

 I have done what just might be the strangest sequence of cycling I’ve done in a while.  What makes it so odd is its familiarity:  I have done the same ride three times in five days: today, Monday and Saturday.

Why did I do that?  Well, I took Negrosa, my vintage Mercian Olympic, to Greenwich, Connecticut on Saturday.  That has become a frequent weekend day ride for me.  I took that same ride on Monday because I wanted to start the week right.  And today I hopped on Dee-Lilah, my Mercian Vincitore Special.  The weather—overcast, with no threat of rain and temperatures that maxed out at 24C (75F)—was ideal and I just wanted to ride and ride. Somehow I ended up taking that 140 kilometer round trip again.




Perhaps an unconscious, or at least unacknowledged, wish guided to today’s ride.  Whether it had to do with Dee-Lilah, the weather or me, today I felt better riding today than at any time since last June, when a crash led to a weekend stay in Westchester Medical Center.

If I can say “this is the best I’ve felt” at my age, I guess things are pretty good.