Thursday’s ride took me through the thick air of our humid heat wave to Hampden to meet L. for lunch. We know each other on the internet, and we’ve got a lot in common, it seems, so we decided to finally go offline and actually prove that we are bodies in real life. Turns out we are, and we both like to eat at Golden West, which we did before splitting ways, him to his writing hovel and me to a bar to do some grading and sip on some pumpkin pie flavored sangria–grading makes a girl do outrageous things. Continue reading
Wyman Park
View Over the Bridge on Wyman Park Drive
Sunday’s ride took me up to Hampden for a late breakfast–I think they call it “brunch.” The ladyfriend came too, riding her sexy pale blue 1972 Miyata 10 speed bicycle. Oh, life is better when the people you love want to take their bikes, too! We locked up to some road signs in the neighborhood, put our names on the list, and settled in to wait. I watched as the easy flow of mostly-white folks wandered up and down our Avenue, a million miles away, it felt, from the Baltimore we’ve all been talking about. We saw a bunch of people we knew, shared our hellos and our stories, and ate well and did some window shopping before getting back on our bikes. Unreal privilege right here, I tell you. Unreal.
Row Homes at Imla & Bank in Bayview
The last week of September was all commuter rides punctuated by a Monday relief–a building collapsed in downtown Baltimore, and traffic was at a standstill. N., one of my shuttle buddies, texted me about it from an early shuttle, and I was relieved to learn no one had been hurt, and I could just hop on my bike and ride home instead of waiting for my turn in the wall of cars trying to get to MLK to take a left. Thursday I had the day off from work, though, and I spent in on my bike–all day long, 30+ miles worth of riding for fun and travel. Continue reading
Box For John Brown at the Baltimore Civil War Museum on President & Fleet
After a quick ride Wyman Park for lunch with C. I headed downtown for a little research trip to the Baltimore Civil War Museum in the old President Street Station down in Harbor East. Increasingly museums are going after tourist dollars, so they have tourist things, like touch screens and interactive displays and games and flashbang. That old object/placard thing just doesn’t do it for Kids Today, apparently. And then there’s this museum, tiny, telling three interrelated stories in one tiny little space and then sprinkling it with random stuff from the 1940s, and you don’t expect to see that stuff. Continue reading
What I Saw Riding My Bike Around Today 