Postcard from Manhattan

Mummatus over Manhattan

The wind shifted from the southwest to the northeast and so I packed up and headed into the city. Rode up Broadway and through Central Park to the 100’s and found my cousin Mei. Pleasantly surprised at the ease of navigating NYC by bicycle.

Spent Sunday at the MET with the original Ant ‘Tina and we just about keeled over from an overdose of art. We found the cafe just in time and revived ourselves with snacks and a glass of wine. Arrived back to a fabulous Easter dinner and just about keeled over from an overdose of excellent food. Slept very soundly after the best near-death experiences I can remember.

dinner

Postcard from Long Island

Woke up to the sound of the Atlantic ocean pounding the shore. A friend was kind enough to loan me keys to a condo on the beach in Long Island. Had planned to head straight into the city after a night, but... it’s a really nice place to sit and read a book.

Took the train into the city to visit old friends and spend an afternoon at the Guggenheim. Wandered around Central Park for a while. I’ve always been fond of Manhattan. Though it’s pretty nice to be able to take a train back out to the end of LI at the end of the day and fall asleep listening to the surf.

Central Park

Click here for the route from Madison to Long Island.

Postcard from Connecticut

one-girl camp

Having argued with the GPS all the way to Newport (I was opting for a more scenic route than it advised) I decided to let it win for a day and followed the pink line to Baltic, CT. I swear it took me the direct route over every hill in eastern CT just to get back at me.

Spitting rain, but with a tailwind so I couldn’t really complain about the weather. It is April after all. April showers bring May flowers and all of that. Except that in Seattle, the early flowers start popping up in February, blossoms in March, and by April the bulbs are all in full bloom. I had completely forgotten that March and April are the ugly months in New England when winter’s just over and spring green has barely begun. I remembered when the plane descended towards Logan and I saw frozen ponds. And again when I encountered a huge pile of filthy rotting snow decaying in the corner of a parking lot. Hmmmm. Good thing I brought warm socks and rain gear.

The trip through Connecticut was really pretty. Winding roads through small towns with large cemeteries, past family farms and steepled churches. The trees are beautiful. The one thing I miss from the east are the trees. We just don’t grow the big leafy hardwoods out west like they have here. It’s kind of nice to see them just as they’re starting to bud, before the leaves completely conceal the structure.

GPS deposited me at Annie’s front door in Madison. Out her back door is the Neck River estuary. Regardless of the season, it’s a beautiful view. I traded in the bike for a car for the weekend and proceeded to double the miles of my trip thus far tooling around visiting old friends.




Click here for the route from Westport to Madison

Postcard from the Beginning

The conductor took my ticket and asked if I was Desperate or Brave. Brave, I said. Though in reality it was more like bored and restless...

It was pouring rain when my sister dropped me off at South Station to catch the train. It was raining a little less when the train dropped me off at Plymouth. I don’t mind riding in the rain.

Turned on the GPS and cued up Westport. Thought it was going to be around 40 miles. According to the GPS it was more like 50. I started pedalling and followed the pink line on the screen. Passed the bay where the Pilgrims landed. Turned west. Followed the pink line right into a cemetery. Hmmmm. Rode on through the headstones and out the other side. Hmmmm. Not sure that me and the GPS are necessarily going to see eye to eye.

Outside Plymouth the town gives way to pine forests and cranberry bogs. Easy to tell they’re cranberry bogs because they’re cranberry colored. One of them had two turkeys in it. No joke. I started looking around for the guy with the blunderbuss and the buckle on his hat.

There was a lot of wind pushing me along. And a bunch of rain. Even so, it was really pretty countryside. Winding roads, gentle rolling hills.

Of course, as soon as I got to where I was going the rain stopped and the sun came out. I was too tired to enjoy it. But not too tired to enjoy the major dose of pasta and veggies that Julie cooked up.


Click here for the route from Boston to Westport.

She'll never get lost again?

Those who know me also know that I tend to get lost. I only recently learned my left from my right and believe me, it took a lot of effort. For months I had little "L" and "R" post-its on my dash and in the cockpit until it finally sunk in. I won't say that it necessarily correlates, but I do also tend to get lost. But usually not more than once per destination. So for me, time spent planning a route and studying a map results in a significant reduction in aimless wandering when I do get off-couse.

The past few weeks I've been spending what seems to be an inordinate amount of time finding routes through the eastern seaboard states that are suitable for cycling. Back and forth between Google-Maps, road maps, and various cycling websites. Trying to stay within 50 miles per day. Trying to stay off the interstates and major state highways. Oh, and public transportation for those places that are just impossible for bikes like Newport, RI and the last 20 miles into or out of NYC and Boston. Bus schedules, train schedules, ferry schedules... Honestly, flightplanning is easier than bikeplanning.

Then last week my sweetie stepped in and handed me some new technology: a Garmin GPS bicycle computer. It tells you where you are and what direction you're heading, keeps track of where you've been, how fast, how high, and how many calories you've supposedly burnt in the effort. It's also got detailed road maps of all the cities in the US, plus all sorts of listings for hotels, restaurants, hospitals, and things you never knew you needed to know about while riding your bicycle.

The handiest function, and the reason he got it for me, is that you can enter in an address and the Garmin will plot a bicycle-friendly route for you to follow. Bicycle friendly. It's supposed to keep you off the highways and other roads and bridges that you're not allowed to be riding on. It gives you a map and provides turn-by-turn instructions to your destination. If you make a wrong turn or decide to check out a different road, no problem, it'll automatically recalculate your route for you. A friend of ours has one and by his account it's the best thing since duct tape.

Well, I didn't have a whole lot of time to test it out on my bike since I had to pack it up and ship it out. But I figured I could take it up snowboarding at Mt. Baker and maybe try to figure out how it worked. I started it up at the base of the lifts and started the timer as I headed up on the chair. I stopped it when I stopped for lunch and checked out what it had recorded. After fussing with the buttons I found: a pretty cool squiggly line on the map tracing my route up and down the mountain, a chart that tracked my elevation gains and losses, an average speed, and total distance. So far, so good for the note-taking.

At the end of the day I entered my address and asked it to plot a route home. I wanted to see what kind of roads it would drop me onto. First off, I was impressed that it recognized the little Forest Service road where I'd parked. It told me to turn right. So I did. I was going that way anyway. Here's what I learned about the Garmin bike computer on my way home:

Interesting point #1: since the only road to Mt. Baker is a state highway it tried to get me off of it whenever possible. This amounted to three very short side trips which could easily have been skipped. On the other hand they might have provided a nice break from traffic, if two of them didn't involve left-hand turns to get off and back on the main road.

Interesting point #2: to make a fuel stop, I deviated from the route blowing right past the turn the Garmin wanted me to make. It started to recalculate the route, I canceled the recalc. After filling up the tank I had to restart from scratch. Of course, that's because I'd stopped the recalc.

Interesting point #3: heading south along Rte 9, the Garmin plotted a side course on a parallel road and I blew right by the turn. The turn indications occur with plenty of time for cycling, but not quite enough for a car going 55 mph.

Interesting point #4: when the Garmin recalculated the route after that missed turn it created a new side route off Rte 9 and changed the rest of the course entirely. Whereas before the route roughly paralleled Rte 9 and rejoined it a few times for 50 miles, the new route took me west for 20 miles before taking an entirely different southbound course. Ultimately similar mileage, but entirely different course. Hmm.

Interesting point #5: it did at one point drop me onto a dead end road. The Google map function on my iPhone had properly identified it as a dead end, as did the road sign, but the Garmin did not. I checked. After going back to the beginning of the dead end and turning to continue in the previous direction, the Garmin did recalculate the route accordingly. Note to self - pay attention to road signs.

When I got home, I was able to upload the snowboarding route and the drive home to my computer with a minimum of fuss (after downloading and installing the appropriate drivers, software etc. which took rather more fuss). Anyway, the information I was able to see from the snowboarding was actually quite fascinating - especially the altitude/time and distance/time graphs. Really, I had no idea I was going that fast.

Generally speaking, I was pretty pleased with the performance of the Garmin GPS bike computer. It did a good job of keeping track of where I was and where I was going as well as a whole bunch of nifty data. While I think it won't entirely keep me from getting lost (that appears to be pretty deeply ingrained) it will certainly get me un-lost a heck of a lot quicker than if I'm left to my own devices.

Snowed In

We went up to the Shak last weekend and it was so sunny and warm I decided to stay on for a few days. I split a bunch of wood, went for long walks, and read a couple books. On Tuesday it rained, then it got chilly. The rain turned to slush and ice. On Wednesday it snowed.




I went for a walk in the snow. It was falling in big chunks, like a billion white moths coming in for landing. An eagle was perched above the meadow. It startled as I walked by and flew off in the snow bobbing and weaving trying not to get hit. A half dozen blue herons were standing ankle-deep in the bay, hunkered down trying to keep their feet warm.

By mid-day Thursday the snow melted into a thick layer of slush on the roads and the runway. The Flying Fish dropped in to rescue me. We flew out into thick cold calm air. 10 miles south it was 10 degrees warmer. The San Juans were still covered with snow but on the mainland the only white in the fields were flocks of snow geese and swans.

Really bad report card.

Report cards were a pretty big deal in our house growing up. A's were expected, B's caused issues. You know, like no Mork & Mindy for a couple weeks. C's were unthinkable - the Atari get's unplugged and no more Pac-Man until those grades improve. Even now, I don't remember if any of us came back with C's on anything other than handwriting (where the only excuse was a broken bone, a plaster cast and a sling). If there were any other C's I'm sure to have blocked them out along with any repercussions that went along with the event...

Which is all to say that I've never seen a report card as bad as the one issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers last month. This would be the 2009 Report Card for America's Infrastructure. I would not want to be on the same block when my mom got a look at these grades. Let's just say that the highest grade is in Solid Waste: C+. In Brief: Aviation: D Bridges: C Dams: D Drinking Water: D- Energy: D+ Roads: D- Solid Waste: C+ Wastewater: D-

Now, granted, just about every civil and structural engineer I've ever worked with used an overdesign factor of 50-100% so, I'd expect the grading to be harsh. But the fact is, we really haven't spent much energy on upgrading large-scale infrastructure projects in a long time. Most of us in the construction world have been building houses, offices, hotels... There aren't too many folks in the private sector with large scale infrastructure construction experience. At least not here in the US. All the cool jobs have been happening in Asia lately.

This isn't to say we don't have the ability or the manpower to get the work done. But there hasn't been the motivation, the focus and the discipline it takes to get funding for non-sexy projects like bridges and roads and power transmission stations and water treatment facilities. Especially when we can build condos, casinos and shopping centers. Kinda like, who wants to do homework?