We Made It!

Lately my wireless connection has been misbehaving.  That's why I've posted only once this year before tonight.


At least I rode to work yesterday.  I'm teaching a winter intercession course at my "second" college.  They offered me a course before my main job offered me one, and I couldn't have taught both.  Plus, this course is an elective called Readings In Prose Fiction.  Basically, I can assign anything I want in it.  The other course I was offered was a required course in writing research papers.


The college at which I'm teaching is the one that had the full bike rack almost any time I rode in.  It's also the one where I saw a Pinarello parked in the rack.  That bike wasn't there yesterday.  In fact, I was a bit surprised to see any other bike at all.  Although the temperature reached the 40's (5-8 degrees Celsius), there were still piles of snow and ice around the edges of the parking lot, and at the bike rack.

Even if we weren't blessed with the remnants of last week's storm, there wouldn't be very many more bikes parked on campus.  The campus feels like a ghost town, at least in comparison with the regular semester.  To be fair, that's the case in most schools:  Fewer courses are offered, and fewer students attend.  As I understand, financial aid isn't available for students during the winter session.


Anyway, it's nice to be able to park my bike without having to maneuver others.  On the other, I miss the crowded bike rack:  It's nice to know that there are so many cyclists in the college.  Plus, the prof with whom I'd been riding home toward the end of the semester isn't teaching during the intersession. Sometimes I like riding home alone, probably because I interact with people on my job.  But I was enjoying the company of that other prof.  She and her husband had recently begun to take some longer rides on weekends, she told me.  


Somehow I imagine that she'd be riding in if she were teaching.  After all, she cycled through the coldest weather we had at the end of the semester--in a skirt.  So I know I wasn't the only crazy one in the college!  She has nicer legs, though. ;-)


Mine got me to work, which was about an hour and fifteen minutes from my apartment.  One other person at the college could say the same thing.

Floating Into The New Year

On two of the four mountain bikes I owned, I had a front fork with suspension.  But I never had a frame with suspension built into it.  


Now, on one of my bikes (Marianela), I have a sprung saddle.  That counts as suspension, I guess.  And I've had a two other sprung saddles that I can recall.


However, I don't think any suspension system on a bike can compare to this:

Over Flagler Beach, FL, 31 December 2010

And the pilot/passenger doesn't look as if he''s suffering from any saddle soreness:

When I took his photo, he couldn't have been more than about twenty feet above me.   I'm passing on his wishes for a happy new year!

Making Friends At The End of The Year

For my last ride of 2010, I did a few easy miles on the local paths.  On my way to them, a cute stranger crossed my path:

He was roaming around in front of somebody's house, saw me coming and nonchalantly started to cross the street.  Somehow he knew I would stop to stroke him. 

At least it's good to know that someone finds me more interesting than the newspaper--one called the "Observer," yet.  If an observer something and no one pays attention....how does that question end?

So what do I miss most about home?  My cats?  My bikes?  My books?  My friends?  It's really close.  

Happy New Year!

Bridges to Deja Vu

There are at least a couple of different ways in which you can experience deja vu during a bike ride.


The most common way, of course, is to see familiar sights during along a route you've ridden before.  More often than not, that is a pleasant or at least agreeable situation.  After all, you wouldn't be doing the ride again if you don't get some kind of pleasure from it.


Then there is what I will call, for lack of a better term, situational deja vu.  Any number of situations or other experiences can repeat themselves during a ride. Among them are weather, road conditions, fatigue, exhiliaration or some emotion or another that you're dealing with.


Yet another kind of deja vu is, paradoxically, the most ephemeral yet the one that affects us most deeply.  It's the one in which we recall feelings or memories which may have come to us on rides very different from the one we're on at the moment.  Or we have expereinced those emotions during rides we did much earlier in our lives, or in places very different from the one in which we happen to be riding.


There are other ways, I'm sure, in which we can experience deja vu during a bike ride.  I've just mentioned three I could think of at this moment.  They also happen to be the ways in which I experienced deja vu on today's ride.


Although this is my first visit to, and therefore my first bike ride in, Florida in two years, every inch of today's ride was at least somewhat familiar to me.  I had previously ridden every crack and grain of sand my tires tread, though not necessarily in the sequence in which I rode them today.  But it seemed that the flow of sense memories was all but seamless.


It began when I crossed the bridge from Palm Coast Parkway to Route A1A:

Hannibal is said to have shouted "Excelsior!" after conquering the Alps.  Whatever he was feeling, it has nothing on the sensation I experience as I reach the apex of a bridge that connects the mainland to a strip of land along the sea.  At such moments, I feel as if I'm exhaling for the first time, whether the bridge is the one I crossed today, the one that connects Broad Channel to Rockaway Beach, the one I crossed over the estuary of the Dordogne river to the coast near Bordeaux or the one from Highlands to Sandy Hook in New Jersey. 


It was over that last bridge that I took my first long rides during my early teen years.


And that bridge led, like the one I crossed today, led to a spit of land that stands, almost defiantly, between the ocean and another body of water.  When you ride along Route 36 from Sandy Hook to Long Branch, the ocean is never more than two hundred feet to your left and the Shrewsbury River is no further than that to your right.  When you ride A1A from Palm Coast to Flagler Beach, the dunes of Painters Hill (such an apt name!) and Beverly Beach are practically at arm's length on your left, and you're separated by no more than the width of a grove or mobile-home "campground" from the Florida Intercoastal Waterway.


Even though this is Florida, I'll admit that today's ride is more beautiful than the ones in New Jersey or to Rockaway Beach.  But in the end, I enjoy it--and, more important, it matters to me for the same reasons as those rides, and the one in the southwest of France.  They all are bridges to deja vu.

Riding A Borrowed Bike On Its Own Time

Dear Reader, I really want you to feel pity for me.

Yeah, I know, I'm spending the holidays in Florida.  And, in doing so, I avoided the Great Christmas Blizzard of 2010 (or whatever the media are calling it) that hit the Northeast.

But where I am, while it's lovely enough, it ain't South Beach.  Then again, I never really wanted to go there.  In fact, I never had much of a yearning to go to Miami, or to come to this state at all.  My reasons are beyond the scope of this post or this blog, but suffice to say that my parents are the reason I come here, to a place that's about halfway between Jacksonville and Orlando--and, for that matter, about halfway between Saint Augustine and Daytona Beach. 

Now, all of those towns except Jacksonville (which, frankly, I don't know very well and--again, for reasons beyond the scope of this post and blog--don't want to know very well), have much to recommend them.  The town in which my parents live is not without its charms, including some nice pedestrian/bike lanes.

So, there's some good riding here.  The problem is this:

Yes, this is what I have been riding.  My parents borrowed it from a neighbor.  While I appreciate that neighbor's kindness, I have to wonder how much she actually rides it.  I saw it two years ago, and it looked no more used when I saw again this week.

It's a very cushy bike: the sort of machine on which you'd float along on a boardwalk or around the golf course.  But try to ride it more than half an hour, or make it go more than about three times your normal walking speed, and this bike will ignore your efforts and continue on its merry but very slow ways.

It's not too bad when ridden on level ground (which, around here, is pretty much the only kind of ground) and with the wind.  But pedal against the wind, which sometimes kicks up along the coastline, and it feels as if you're riding suspended in syrup.

This is giving me incentive to order a Brompton.  Of course, if I were to bring it (or any other) bike down, I'd have to check it in.  Usually, I bring everything I need for a trip down here in a carry-on.

Well, I'm glad I have a bike to ride, anyway.  And this one makes me appreciate my own bikes all the more.