If bicycles and bicyclists were to achieve public stature equal to that of cars and drivers, how would we know?
Well, I think I may have seen a sign that we're on our way:
While Vera was parked near Baker Field, at the very upper end of Manhattan, someone left a menu for a restaurant in my rack.
Menus and flyers are left on car winshields all the time. I've even seen them rolled onto motorcycle handlebars. But this is the first time I've seen one on any bike, let alone one of my own.
In at least one way, Columbus Day is a terrible holiday. Depending on how you look at it, on this day the United States celebrates a guy who got lost or the beginning of Native American genocide.
Italy has given the world Petrarch, Dante, Bocaccio, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Puccini, Verdi and Gino Bartali. But we celebrate "Columbus Day" as a festival of Italian pride. Mamma mia!
One nice thing about it, though, is that most people have the day off from work or school, so there isn't much traffic on the roads. If the weather is nice, as it was today, people will be out and about--but not as many as, say, on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July or Labor Day.
There was no denying that it was a great day to ride. I took Tosca on a ramble through the Brooklyn waterfronts, the Hasidic neighborhoods and Coney Island.
At Sheepshead Bay, I saw the Three Musketeers:
One of the great things about doing a ride you've done dozens, even hundreds of times, before is noticing how it looks and feels different from other times when you've done it.
So it was on my Point Lookout ride today. We had classic Fall weather: a mix of sun and clouds and a high temperature of about 20 C.
But we pedaled into wind that varied from 10 to 15kph from Rockaway Beach to the Point. That meant, of course, that the ride home was more like flight.
Arielle, my Mercian Audax, made the ride even better, as she always does. She also seems to be taking on the light a little differently--or is it my imagination?
Perhaps it has to do with her consciousness of line.
No, it has to be the light itself--or at least the changing Fall colors.
