It’s Mardi Gras Thursday–or Muses Thursday, if you, like most folks I know, have been waiting for this parade in particular. The parade isn’t until tonight and I had the day mostly free, so I took the bike out for a ride to this appointment and that appointment, and then rode out toward City Park to check out the folks already gathering for this Saturday’s big parade. The weather was perfect and I hadn’t had a good longer ride in awhile, so it felt particularly good to just pedal around the park, taking in the lovely scenes like this one. I somehow survived the dangerous ride under the freeway on Carrollton and the near-sideswipes of the cars that somehow think three lanes aren’t enough and ended up on the Wisner bike path, watching ducks cross the street (why is that so cute?), a heron standing on the shore, a white-faced pelican, and those white birds with the long, skinny hooked bills pecking around the golf course. I turned into the wind on Marconi and pedaled hard before stopping at the bike shop. The Surly is celebrating Mardi Gras with new pedals and new shoes! It’s a whole new world, having shoes that aren’t all stretched out, and I felt that on my ride home, dodging the traffic already headed to my neighborhood for the parades. What a perfect, perfect day, and now it’s time to put on my walking shoes and head to tonight’s parade spot.