It has felt like weeks since I last got to ride my bicycle. I was busy heeding the weather warnings and staying inside as Hurricane Sandy approached the east coast, and then I was busy catching up with work at work. I took the bike out for a very quick ride to see a show on Halloween, but that didn’t even count. Today I got to ride the bike all the way to Harbor East and back–hooray! Ok, still a rather short ride, but at least today I got get myself pedaling a bit. It took about three blocks for everything to feel sunnier, even if the skies are still gray, like they’ve been for over a week. Continue reading
rain
Clouds Rolling in Over Federal Hill From Montgomery & William
I woke up to a warm morning, 96% humidity, and gray skies that wore off to blue. Sure, maybe not the best for a long bike ride in the city, but it’s Defenders Day, and E. and I were on tap to lead a tour of historic sites related to the War of 1812. Then I looked at the weather report, and E. called, and we decided to postpone the ride due to expected thunderstorms and possible tornadoes. Continue reading
Flower Detritus at Guilford & McAlister
As I’m sure you know, we’ve all been having a heat wave of science fiction proportions. Yesterday in Baltimore it was EIGHTY FIVE DEGREES. That’s summertime weather, and we’re just on March’s downhill. I loved having that weather for my week off. I got in some wonderful bike rides, and Thursday’s trip to DC was a feast with all those cherry blossoms and 15 miles of strolling through neighborhoods, monuments, and museums (a perfect situation for a tiny clown bike, I must say). This morning, though, started with a thunderstorm and rained off and on all day long, giving it the feel of spring instead of summer. Continue reading
Blighted Houses on Druid Hill Park Drive and Linden
I just haven’t been getting my bike rides in lately, what with trips and visitors and hard rains, and it is starting to grate on me. I mean, I need to ride my bicycle, and I need rides to stop these terrible dreams about losing my bike from waking me up like one did this morning. The weather report promised rain, as did the sky, but after a lovely and lazy morning, I managed to get on the bike and pedal over to Druid Hill Park for a trip around the reservoir. Continue reading
Cloudy Skies at Preston & Howard
I checked the weather report before I got on my bike to ride to work this morning: high winds and a 90% chance of rain. I looked at the sky: blue with clouds out my bedroom window, ominous gray outside my west-facing living room (and I was heading west). Yeah, everything said don’t take the bike, but I wanted to ride, so I tossed my new rain cape in my bike bag and headed out, hoping to maybe beat the weather. Continue reading
Pigeons at 36th & Roland
For some reason I had convinced myself yesterday that the weather today was going to be delightfully sunny, maybe a tiny bit cool, so when it was time to head over to Hampden for a much-needed haircut. I pulled the bike out and felt the rain, but what are you going to do, get in a car to go less/fewer than two miles? Continue reading
Fresh Mint at a Bar on Rampart & Dumaine
Today is one of those days that just runs away from you, best laid plans be damned. The bicycle rides have been similarly fruitless, first in the middle of a downpour after what otherwise was a positively lovely lunch with new friends I met too late and then this bike ride to the fancy bar on North Rampart to meet M., but it turns out we got our Mondays mixed up. I’m thinking we both have moving on the brain–she’s still in Georgia and I’m still in New Orleans and those facts can leave us a bit addled. Sigh. But that means I get to sit here and have a couple of drinks by myself while watching the place fill up. First it was the hipster couple–he knows a lot about what makes water carbonated. Then it was the woman with the book, waiting for her mess of friends–that table reminds me there’s a whole world of thirty something straight women I don’t know anything about, but I hope the sunglasses-on-the-head lady has a good blind date later, in spite of her headache. Then there were the tourists from New York by way of South Florida who are relating to our just-here-for-the-summer bartender until they started sharing pictures of their cats with me. I can totally play that game. And then the two guys on a date and the other hipsters and now the bar is full. Hi, everybody! Time to ride my bike home cheerfully in the after-rain, toss a salad and heat up a pizza, and watch some TV. Not a bad ending after all.
Empty Lot For Sale at Prytania & Josephine
Today’s ride took me up to the office and back, with a couple stops along the way. It started with sun, but by the time I got Uptown the skies had that steely blue thing going on, and I could mostly just think about my car down on Frenchman, parked in a spot still wet from earlier in the week, and you know what that means. I wonder what it’s like to live in a place with an infrastructure you can trust not to flood in a hard rain. Those places exist, right?
Anyway, I wrote a couple of recommendation letters and threw the rest of my office stuff in to one more box before pedaling home as fast as I could to beat the rain. Annnnnd the clouds were breaking up. Phew. I slowed my roll to enjoy the ride and stopped to take a picture of this lot for sale at Prytania and Josephine. There was a beautiful old church here until January when the place burned down. It had been empty and for sale since Katrina, but I guess there’s not much of a market for a church. The fire was intense, but walls and rubble were left strewn about the place. That lot was cleared in record time, and now here it is, just the ironwork sign and a leaning tree on empty land. Sometimes the bulldozers move quick; we’ll see if the property does. I continued on my way, happy for a day without rain.
504 Fashion on St. Bernard & N. Johnson
So I’m stuck in a rainstorm after a most lovely sunny ride to brunch with E. and then along the new Broad Street bike lane to the Gentilly bike lane and then back. Oh, do I love a new bike lane! Broad’s is super-wide and the asphalt isn’t piled with loose gravel and sticks yet, and in the whole ride, only one car was parked in it. For the commuter cyclist, that’s just heaven. And connection between Orleans, Broad, and Gentilly? Be still my heart! I thought I would make it back to the Quarter for women’s World Cup soccer before the rains, but alas, it wasn’t to be. But I needed a ride, and I got one, and there’s a dry spot under this church overhang and 504 Fashion just across the street and eventually I will just wade out into it, but for now I will stand here and mop off, composing another love letter to another bike lane.
New Orleans Ladies Arm Wrestling at the Rusty Nail Under the Expressway
If I had gotten out of bed at a reasonable hour I maybe would have gotten a good ride in–which I really, really need–but I was too busy reading about somebody else going for a walk in Baltimore (wow, that’s not how I saw those streets) and the new local paper (Jesus Christ, Frederick County-really?) that by the time I was ready to leave the house, the rain had started again. Bah. I was in my car, craigslist-dealing this, picking up S. at the airport (thank goodness S. is home again!) Until it was time to ride over to the Rusty Nail for another session with New Orleans Ladies Arm Wrestling. I wasn’t much in the mood for crowds, but I knew I would see most of my friends there, and it was raising money for BreakOUT!, one of those groups just plain doing good stuff. I snapped this picture of a bout and also of other people taking pictures of the bout. NOLAW is getting to be the kind of thing that you’ll want pictures of. That’s mine, and I need a much, much longer bike ride to say more than that; I’m not myself without my miles. Tomorrow, tomorrow.
What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today 