An Ocean And A Desert

The temperature felt more like New York in March, or the coast of Belgium in any month besides July and August.  And while strong wind is not unusual in this part of the world, I have never felt it for days on end during my visit.

At least the colors and light at Matanzas Bay looked more like those one associates with Florida:

So did those of Painters Hill

Some places, though, looked more like deserts.

During my visit last year, there were palm trees and littoral plant life here.  The storms that struck a few weeks ago have laid them to waste.

Believe it or not, this is a roadway:

Old A1A, to be exact.  It's closed.  Even though I was riding the beach cruiser, I didn't ride this road:  I managed to go only a few meters before the wind whipped me around and blew enough sand in my face to make me even less of a navigtor than I normally am!

Still, I had a great ride.

My Personal Track

It was cold ,at least compared to the weather we've had.  It was windy.  

So what did I do today?  I went for a bike ride.

That is not, in itself, so unusual (at least for me).  For one thing, the cold and wind were balanced out by the bright sunshine.

So, perhaps, you can understand why I rode along the bay and the ocean:  to Howard and Rockaway Beaches, then to Breezy Point (which certainly lived up to its name!) and Coney Island, from which I pedaled along the Verrrazano Narrows and under the bridge named for it.

The funny thing about the beach areas, at least around here, is that they are usually a couple of degrees warmer than the areas only a couple of miles inland.  The wind, however, makes it feel colder, which is why I had long stretches of shore, beach and boardwalk almost entirely to myself.

Even on Coney Island, where I often find couples, young and old, strolling in the shadow of the Parachute Jump and and men fishing from the pier, I felt as if the boardwalk was my own personal track.

Speaking of which:  I rode Tosca.  Yes, my Mercian fixed-gear.  Pedaling into the wind on a fixie is good training, to say the least.  But riding with it--especially on such a flat ride--feels almost like cheating! 

Pumping And Sailing

A couple of days ago, I returned from a week in Florida.  Aside from a couple of brief spells of rain, which passed quickly, the days were sunny and warm, so  I did a fair amount of riding.

Now, I know that spending a week or two there every year hardly makes me an expert on cycling in the Sunshine State.  But I can comment on something I've noticed whenever I've ridden there:  wind.  I wouldn't say there is more of it than in New York. It is however, more noticeable, as the terrain is flat and even in the urban areas, the buildings aren't as densely clustered--and certainly not as tall!--as in even the most suburban neighborhoods of New York.  

When I rode to St. Augustine from my parents' house, I pedaled into a fairly stiff wind almost the entire way there.  The flip-side of that, of course, is that I breezed back:  I completed the 52.5 kilometers back to my parents' house in about half an hour less than it took me to pedal the same distance to St. Augustine.  I had a similar experience in riding to Daytona Beach, although the wind wasn't quite as stiff.  On the other hand, on another ride, I breezed down to Ormond Beach but fought the wind on my way back.

Today the wind will be much stiffer than anything I experienced last week:  Gusts of 80-110 KPH are predicted.  This would certainly be a day to plan a ride into the wind and with it coming home!  The thing is, though the cross-winds could be really tough.  

Hmm...If I could manage to ride into the wind for a bit, perhaps my ride home could look something like this:

The Wind I Buck, The Wind At My Back -- And Snow

The other night, rain was forecast for most of the area, along with a precipitous (pun intended) temperature drop.  There was even the possiblility of snow flurries for areas north and west.  




Now, the last time I looked, Rockaway Beach was neither north nor west of Central Park (where NYC area forecasts are usually made) or Astoria.  But it looks like the place the Ramones made famous got a bit of the white stuff:

I didn't see any of it on the streets or paths I rode.  But the fact that the snow is there is testament to how cold the weather's been:  The high temperatures haven't passed 5C (40F) in Manhattan or Astoria.  So it's conceivable that they've remained below freezing in the Rockaways.

While the weather's been a bit colder than normal for this time of year, the reason why everyone is talking about it is the wind, which seems to have blown nonstop since the snow/rain fell.  I was glad to be on Arielle rather than Tosca because Arielle has gears.  But it was great to ride her again; of all of my bikes, she fits (and therefore feels) best.

She didn't seem to mind the cold--or wind.  Oddly enough, my trip back from Point Lookout--into the wind--was faster than my ride out there, when the same wind blew at my back.  I guess I was just more motivated to ride in the wind, and Arielle seems not to mind it any more than she minds the cold.  At least the cold air was clear and bright. 

Shifting Is For Sissies ;-)

Today I did a ride I haven't done in a while:  Point Lookout.  It's also the longest ride--at 105 km--I've done so far this year.

I felt better than I thought I would, considering how much riding I've missed due to the long winter full of days of ice-glazed streets.  The ride out there was harder, which is actually a good thing.  It meant that I felt better in the second half of my ride than I did in my first.  It also meant that I was riding into the wind during the stretch from Forest Park to Rockaway Beach, and I had the same wind at my back on the way home.

And what a wind it was!  The National Weather Service said it would blow at 30-40 KPH with gusts to 60.  It certainly felt that way, coming and going.

Those ripples are not the normal tides of Jamaica Bay:  The water is being ruffled, like a bird's feathers, from the wind.

Actually, riding into the wind wasn't the most difficult part of the ride.  On my way back, after crossing the bridge from Atlantic Beach to Far Rockaway, I pedaled up to the  boardwalk.  After a few blocks, I had to exit and cycle the middle of the Rockaway Peninsula:  the wind off the ocean blew so strongly that I was having trouble remaining upright.  And I wasn't sure of how far, or how long, I could ride in a "track lean":

And, yes, I rode on Tosca.  As I pedaled into the gusts, I told myself, "Shifting is for sissies..."  ;-)

Into The Season, Late: Into The Wind

In this part of the world, winter has been longer, colder and grayer than in recent years past.

That means, among other things, that the transition to Spring has been later--by about a month--than it normally is.  So, we've been getting the proverbial March winds in April.

Under normal circumstances, riding in it would be invigorating, even bracing. But since I've done less cycling than I normally do, riding into the wind has been arduous.

 But at least we had blue skies and sunshine yesterday.  Life is good, cycling is great.

A Beginning: A Fixed Gear And The Wind

Pedal into the wind and let it blow you home.  Or, let the wind take you where you want to go and...

I know that I usually prefer the first option--especially when I'm riding my fixed gear.  Especially if I'm doing something really goofy like a metric century on a fixed gear.

On a clear day, with the wind at my back, I don't feel as if I'm riding a bicycle anymore: Rather, my bike and legs become conduits for the wind that takes me back, the wind that, according to the Navajos, begins life.

And when my ride on a current of wind begins at the ocean, it seems as if the world--or, at least, a season--has begun.

Windy Bike Rides In The City

The wind grew stronger throughout the day.  Late this afternoon, the stretch of Crescent Street that leads to the Queensborough (59th Street) Bridge had become a veritable wind tunnel.  So had some of the surrounding streets.  But in others, the air was as calm as it is in an airliner's cabin.

That is one of the interesting quirks of urban cycling.  On the open road, when the wind is blowing, it's either in your face, at your sides or at your back.  And the wind at your side can, if it's strong enough, impede your progress as much as a headwind if you're riding "Deep V" rims.  When you're cycling in the woods, the trees and sometimes the hills or rock outcroppings block at least some of the wind.  At least, in the time I spent riding in the woods, I never found the wind to be as much of an issue as it can be on the road.

But I think that the effect of the wind is at its least predictable when riding asphalt rivers through concrete canyons.  I wonder why that is.

Now, my commute today wasn't more difficult than usual.  At least, it couldn't have been as difficult as what these guys faced:

Into The Wind, Again

In places like southern Italy and Greece, spring began a couple of weeks ago.  At least, it usually begins about the middle of February or thereabouts.


Here in New York, winter began yesterday.  At least, that's how it seemed.  We've had only a couple of cold (by the standards of NY winters, anyway) days, and practically no snowfall since, ironically, the end of October.


However, today the temperature dropped from its early-morning high of 45F (8C) to a couple of degrees below freezing.  As the temperature dropped, the wind picked up speed so that it was blowing steadily at about 20MPH and gusting to 50.


I did a couple of errands on Vera today.  Of course, that meant parts of the ride were absurdly easy, while other parts felt like a series of still photographs

From:  http://brucefong.wordpress.com/2012/02/20/9272/

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It got me to thinking of a couple of times when I spent entire days riding into the wind.  One in particular was particularly grueling.


Provence is noted for its mistrals, which come literally out of the clear blue sky.  One day I learned that the mistral, as we say in the old country, actually lives up to the hype.


I had been pedaling out of Arles after, of course, visiting everything that had to do with Van Gogh.  Perhaps it was endorphins--I'm pretty sure that the effects of the wine had worn off--that caused me to see something I hadn't seen, or at least noticed, before in my life:  The air was so clear that everyting seemed almost surreal.  The lavender fields were no longer simply plants growing from the earth, and the windows and grain fields didn't merely reflect the bright sunshine:  They all became forms of light and wind that filled me so that I felt, for a moment, that I was not inhabiting a body, much less riding a pannier-laden bicycle; rather, I was a wave of that light and wind.


And then, in a seeming instant, I was pedaling into a wind that whirled like the mirror image of a cyclone.  There were moments when I literally could not pedal at all; for much of the rest of the time, I moved slower than the snails in the ground.  I stopped in a solitary boulangerie in the countryside, in part for a respite from the wind and in another part to feed myself so that I could continue to pedal into it.


As tasty as the bread was, I couldn't digest it; my entire body, it seemed, had formed a knot.  Over the next two hours, I think I pedaled about five kilometers.  Even though I was young and in really good shape, it seemed like an accomplishment, given the relentless wind and that I seemed to be making one climb, however short, after another.  


Finally, I ended up in a town called Brignoles.  I had never even heard of the place; I don't think it was even mentioned in the guides.  What it had, in addition to a castle and narrow cobblestoned streets, were a some shops and a cheap, clean place to lay my head.  


When I set out the following day, the once-again-clear skies were preternaturally still, as if the winds of the previous day had never blown.