A Tale Of Two Beaches--And Rides

Compare and contrast Rockaway and Flagler Beaches.

Comparison #1:  I rode to both of them within the past few days.  Rockaway is a bit further from my apartment than Flagler is from my parents’ house.  But while neither are particularly long rides, I feel a sense of satisfaction, if not accomplishment, from either.

Contrast #1:  This one is obvious:  Flagler is in Florida, Rockaway is in New York—the borough and county of Queens, to be exact.  Flagler, on the other hand, shares its name with that of the county.

Comparison #2:  You have to cross a bridge to get into either one.  The SR 100 Bridge arches over the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, while the Veterans Memorial Bridge spans Jamaica Bay.  After crossing either bridge, you find yourself on an isthmus that separates the body of water spanned by the bridge from the Atlantic Ocean.

Contrast#2:  Almost everyone who crosses the bridge to the Rockaways lives in Queens or one of the other boroughs of New York City.  You are as likely to encounter someone from just about any state in the US—or Quebec or Ontario—as a Floridian on the bridge as well as Route A1A, the road on the other side of the bridge.

Comparison #3:  You’re likely to encounter cyclists while crossing either bridge or riding along the roads that parallel the beaches.  Said cyclists could be riding anything from an old beach cruiser rescued from someone’s basement to the latest and most exclusive road and mountain bikes.

Contrast #3:  People riding high-quality bikes to or in Rockaway Beach are almost invariably residents of Queens—though not of Rockaway Beach or any other part of the Rockaway Peninsula—or Brooklyn or Manhattan.  If someone’s riding a really good bike to or in Flagler Beach, he or she is most likely from someplace else,  or lives in the area part-time.  Also, a high-end bike in Flagler is usually a Specialized, Cannondale or Trek and has a carbon-fiber or aluminum frame, while one in Rockaway could be one of those or could just as easily be a classic steel road or mountain bike.

Comparison #4:  You’re likely to pedal into or with the wind while riding to or from either place.  If you’re  lucky, you ride into the wind while going and with it while coming back.

Contrast #4:  The temperature might drop a degree or two when you cross the bridge into Flagler Beach.  The temperature could drop a bit more while crossing into the Rockaways, especially early in Spring, when the water temperature in Jamaica Bay and the Atlantic is around 5 to 8 degrees Celsius (40 to 45 F).   On the other hand, the temperature of the Atlantic where it meets Flagler Beach is around 15 C (60 F) at this time of year.

Why is there so much more rust on the right side of this handlebar than on the left?

Comparison #5:  Both beaches have their wizened, grizzled characters who live on the streets or beach, or who “couch surf”.  

Contrast #5:  Surprisingly, Rockaway has more such characters.  I say “surprisingly” because they are usually more common in larger beach communities where the weather is warm, or at least mild, all year round.  What that means, of course, is that more of those characters are living such a lifestyle by choice in Flagler (or Daytona Beach) .  In the Rockaways, there are now more of those characters than there were three years ago.  Many of them are living as they are as a result of Superstorm Sandy, where much of the devastation still hasn’t been repaired.  Seeing such people in the Rockaways makes me think of the film Atlantic City, in which the "busted valises", as Ring Lardner used to call them, were abandoned by another kind of tide that ravaged, then turned away from, them.

One final contrast:  Whenever I‘ve ridden to Flagler, it’s been on someone else’s bike.  I’ve never ridden to or through Rockaway Beach on any bike that’s not my own.  That includes today, when I took Tosca, my fixed-gear Mercian, out for the first time since the snowstorms buried and iced us in January.  She’s looking—and feeling—better than ever, if I do say so myself. 

In The Time It Takes To Go To Paris, I Made It Home!

Today dawned fair and excellent:  bright, clear and cool.

Now, most of you found at least one problem with the previous sentence.   Some of you might have known that I didn’t come up with “fair and excellent” all on my own.  The credit for that, of course, goes to Emily Dickinson.

The rest of you, if you’ve been reading my blogs, probably know that I don’t normally use “dawn” as a verb.  I have nothing against it:  In fact, it’s one of those near-anachronisms that I like.  It’s one of those locutions I really wish I could use without sounding self-conscious, sentimental or, worse, pretentious.  I know I can be pretty literary (Is that possible?) but I ain’t that literary.

It reminds me of the time Tommy James used the word “yonder” in one of his songs.  I don’t know the man personally, but somehow I doubt that he’s ever uttered that word in his life. As with the verb form of “dawn”, I love it.  However,iIt’s not the sort of thing one drops into normal conversations in this culture and time; one isn’t likely to hear it much outside of church hymns and Christmas carols.  

Anyway…back to the opening sentence of this post.  What’s wrong with it—as some of you might have suspected—I didn’t see anything “dawn.”  I slept through it because I didn’t get home until 1:40 this morning.  That’s about three and a half hours later than I’d planned.  

If you live in the central part of the United States, you might have experienced some wicked weather.  Well, when you guys (Those of us raised in blue-collar neighborhoods in northeastern US are wont to use “guys” as if it were a gender-neutral  term!) in Kentucky and Illinois and other place were experiencing hail and even tornadoes, much of the southeast and mid-Atlantic region were drenched and shaken by storms that flashed through the skies.  

Those storms hadn’t begun yet when I was waiting to board my flight at Daytona Beach.  But, as you know, when  Atlanta sneezes, almost every other air terminal in the region gets at least a cold.  And the Hartsfield was experiencing convulsions and seizures.  Hence the delays in Daytona and other depots.

At first, I didn’t mind. They way my flights were originally scheduled, I had a layover of nearly two and a half hours in Atlanta.  So, a half-hour or even an hour’s delay would still leave me with plenty of time to catch my flight to JFK, even in a terminal as sprawling as Hartsfield.  Then again, I figured, my connecting flight would probably be delayed as well, I mused to myself.

That’s probably the biggest understatement I’ve made to myself in ages!  It had rained in Atlanta, all right.  But an even bigger cloudburst was on the way.  After the other passengers and I boarded the plane, the skies opened up so much that we could barely see outside the window.  So we couldn’t take off.  Nor could many other flights scheduled just before and after ours.  And, as it turned out, there were more of such flights than usual because of the Augusta golf tournament.  Plus, students (and faculty members) were returning from spring recess.  So, all of those flights were completely booked, which meant that the terminal was packed with people waiting to board the flights after ours.

Our flight was scheduled to depart at 17:58.  But it didn’t take off until 21:20.  Yes, you read that right.  And we landed in JFK at 23:00.  But, according to the captain, there weren’t any airport staff members to guide the plane into the gate.  So he did everything he could to summon them.  Finally, we started to exit the plane fifteen minutes before midnight.  By then, almost all of the concessions in the airport were closed.  I didn’t need them, but I’m sure others could have used a cup of coffee or a drink or something.  Even more important, they were connecting to other flights.  The guy sitting next to me was going to Dubai.  That flight was also delayed, but even so, he had only a few minutes to get to it after we finally got off our plane.

I got off at a part of the airport that was unfamiliar to me.  I don’t know whether it was my fatigue or a lack of signage, but it seemed to take almost as long for me to get out of there as it did to get to it! Oh, if only I’d had my bike with me!

The flight from Atlanta to any NYC airport normally takes a bit less than two hours. But when I finally got off the Air Train and into the subway, I realized that from the time of the scheduled departure until the time I got off the plane, nearly six hours had elapsed.  That’s how long it takes, on a typical day, to fly from JFK to CDG.  I’m sure someone on my flight was going there.  I hope that person caught his or her flight!

Maybe I’ll ride my bike down to my parents’ next time I go.  Of course, I’ll need a longer recess for that.  As for today, I slept late and was still tired, so I didn’t ride.  I hope I will tomorrow.

This Journey (With Apologies to James Wright)

Whenever I ride a long road or path along an ocean--or just about any other body of water, for that matter--I can't help but to think about some of the earliest long rides I took, as a teenager in New Jersey.

Some said I was a lonely kid. Truth was, I simply wasn't thinking about the things most other kids my age were.  Truth was, I couldn't.  Oh, I worried about which college, if any, would accept me and ran different career paths through my mind.  Truth was, I was doing those things because other people said I should.

Truth is, I was on a journey on which no one could accompany, let alone guide, me.  I wanted to ride my bike across counties and countries when my peers wanted to get their licenses and pick up dates who would be impressed by such things--or being picked up by one of those new drivers.

And that was just one way in which I wasn't on the same road or path as my peers.  If you've been reading my other blog--or even some posts on this one--you know another one of the ways in which my life--or, more precisely, the way in which I saw my identity, my self--differed from almost anybody else I knew.  And I would not learn a language to express it for a long time.

But cycling was, and remains, a means of communication between my body, my spirit and all that is essential to them.  That is the reason why, even when I have ridden by myself, I have never felt lonely while on two wheels.  Some might have said I rode because of alienation.  When I didn't know any better--in other words, when I didn't know how to express otherwise--I believed something like that in the same way people believe the most plausible-sounding explanation for just about anything because they don't know anything else.

Perhaps that is the reason why I am drawn to the ocean, or to any other large body of water, when I'm on my bike.  It was while pedaling along the Atlantic Ocean between Sandy Hook and Island Beach--and along the bodies of water that led to the ocean--that I first realized that I would often ride alone, but I would not lack for companionship.  I had my self, I had my bike and at times I would have a riding partners who understood, or who at least simply wanted to ride with me. Or, perhaps, I would simply want to ride with them. 

P.S.  On a somewhat related topic, please check out my latest on Huffington Post!

Flora And Fauna And Time

When you live in a big city, you can tell what part of the day it is by the light in which you're seeing whatever's in front of you.  In other words, buildings or streets or other structures reflect morning, noon or night by dawn, daylight, dusk, shadows or artificial light.

Here in small-town and rural Florida, flora and fauna show varying sides of themselves through the different facets of the day.  So, bush that might bud at one time of the day could bloom a couple of hours later and denude itself by nightfall.

And so it was this morning, when I rode from my parents' house.  The street on which they live ends in a wider street that edges a wooded area.  That street, in turn, leads to a four-line parkway that cuts through a swamp. 

Alongside the parkway I saw these tiny flowers colored like pale lilacs waving in the breeze as I pedaled away.  When I returned in the afternoon, they were gone.  They were repeating the "hello" and "goodbye" they bade me yesterday and the day before as I began and ended those days' rides.

Tomorrow I will bid them farewell until another day, another season--and more important, another hour, another time of day.

Portrait Of A Chance Encounter On My Way To Painters Hill

Yesterday I did a shorter ride (about 50 km) than I did the other day (Daytona Beach) or Saturday (St. Augustine).  But I planned it that way so I could linger along one of my favorite stretches of Route A1A, in the very aptly named Painters Hill:

Well, all right, the Painters part is apt.  The hill, not so much.  But it's a feast for the senses.  And, oh yeah, I went swimming.  You could tell I--and the other swimmers--aren't from around here.  Natives wondered how we could "stand" water that's "so cold".  I'd guess that the temperature was somewhere around 13 to 15 C (55 to 60F).  At Rockaway Beach or Coney Island, it's probably not much higher than 5C (40F) right now.

Perhaps the best part of the ride is that I might have made a new friend and riding partner for future trips down here (or perhaps even for later this week!)  I met her at a convenience store-gas station just west of the bridge from Palm Coast Parkway to Route A-1A.  The bichon frise in the front basket of her Diamond Back cruiser gave that ever-so-friendly look bichon frises give and, of course, I stroked his head.  If dogs are a reflection of their owners, that bichon frise perfectly mirrored her personality.  

Before I crossed the bridge into A1A, we rode trails that crossed ponds, cut through swamps and rimmed the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.  She apologized--though she had no reason to--for her riding:  It was her first time out this year, she said.  I didn't feel that she was slowing me down, as she feared.  I must say, though, that I astounded her when I said that I rode the borrowed clunker to and from St. Augustine and Daytona Beach.  "Just thinking about it gets me tired," she exclaimed.

After about two hours, she had to go back to her house to meet a client.  I thanked her:  Even if I hadn't continued down to Painters Hill and Flagler Beach, I would have felt I'd had a good ride.  After all, encounters like that remind me of some of the reasons I ride.

Another Day At The Races--Sort Of

Yesterday I was off to the races.

No, I wasn't in the peloton or even at the starting line.  But I was in the vicinity of a track.

All right, it wasn't a velodrome.  But it's probably the one truly important racing venue outside the world of cycling.  I'm talking, of course about the Daytona Speedway.

To be more precise, I pedaled to Daytona Beach, which meant that I did two 100k rides in three days, which is two more than I'd done in the three previous months.  

I rode up and down the streets, along the boardwalk and, yes, on the beach itself.  I was going to do the latter because, I reasoned, if it was OK for cars and jeeps to drive there, why not bikes?  Plus, I was riding a beach cruiser, and I thought perhaps it should actually be ridden on a beach at least once!

Believe it or not, the car lane on the beach is actually designated as the Daytona Beach Highway, subject to all of the same rules and regulations as other automobile routes.  The difference is, of course, that it's sand instead of asphalt or concrete, and the speed limit is ten miles per hour (16KPH). Hey, you can go faster than that on your bike!

But the best part of going to and from Daytona by bike is the beautiful road--Route A1A--that skirts the coast line.  When you're riding north from Daytona, all you have to do is look--real hard--to your right and, on a clear day, you can see Casablanca.  After all, it's only 6866.9 kilometers (4246 miles) away.

The Burn Without The Climb

Tomorrow or some time after, I'll tell you about the ride I did today.  It's another 100K ride, though to a different destination from the one I did the other day.

So, in three days, I've probably done more riding-for-the-sake-of-riding than I'd done a couple of months.  My legs have been holding up surprisingly well.  Maybe I had more "money in the bank", as an old riding partner used to say, than I realized.  

Whatever fatigue I've felt has come from all of the sun I've absorbed on my skin.  Even though I've used lots of sunscreen, I now see--and feel--redness on skin that had been the color of Wonder bread for weeks.

All right, so that last description was a bit of an exaggeration.  Still, I feel as if the past few days have been a new beginning, at least in terms of my cycling--and writing. Yes, I've been doing some of the latter, and it's not related (at least not obviously so) to this or my other blog.

The only complaint I have is the one I have about cycling here generally:  It's flat.  Now, it's probably the reason I've been able to do the rides I've done with relative ease. But to really get back into shape, I'll have to start going vertical.  And about the only climbs around here are the bridge ramps. Even places with "hill" in their names don't require much more of a change in elevation than the floor of one place in which I lived during my youth.

Speaking of my youth:  Yes, I did a fair amount of climbing on my bike.  In fact, during my last two tours in France, I pedaled up a few of the fabled Tour de France climbs.  One day I will write about them, after I sift through my photos and journals of those rides, the most recent of which I did in 2001.

But for now, I'll share this wry image about the difficulty of such climbs:

From Imgkid

Of the peaks mentioned, I have done all except Port de Bales.  Perhaps one day I will do them again, or find others.

Happy Easter From The Florida "Bunny"

So...Yesterday I was feeling good about doing my first 100K ride of the year and, in the process, getting more sunshine in one day than I'd seen in the previous three months.

Today I rode about half as much.  I probably would have had a shorter ride in any event because I started later and had to get back earlier than I did yesterday.  But today I made a point of not venturing very far because I was riding in and out of showers that threatened to turn into one of those Florida downpours that bears more resemblance to Niagara Falls than to most other storms you've seen.  At least, that's what the weather forecasters promised us.

And we did get one, about an hour after I got back--and just minutes after seeing someone who probably weathered it all quite well:

Can you imagine if we had necks like that?  It would definitely put chiropractors out of business!
 

Actually, he's the Florida Easter Bunny. a.k.a. the Great Egret.

Have a great holiday!

Back In The Sunshine--And Heat

Like everyone else in northeastern US, I've been complaining about The Winter That Won't Go Away.  It hasn't been the snowiest or coldest season, but it's been so gray and dreary, and the snow and ice cover were all but constant from the beginning of the new year until a couple of weeks ago.

Mind you, I don't mind cold or snow.  I like changing seasons.  I don't want endless winter more than I want any other endless season.

So guess where I am now?  You guessed it:  in a place that has a couple fewer seasons than New York.

  

Yes, I'm in Florida again, having come just as the weather was starting to warm up (or, at least,turn more springlike) at home.  

Bicycle tubes at the Trailhead Beach 'n' Bike Gallery, Palm Coast, FL

I'm glad to see Mom and Dad again.  And today I got on the old beach cruiser they keep here for me and kept on pedaling, into the wind, up Route A1A.   I could feel some of the dust flying off and the cobwebs breaking away from my muscles.  And the sun grew warmer--and, I would discover, more intense on my skin.

The result?  I pedaled 51 km (31.5 miles), encountering almost no traffic and, before my destination for the day, my only obstacle--lions .

I had to get past them to enter the historic downtown area of St. Augustine.  Surprisingly, those lions don't chase cyclists.  At least, they didn't chase me.  Maybe they know I love cats.

And they stood aside as I crossed their bridge to leave the city and pedal another 51 km back to Mom and Dad's house.  The 102 km I covered today made it my longest ride of the year, so far.

After fighting the wind on the way up, my feet were practically pedaling automatically on the way back.  That, in spite of tiring about halfway back. 

In June 1964, Andrew Young, then one of Martin Luther King Jr's senior field organizers, led a march through the old part of St. Augustine. He and the other marchers were beaten as they tried to cross to Plaza de la Constitution. One month later, the Civil Rights Act was passed.

I realized why:  I felt that glow I feel on my skin whenever I've just gotten more sun than I've had in weeks and months.  Not only did I spend a few hours in uninterrupted sunlight (except for a couple of brief incursions into St. Augustine landmarks and shops), I was wearing far less--shorts and a tank top--than I've worn in months.  And, as this ride reminded me, the sun is a good deal more intense here than it is in New York.

But I feel my body, my spirit opened again.  That, and something I wrote on the plane on the way down, help me to feel as if I am returning to normal in the good ways.  I'm ready to say "I'm back", though perhaps without the Austrian accent. 

Will They Still Be Riding When They're 64?

We all get older. Some of us get old.  Of course, when we're young, most of us don't think about that:  We simply cannot imagine ourselves not going on as we are.

I got to thinking about that again, ironically, while riding along the waterfront from my neighborhood into Long Island City, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, a.k.a. Hipster Hook. Hipsters are, of course, young by definition.  At least, that's how I understand them to be.  That begs the question of whether one can "age out" of hipsterdom.  (I recall how the hippies used to say young people shouldn't trust anyone over 30.)  What do hipsters become when they're, say, old enough to be President?  Or do they move to other hipster enclaves and lie about their age?

More important (at least in relation to this blog!), will they continue riding their fixed-gear bicycles?  And, if they do (or if they ride any bikes at all), will they still want "deep V" aerodynamic rims in rainbow colors?

I can just picture some hipster retirement community in 40 years. Maybe residents will be riding machines like this:

From Trikes and (odd) Bikes

To tell you the truth, I like it, though I don't feel ready to ride a trike just yet. (Knock on my Phil Woods!)

Crazy In Chicago

Since I'm posting this on the day after April Fools' Day, This it is not a joke.  But some of the bikes you will see in it will seem like pranks.

As we all know, Schwinn was based in Chicago for a century.  At the time it started building bikes, in the mid-1890s, about six dozen other bicycle manufacturers were making their wares in the Windy City.

Most, of course, did not survive beyond the first decade of the 20th Century.  Still, Schwinn was big enough, and enough smaller companies remained, to ensure that the city on the shore of Lake Michigan would retain its status as one of the centers of the American bicycle industry.

And it's one of the places where adult cycling actually survived, at least to some degree, during the Dark Ages of cycling in the US:  roughly the two decades following World War II.

Maybe it has to do with the water (Lake Michigan?  The Chicago River?  The Canal?):  During the 1940s, a lot of "crazy bikes" were built there by ostensibly sentient grown-ups.  

I don't know whether to have respect or to ridicule Art Rothman, who designed this one:

 

He's riding in the top position. Perhaps not surprisingly, he broke three ribs while learning how to ride it.  Perhaps he recuperated on this Joe Steinlauf-designed bike-bed:

 



Once he got it going, I'm sure he got further on it than anyone who rode this machine:


 

Just in case you run into any gangsters (It's Chicago, after all!), make sure you have this:

 


Thirteen shotguns, two revolvers, six bayonets and a flare gun.  They covered all possibilities, didn't they?


Now here's what we needed this past winter:

 

So You Wanna Have The Lightest Bike On The Block...

So...You missed your opportunity to ride Gunter Mai's 2.96 kilogram Lightbike.  You hadn't heard about it. Or you did,  but couldn't find his website.  Or you did, but can't read German.  Or you couldn't afford it. (I didn't ask.  You know what they say:  If you have to ask, you can't afford it.)  Or you had some other commitment.

Well, don't feel bad.  You didn't miss your opportunity to ride the world's lightest bike after all. As we speak, a new, revolutionary velocipedic machine is being made from the lightest material known to humankind.

 

How light is it?   Try 100 times lighter than Styrofoam (you know, that stuff in your helmet).  And it's stronger than carbon-fiber, beryllium or any other metal that's every been used to make a bike or part on which you've spent your hard-earned money.

What is that wonder metal?, you ask.  It's a nickel-phosphorus alloy.  Even more important, though, it's drawn into tubes one-hundreth the breadth of a human hair and woven into a latticework that can withstand enormous stresses.

No one has said when a bike made from this material will be ready to ride, but here is a prototype.


To learn more about it, click here.

Bicycles And The Eiffel Tower

On this date in 1889, the Eiffel Tower opened to the public.

Probably no other manmade structure in the world has served as a backdrop for as many bicycles and cyclists as that most iconic of buildings.  Made to serve as the entrance of that year's Exposition, it was, ironically, slated to be torn down once the fair ended.  And many criticis couldn't wait:  They complained that it interrupted the Paris skyline.



There are a number of reasons why la Tour and two wheels are so linked in people's imaginations.  One, of course, is that cycling, almost from its very beginnings, has been a seemingly inextricable part of French culture.  Another is that the tower is so associated with romance, like people and couples wending and sashaying along rues diffuse eclaires, in the City of Light and in les pays.

Also, it's difficult to separate the history of bicycles themselves from that of the Eiffel Tower.  When its construction began in 1887, the "safety bicycle", with a chain-driven rear wheel and a front of equal size or smaller, had been on the market a couple of years.  With it, ridership grew by leaps and bounds--and, for the first time, significant numbers of women were riding--because, as its name indicates, it was safer to ride than the high-wheelers that had mainly been toys for strong young men.  And, in 1888, while the la Tour was going up, John Boyd Dunlop introduced his pneumatic tire, which would further improve the rideabilty of bicycles.



Now, I am neither an engineer nor a scientist, so take what I'm about to say for what it's worth.  I think that another parallel between the development of two-wheelers and the tower is that both taught subsequent inventors and researchers much about the possibilities of metal construction.  Contrary to what most people believe (as I did, until I learned otherwise!), the Eiffel Tower and most bicycles of the time were not made of steel.  Although steel had been around for milennia, methods for making it in large quantities had only recently been developed.  Thus, it was expensive and nobody really knew how to use it in construction.

Thus, the Tower and bikes were made of iron--wrought in the case of the former and cast for bikes.  Monsieur Eiffel's team figured out that the structure they conceived would be best built by placing them at angles to each other.  Around the same time, bicycle frames were evolving into something like the shapes so familiar to us today, as different bike-builders experimented with different placements of, and ways of joining, frame members.

As heavy as wrought iron is, it's still much lighter than stone, the most popular material for large structures at that time, and for centuries before.  And the cast iron used for bicycles (which were sometimes made by blacksmiths) was sturdier than the wood that had been used to make bikes.  While iron bikes were heavier, they paved the road (so to speak) for steel bikes, which could be made much lighter because the fact that the material is stronger means that less of it can be used to achieve the necessary strength.

Of course, the work of Eiffel's team made the creation of other large metal structures, just as the new safety bicycle opened up other possiblities in bicycle (as well as other vehicular) design and construction.  That meant that, while the Eiffel Tower was the world's tallest manmade structure on the day it opened, it would hold that distinction for 41 years, until the Chrysler Building was completed in 1930.  Likewise, the construction methods developed for iron bikes, along with pneumatic tires, made it possible to develop, not only better bicycles, but also automobiles and aircraft.

So, if you find yourself thinking about the Eiffel Towers and bicycles together, just remember that they are linked, not only in romantic images, but also in history and technology.

Knowing that, it seems fitting that the Bikeffel Tower was built in Breckenridge, Colorado from recycled bike parts:

Defining The Season

What's the difference between a late winter and an early spring ride?

Since it's not yet April Fool's Day, this is not a joke.  However, you are free to leave humorous comments.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's been Spring--at least officially--for a bit more than a week.  Some places have had the kind of weather we normally associate with spring for days, or even weeks.  Other places, like Florida, have already had summer-like (at least by the standards of NYC) conditions, if only for a day here and a day there.  On the other hand, there are places like northern New England, much of Canada and the Rockies, where snow still covers the ground.

So what, exactly, makes a ride early spring rather than late winter?  One factor might be the amount of daylight:  There's noticeably more of it than there was even a week or two ago.  And, since Daylight Savings Time began three weeks ago, that daylight (sometimes a gray pallor) lasts to 19h (7:00 pm) or even later.  Of course, the day has begun later, but soon we will have early dawns to go with our late dusks.

That's a fair measure of the seasons.  But the further north one goes in this hemisphere, the more daylight there is.  (Conversely,there is less of it during the fall and winter.) And some of those places are even more packed in snow and ice than this area was after even a series of snowstorms.  For those who are accustomed to such conditions and have studded tires, that might not be such an important factor.  But even such cyclists--some, anyway--do not ride in such conditions.

That brings me to yet another factor in differentiating the seasons:  The number of fellow riders you see on the road or trail. When I rode to Rockaway Beach three weeks ago, I didn't see any other cyclists. Ditto for the ride I took through the Bronx and Westchester a week after that.  But yesterday, I saw dozens of other riders on the bike path that wends its way along the Brooklyn waterfront.  Then again, once I got to the cobblestoned streets around Bush Terminal--deserted on a Sunday--I had them all to myself.  If I go there in a couple of weeks, I'll probably see other riders, though not nearly as many as one encounters on the Kent Street path.

By that standard, the ride I took yesterday was definitely Early Spring, even if the temperature barely broke the freezing mark and the wind whipped against our jackets.

Post #3000: Celebrating With An Allegro

Between this and my other blog, this is my 3000th post.  

I started this blog nearly five years ago, in June 2010.  My other blog, Transwoman Times, started nearly two years before that.  While TT has about 200 more posts, I have been more active on this one since I've started it.

I'm going to celebrate with an Allegro.  Well, yeah, I mean a musical piece by Bach. After all, I was listening to a classical music program before I went out riding.  But I also mean a derauilleur SunTour made, possibly because I saw one.

 

It's not the most refined piece they ever made.  But it wasn't meant to be. Like its predecessor, the Honor, it was cheap, sturdy and worked well.  That is enough to make most people as happy as the word "allegro" sounds.

Ah, SunTour:  Of all bike component companies no longer in business (at least in the US; in Europe there is a company called SR-SunTour which seems to share only the name), it's probably the one I miss most.