Rides 76 & 77: Hard to Keep Up With It All

I'm finding it increasingly hard to do it all - ride, blog, live, change houses, work, create. Time is finite while enthusiasm and curiosity is limitless! They clash and something must give, the wave particles flutter, the planet spin according to the laws of nature while the Dub thumps the dub-o-sphere with bass reverberations until the sun sets and riding safely evaporates.

Ride 76. Monday, September 22. Barney's Crew. A few guys (maybe have the group of 15) get caught at a red light. I alert Pete the organizer (I'm not sure of the etiquette - do we wait? or go on?). He says on this ride everyone's responsible for themselves and no one waits. If you get caught behind, well, the route is the same every week and everyone knows which way to go so no, no need to wait up. Instead, we blast forward. Ironically, or perhaps karmically, as we race through the last stretch of neighborhood on the way home, darkness at 6:53 settling in around us (a good thing we all have tail lights, some with head lights), Pete gets a flat tire! And though several of us offer to wait and help, Pete, perhaps recognizing the irony of not waiting earlier in the ride, tells us all to go ahead. And we do.

But it's so dark by the time I get back to my neighborhood, I'm like a shadow darting through the gloaming under the huge beeches and sweet gum trees; I decide that this is the last Monday night right for me this season.

Barney's, the departure in long shadows

Back to Park and Highland well after dusk

Unintended art, or perhaps
the subconscious made manifest

Ride Summary: 15.8 miles, 15.4 mph. Hoofing it. Strava.

Ride 77, Tuesday, September 23. Less than 24 hours later, Tuesday afternoon, another gorgeous early autumn afternoon, I can't NOT ride so saddle up and head out for a reservoir loop even though I'm tired and perhaps not fully recovered from last night's right. But I also want to re-do the Barney's loop (with a slight variation) so that I know the return sections - riding in a group the last three times I haven't paid close attention to where we actually were and which road to turn onto and into the neighborhood that leads back to Elm Park.

It all goes well, albeit with not quite the same urgency and speed as the group ride.

I take in the Holden Reservoir (sort of the de facto route to most loops out this way) but then coming back instead of actually jumping off into the neighborhood wind-about, I stay the course a little longer down Salisbury St toward Park Ave and duck into a different section of neighborhood and find myself heading up to Bancroft Tower in Salisbury Park, an interesting Woo City landmark that one can imagine has hosted hundreds of teen-age parties over the decades. Turns out that George Bancroft was a scholar and a eulogist at Abraham Lincoln's funeral and the tower erected in his honor stands proudly today and, amazingly enough, doesn't appear to have been defaced in the century+ that it's been there.

Bancroft Tower

Dubstoevsky at the tower

Nope, not Scotland; Woo City

The commemoration

Ride Summary: 18 miles, 14.4 mph. Not fast, but fun.