A Quarter Or A Memory? Either Way, A Pleasure

Yesterday was balmy compared to most of the weather we've had in NYC for the past few weeks.  In fact, the afternoon high temperature of 11C (52F) was about the same as that of a couple of days last week in Florida.

The funny thing is that it actually seemed chillier in Florida.  Perhaps my body had acclimated itself to warmer weather--or to the expectations of people who live there. To them, it was cold.

For me, it was a day filled with more of that diffuse but austere winter light Bill and I enjoyed the other day.

So where did I ride?  Here is a clue:

I can't see defoliated trees in the Nutmeg State without thinking about the "Connecticut quarter".  Of course, the ride was better than that coin:  That 25-cent piece, like most money, is worth less and less every year, while the joy of a ride does not depreciate for me.

Not even after seeing the Greenwich Veterans' Memorial against such a stark background.

Part of the joy was, of course, that I was doing a ride I don't normally do at this time of year.  In spite of the mild weather, not many people, cyclists or otherwise, were out.  The good thing about that was that I saw little traffic, even at the highway entrances by the state line or in New Rochelle or the Bronx.

After 140 kilometers of riding and a good dinner, I was happy, to say the least!  So was Arielle, my Mercian Audax.

Enough Fiber?

The first time I heard of "carbon fiber", I think I heard only the "fiber" part. So, I was envisioning a bike like this:

All right, maybe the bread needs to be darker to get the "fiber" part right.

Maybe those sunflowers--or, at least, their seeds--might help in that department.

Arielle And Amber

You know a winter day in New York is mild if it doesn't seem cold after you've just spent a week in Florida.

Today was such a day.  Actually, I experienced a day or two in the Sunshine State that were even a bit chillier than today.  For me, it was perfectly fine for riding.

And it was for Bill, too.  What inspired us, aside from the sheer joy of being on our bikes, was the light of this day:

It wasn't only the clarity of the sky that so inspired us.  Rather, it seemed that on every street, in every field, sunlight became the bricks, reeds and even the trees--all of them amber momentos of days, of seasons.

One way you know you're in a park in New York is if you see a rodent and you know it's not a rat or a squirrel.  As we carried and pushed our bikes on a trail I'd ridden before, but was today submerged in mud and dotted with slates laid down as stepping stones, we saw rustles in the reeds.  I never realized muskrats were so quick!

So...How did we know they were muskrats?  Well, in that marshy area by Willow Lake--really a dot to the dash that forms an aquatic exclamation point in Flushing Meadow  Park--what other rodent-like creatures would we have seen?  A sign at the entrance to the trail--where we exited--listed muskrats among the "wildlife" in the area.

All of those creatures seemed to enjoy the light as much as we did.  

So did Arielle, my Mercian Audax.

N.B.:  I took the bike photo with my cell phone.  Bill took all of the other photo in this post.

Reunited, Two Years Later

In some earlier posts, I bemoaned the fact that stolen bicycles are almost never returned to their rightful owners.  In most cities, if someone takes your bike, you have less than a two percent chance of ever seeing it again.

Since I don't want this blog to turn into a repository of lamentable statistics and depressing stories, I try to draw attention to the outliers and happy endings, whenever I hear about them.

Trevor Pryor

Two years ago, Trevor Pryor was working for Arizona State University in Tempe.  He propped his machine in a hallway for "only a few seconds" while he said good-bye to some co-workers.

Well, "a few seconds" is all a thief needs.  "I turned around and the bike is gone," Pryor recalls.  He checked online marketplaces like Offerup.com and Letgo.com, but found "no real leads."  

His bike

He despaired of ever seeing his bike--"my first  bike I bought with my own money", he explained--again.  That is, until last week, when a friend noticed the bike on the Facebook page of the Bicycle Recovery Action Team (BRAT:  what an acronym!), a group of vigilantes that keeps an eye out for stolen bikes.  

The friend set up a meeting to look at it .  Pryor, accompanied by an ASU police officer, went to a warehouse full of bikes in Tempe.  There, a man wheeled the bike out and the officer intervened.  "Did you know that bike is stolen?," he asked.

The man's boss claimed he bought the bike at a pawnshop and offered to sell it to Pryor for $100 because he "didn't want to take a loss."
 

Reporters who followed this story went back to that warehouse the other day.  It was full of bikes, but there were no people there.

At least Pryor has his bike back.  Hopefully, other bikes in that warehouse will end up with their rightful owners.

How Many Australians Does It Take To....?

When we're teenagers, we (some of us, anyway) become obsessed with books we don't look at after the age of 20 or so.  Such books included, for me, the ones written by Ayn Rand and J.R.R. Tolkien.  

Now, some of you might hate me for saying I haven't read Tolkien since my freshman year of college.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit. They're just not my thing.  

The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand, seem even more like fantasies than anything Tolkien wrote.  Actually, that's giving Ayn Rand's novels too much credit:  They seem rather like comic books to me now.  And, though some libertarians claim her as an intellectual godmother, I think she was more of a Mc Carthyist anti-Communist with a pretense of intellectuality.  

But I digress.  Just before that period of my life, there was a time when I was obsessed with another book I haven't looked at in years:  The Guinness Book of World Records.  I guess that at 12 or 13, I liked anything I could gawk at, and the book was full of such things. Some might be interesting to me now, but others would probably seem ridiculous--and the people involved just plain stupid--to me now.  

In the former category--ridiculous--falls something that recently made it into the latest edition of the book.  Actually, it's something I might want to see, if not try.

It's the world's longest bicycle:



The 41.42 meter (135 ft 10.7 in) contraption was built collaboratively by gas and oil company Santos and engineering students at the University of South Australia. 

For such a record, Guinness editors stipulate that the bicycle must be able to travel 100 meters without the riders' feet touching the ground.  Seven riders managed the feat on the bike in the video on 17 January 2015.  An earlier attempt resulted in the bike toppling over.  Luckily, "besides damaged pride and a couple of scratches, there were no serious injuries," according to Victoria Fielding, who wrote the record application.  

Now as to why someone would build such a bike--you've got me.  But I admit that I enjoyed watching the ride!

Leaving The Sunshine In State

I've left the Sunshine State.

Did I leave in a state of sunshine?  

Maybe I left the sunshine in the state:

Yes, I'm back in New York now. The sidewalks look like 7-11 Slurpees without the bright colors.  And snow is fluttering down.

One thing I didn't bring with me was the wind I experienced while in Florida.  Oh well.  ;-)

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.

Pedaling A Parallel Universe

Yesterday I pedaled into a parallel universe.

All right...You might think Florida--or anything south of the Potomac, for that matter--is a different world if you come from anyplace north of it.  You would not be wrong.  But I am not talking about culture, politics or even climate.  Rather, I mean a waterway that, for about 5000 kilometers, runs as close to the Atlantic Ocean as it can without actually being the Atlantic.

I am talking about the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, which runs just inland of the Atlantic Ocean all the way from Boston to the tip of Florida.  The purpose of it was to provide navigable waterways for shipping along the Atlantic Coast without having to deal with the hazards of the ocean.

 One hardly thinks about the AIW in Massachusetts or New York or New Jersey because it's known by other names.  Actually, in those states, it's a series of rivers, bays and other bodies of water linked by canals. 

The stretch I rode yesterday is one of those canals.  It hooks up with the Halifax River to the south. Its shoreline is dotted with gazebos on piers:  the sort of thing one envisions when thinking about life in Florida. 

The weather, however, was another story--overcast, which I didn't mind, but colder than yesterday and colder by the end of the ride than at the beginning.  And windy, again. I was reminded of why I don't have kickstands on my own bikes:  Using the one on the bike I rode today virtually guaranteed that it would be toppled.  Such falls wouldn't damage the bike; still, I laid the bike on the ground when I stopped, figuring that I would have had to pick it up anyway if I stood it up.

One interesting feature of the trails that line the Intracoastal Waterway, and connect it to several parks, are bike maintenance stations operated by the city of Palm Coast and local businesses.  

They include small tools such as screwdrivers, adjustable wrenches and tire levers attached to cords, and a tire pump.  

I actually rode a technical section of a mountain bike trail near Herschel King Park (one of my favorites in this area).  And, no, I didn't need those tools--or anything to repair my body!

They're Gone!

A couple of friends are gone!

On Thursday,  I rode by the City Market Place near my parents' home in Palm Coast.  During my past few visits to PC, I've stopped by the Market Place to see an old friend:

but I found this:

an empty lot where they "rode"!

I am trying to find out what happened to Wes Cackler's "The Race".  I'm guessing--and sort of hoping--that it was knocked down in recent storms and will be reinstalled on that same site, or somewhere else.  

A New Light And Less Heat To St. Augustine

Yesterday I rode into stiff wind,  though sunshine breaking through trees and opening clouds over the sea.  Then, as I had the wind at my back, a curtain of clouds drew across the sun and darkened, and I got caught in the kind of late-afternoon downpour this part of Florida experiences in summer.  Then again, by that time, the temperature, at about 27C, or 80 F.

Today I pedaled about the same distance--about 100 kilometers--as I did yesterday, but in the opposite direction.  I did that on purpose:  The wind,  not quite as stiff as yesterday's, was blowing from the north instead of the south.  That is probably what dropped the temperature by about 17 degrees Celsius to about 10 C, or 50F. 

The sky and sea even looked colder:

I never saw that kind of light before in Florida--not even at the place in the photos:  Matanzas Bay, where it enters the ocean.  

Under that light I pedaled, against the wind but full of good energy, all the way up Route A1A to the Bridge of Lions, which leads to the historic center of St. Augustine:

I think the temperature dropped by another 10 degrees Celsius when I crossed the bridge.  At least, it felt that way, even after I pedaled to the old fort.

I must say, though, it's a lovely place, even when it's (comparatively) cold and still full of tourists.

And, yes, the skies cleared for my ride back to my parents' house.  And I had the wind at my back.

Sun, Sea And A Summer Storm In January

Since I've come to Florida, I think I've seen every kind of weather one can find when the temperature is above freezing.  Today, I thought I was entering a path of sunshine.

Light and warmth threaded through those tree limbs and filled the sky as I rode the Lehigh Trail, which begins about two kilometers from my parents' house and extends for five kilos to Colbert Road, which leads to SR 100 and the bridge to Flagler Beach.

There are few things in this world that I love more than descending a bridge to an ocean I can see on the horizon

even if I turn right at the end of the bridge and pedal 50 kilometers straight into a 30 kilometer per hour wind that, at moments, gusted to 40 KPH.

I mean, how could I complain when my ride was filled with the wind, the light and the hiss of the ocean--which meant that they were filling me>

Like Flagler Beach yesterday and today, Daytona Beach did not lack for people walking along the sand on the warm day.  At Flagler and Daytona, however, swimming was not allowed.  No one was allowed even to enter any of the beaches along the 50 or so kilometers of Atlantic Coast between them.

After savoring two of mom's meatball sandwiches and polishing them off with some strawberries and a mandarin orange, I started my ride back.  After the ride down, it was almost too easy:  the wind I'd fought on the way down was blowing at my back.  But that wind also brought something else:

gray clouds thickening ahead of me.  The fact that I was riding about as fast as my body could move the ballon-tired beach cruiser under it meant that I could ride right into the rain.

Which is what happened after I turned left from the Flagler Beach pier onto the SR 100 bridge.  After climbing away from the ocean and descending on the "mainland", a cascade dropped from the sky on me.  There was no prelude of light showers gradually turning to rain; that storm dropped straight on me.  It was like the "instant storms" that often soak this area, momentarily, late on summer afternoons.  The difference was that this storm didn't include lightning and thunder.  But it ended about halfway into the Lehigh Trail--about fifteen minutes before I got to my parents' house.

In The Sunshine State, In A Cloud

The rain that pattered the canal yesterday turned, for a time, into a barrage last night.  When I woke this morning, raindrops were poking ephemeral pockmarks in the face of the water.

But, by the time Dr. Phil's show ended (Yes, I watched it with my mother and father.), the rain had stopped and the sun looked like it was trying to wedge itself between clouds.  I got on the bike a while later, and the clouds closed ranks on the sun.  Still, I managed to ride along some trails to the Palm Coast Parkway Bridge, where the scene changed just a bit.

Of course, when you see something on your left, you look to your right.  Or is it the other way around?  Who told me that, anyway?

In any event, I looked to my left and saw this:

I thought, for a moment, it was sea mist.  After I descended the bridge and turned onto the Route A1A bike/pedestrian lane, it thickened faster than the makeup of a reality TV star.

The shrouded area is known as Painters Hill.  It's a very lovely area where, on many a day, breezes skip across sea oats and other grasses and shrubs on the dunes that line the ocean.  I would have loved to see how a painter might have rendered it in the light I saw today.

The Flagler Beach pier jutted out into water that dissolved into mist.  The eponymous beach, about 10 kilometers south of Painter's Hill, was the only one open along  A1A from Palm Coast to Ormond Beach.  The area is still recovering from recent storm and the surf was rough.  Nobody was swimming at Ormond, but of course, a few surfers flung themselves into the tides.

Finally, as I reached Ormond Beach, the fog began to dissipate and the sun that, earlier, had been trying to get a few waves in edgewise pushed some clouds aside--and shone through a light mist.

I must say, though, that I don't recall much, if any fog in my previous two dozen or so trips here.  Certainly I had never before seen what I saw today.

Sunshine, With Irony

So...where in the world is Justine Valinotti now?

OK, you know this isn't the Ponte Vecchio.  Or the Pont Neuf.  Or the Tower, Verrazano or Golden Gate Bridges.

For all I know, the local transportation authorities don't even classify it as a bridge.  It doesn't connect countries, states or even two sides of a neighborhood. The houses on each side of this bridge are even considered part of the same development.

The body of water spanned by that structure looks like this:

Seeing that birthday party baloon floating in the effluvium surprised me more than seeing a creature that could have caused me harm would have--or, for that matter, almost anything else I might have encountered.


It's a canal, and from what I've gathered, it was used for irrigation, as it doesn't look terribly navigable. (Now tell me, who else  uses phrases like "terribly navigable"?)  It runs behind the house where I'm staying.

You've probably figured, by now, that I'm visiting my parents 

in "The Sunshine State."

It sounds like a corollary of Murphy's Law:  You escape from the cold only to run into the rain.

We might get more rain tomorrow.  I might chance a ride, but if I don't, skies are supposed to clear--and the temperature drop--the day after.  I wouldn't mind that.

Nor do I mind today which, so far, has included a leisurely lunch with my mother and one of her friends.  It's fun, and part of my education!