Ride In 6/12: The Rick James Baseball Abstract

My commute was delayed this morning. I had a doctor's appointment not too far from home and vaguely on the way to work, so I decided that I would ride there and then continue my bike trip afterward. Turns out that I'm a supinator (unlike a Super Nader, consumer advocate caped crusader) and that's pretty much it. I co-payed and I co-left.

The doctor's office was near Eastern Market and from there it was up Pennsylvania Avenue and then alongside and behind the Liberry of Congress (Tea Party changed the named) and then down the Hill on the House side, which is my opinion, is the inferior side for bicycling, though it's the mirror image of the path I normally take. I thought that maybe I should take a different route to work, but I was caught flat-footed (joke) and I couldn't quite summon the necessary mental energy (i.e. only a little) needed to figure out a better way to get to the office from the Capitol.Or if not a better way, a different one. But the problem is that riding a bike along Independence Avenue is sort of crummy (it's approximately 700 feet wide, but no bike lanes) and I didn't really want to ride along the Mall, since it would've left me at the 15th street bike no man's land, which is not typically a place I want to be. It stinks. So, I rode back over to the normal route and took Pennsylvania to 15th, enjoying the emptier cycle track and luxuriating in being in no particular hurry to get to the office. Fewer bicyclists in the cycle track, but it wasn't empty. When bikes are used for transportation, there's almost always someone who has to go somewhere. As Alan Jackson never sang "It's bike o'clock somewhere." Had he sung that, one of my friends or relatives would have gotten him a different clock or maybe brought him in to a doctor to make sure he didn't have a stroke or something.

It rained.

It was warm enough that the rain wasn't unpleasant, but no so warm as to make the rain refreshing. The rain just felt like rain and I soon tired of it.

At the intersection of Massachusetts and Wisconsin, I decided to make a diversion and ride along Wisconsin and now I remember why I never do that (aside from it being a fairly indirect to get to work. And that whole Scott Walker thing.). After the Cathedral, it's actually sort of flat, so there's no reason to think that the terrain would be that inhospitable to bikes. Theoretically, you could have a nice-ish bikeway between Tenleytown and the Cathedral (something like Fairfax Drive in Arlington) and link the neighborhood in a way that makes it seem like more of a group of houses and businesses and less like some buildings intercepted by a high-speed boulevard. I don't know if there's any political will in doing that. It's not exciting  like delaying a new grocery store for ten years.

From Tenley, it was back down Nebraska, though Ward Circle and then to work. Another one in the books. Or, another one in the blog. I don't actually have a book where I write this down. That would be redundant.