Rides Over the Past Week

I will try to be better this upcoming week. I really will.

One of the things that I tried a few different times on the ride home this week to avoid the Connecticut and Calvert intersection. It would've worked too if not for this dog and you meddling kids. Wait, no, that was when I pretended to be a ghoul so I could inherit the amusement park from my great aunt. Wait, no, that was just a Scooby Doo episode I saw once. Well, in any case, I wanted to mix up my normal route through the bummer of an intersection and decided a few times to head down Woodley, which is a really fun street. Another time this week, I thought that it would be fun to ride down Newark from Wisconsin and skip the whole of Garfield/Cleveland and Calvert entirely. Results, I think, were mixed. I liked riding the other routes- something about Cleveland feels very exposed, but with any of them, you sort of get stuck at Connecticut and to get over the bridge, you sort of have to deal with that. It's not so much getting there that's the problem- it's navigating the six lanes of cars. There are just too many cars. There are just too many cars.

This week in the morning I found myself passing two cyclists when riding uphill. I don't know why I felt compelled to do it, but I wanted to and so I did. There weren't going especially slowly- I just wanted to go faster.

I've been riding the Brompton everyday for the past few weeks and I've been keeping it in my office during the day. Somedays I'll fold it up and leave it mostly out of the way and other days I'll treat it like a regular bike. It's still summer and there aren't a lot of people around, so the bike and I are both happy to be a little less furtive with its presence. Truth be told, the bike probably doesn't care, it being an inanimate object and all. I'd really like to figure out some coffee holder situation for it though. That feels like the only thing lacking on this otherwise Sweet City Ride.

Went to Pittsburgh yesterday. Stayed for a a day and I'm home now. I didn't bring the bike- I rarely ever travel with one. I would like to go back with one though. Seemed like a place where you could seriously wreck yourself riding up hills and then wreck yourself a different way riding down them. I think the Dirty Dozen would utterly end me, but that hardly seems like a reason not to try it once. You should try everything once. Some thing you'll only ever try once, since they'd utterly end you. So that's good, I guess.

Also unrelated to bicycling, I'm on the cusp of no longer having a car. I didn't think it'd be possible to be any more smug, but here we are. I look forward to not having to pay car insurance, which has always seemed like a scam to me. My car didn't even have pre-exisiting conditions. Thanks Obama. Anyway, it'll be a brave new world of getting around DC by bike and public transportation. I wonder what that'll be like.